Davos Newbies

Like any language lover, it’s always interesting to me to find words and phrases that have no translation in my own language. Schadenfreude. Kibitz. Bon appetit.

So I love gufare, as introduced to me today by Pitch Invasion.

The rather wonderful verb gufare means to support against, to wish bad luck upon. It comes from the noun gufo, meaning owl, since the owl in Italy (and Spain) is a symbol of bad luck. So football fans “owl” for another team.

That’s one to keep.

Douglas Muir, at the wonderful A Fistful of Euros, offers a capsule description of the first president of independent Georgia:

Gamsakhurdia deserves a post of his own, but the key point is, he was (1) a foaming-at-the-mouth Georgian nationalist; (2) arrogant, utterly self-centered, and constitutionally incapable of compromise; and, (3) a complete, toe-sucking incompetent who destroyed pretty much everything he touched. Other actors share the blame, but Gamsakhurdia bears first responsibility for turning a difficult but manageable ethnic problem into a bloody little civil war.

In my years as editor of World Link we often talked about writing profiles of the many world leaders we encountered like that, but decorum, and our careful parent, the World Economic Forum, kept us on the bland side. It’s a pity.

Muir’s post, by the way, is an installment in his occasional guide to “frozen conflicts”. The current episode tells you more about South Ossetia than you ever thought possible. Muir’s brief explanation:

Okay, so much for the basics. Now an obvious question: why should you, dear reader, care about South Ossetia?

You probably shouldn’t.

Unlike the other frozen conflicts, there’s not a lot at stake in South Ossetia. It’s small, it’s remote, it has no resources and zero strategic value. It’s very unlikely to lead to a larger conflict. So unless you’re Georgian or Ossetian, there’s no reason it should keep you awake at night. (And even if you’re Georgian, you probably spend a lot more time thinking about Abkhazia — Georgia’s other frozen conflict — than about South Ossetia.) South Ossetia is just not that important to the rest of the world.

That said, South Ossetia is interesting in itself. Tolstoy is supposed to have said every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Well, ethnonationalist conflicts are sort of like that: every one has has its own particular and fascinating awfulness.

I raved the other week about The Damned United, and of course the Internet delivers a wonderful taste of the book.

Martin Varsavsky on his first visit to Cuba:

What follows is the story of a progressive Argentine/Spaniard who had a Michael Moorish view of Cuba until he actually visited the island. Now my view is that there’s nothing progressive about Cuba. That progressive in Cuba can only mean to get rid of the Castrismo and open up, not à la China, a country that is brutally capitalist now, but still managed by the Communist Party, but à la Hungary or most of Eastern Europe, evolving from Communism to a welfare state like democracy.

Very perceptive reportage.