Rave On, Young Enviro-Lefties
 

     For some reason, science reporter Andrew Revkin, in Montreal to cover a climate change conference, instead gives prominent coverage of an ongoing environmental rave of young activists.

     Friday's "Youths Make Spirited Case at Climate Meeting" gives a shout-out to the young lefties: "But a stream of participants hiked through the frigid night to a corner building on the far side of Chinatown that pulsed with light and thudding music. Inside, a local nonprofit group called Apathy Is Boring was giving a party. There was no apathy in attendance -- just 300 people, most in their 20's, who had come from as far away as Australia and Los Angeles to pester the 'fossils' -- the legions of gray-suited negotiators who, these young people said, were hijacking their future."

     Revkin covers the puerile-sounding festivities like an emerging civil rights movement: "Through nearly two weeks of treaty talks here, the young attendees, more than 500 in all, have been staging daily demonstrations, mainly lighthearted, to highlight the meeting's importance for their generation. And they have been buttonholing delegates to share their concerns about the lack of significant new action to cut greenhouse gases linked to global warming."

     But Revkin's clever young protesters seem in fact disappointingly retro and unimaginative, stuck in 60's clichés the same way Revkin's fellow reporters are mired in Vietnam clichés in Iraq:

     "On Thursday, the major action of the day was a 'bed-in' on the sprawling polished floor outside the main meeting rooms. About 15 people lay down on pillows near pictures of a similar protest staged in Montreal in 1969 by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They started singing old Beatles songs, but with new lyrics: 'We all live in a carbon-intensive world' and 'All we are saying is give youth a chance.'"

     He lays out the group's silly and counter-productive protest tactics with the innocent air of someone who's never darkened the archway of a "progressive" college campus before:

     "There is little time for leisure. While some delegates went shopping with the per diem money provided by the United Nations, the campaigners, wielding cellphones and laptops, continued pressing delegations for meetings. On Thursday, about a dozen young people trooped through a maze of corridors to a room used by American negotiators for confidential talks. There they sat around a rectangular table with Daniel A. Reifsnyder, the director of the State Department's office of global change.

     "They met in part to lay out their case for new actions to reduce greenhouse gases, but also to complain about the fate of Nia Robinson, a young campaigner from Detroit working for Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative, a group focused on the social impact of global warming. She had been ejected from the meeting hall on Wednesday for trying to deliver a 'climate change survival pack' to American officials, consisting of a face mask for air pollution, a life jacket to counter the threat of rising sea levels and a can of Spam, symbolizing the potential disruption of traditional food sources for indigenous people."

     If that's the big news coming out of the Montreal climate talks, perhaps the Kyoto Protocol really is doomed.

For more about fighting global warming through street theatre, click here.

Warren Hoge Talks to the Kids
 

     United Nations correspondent Warren Hoge answers questions from students in the "Learning" section at a Times website.

     When asked: "What are some of the more interesting situations around the world in which the United Nations is currently involved? Have any of these been challenging for you to cover as a reporter?"

      Hoge responds, in part: "There is no more despairing place in the world right now than the Darfur region of Sudan, where government-backed Arab militias called Janjaweed are destroying villages and killing villagers solely because they are black Africans. The situation is described by many as genocide -- the deliberate elimination of one race of people by another. I am very interested in the situation there because it illustrates the need to establish ways in which the international community and the great powers can intervene in distant places and curb such horrible abuses. And one last point, with instant communications and images, distant places are not so distant anymore, and we in the West can no longer plead the excuse of ignorance in not acting."

     But Hoge wasn't exactly supportive of Western action when Bush went in to Iraq and curbed similar "horrible abuses" by Saddam Hussein.

     In November 2003 Hoge told a Reuters reporter: "America is now something of a rogue state, a pariah nation. People repeatedly say it isn't Americans we don't like, it is just Bush. He pushes hot buttons. Bush has so much to do with this rather stupendous fall-off in American popularity. It is quite amazing to think where we were the day after September 11 and how much of that goodwill has been squandered."

"Brokeback Mountain" Is "Moving and Majestic"
 

     Liberal movie critic Stephen Holden's review of the GLAAD-approved movie "Brokeback Mountain" gets predictable landmark-style play in Friday's Times, a full half-page of the front of the Arts section.

     Holden is more than up to the task of hagiography: "The lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee's epic western, 'Brokeback Mountain,' is as bone deep as the movie's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon….This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, 'Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey.'"

     Holden makes the same predictable parallels as the activists pushing the film, and adds some sophomoric psychological musings: "'Brokeback Mountain' is not quite the period piece that some would like to imagine. America's squeaky closet doors may have swung open far enough for a gay rodeo circuit to flourish. But let's not kid ourselves. In large segments of American society, especially in sports and the military, those doors remain sealed. The murder of Matthew Shepard, after all, took place in 'Brokeback' territory. Another recent film, 'Jarhead' (in which Mr. Gyllenhaal plays a marine), suggests how any kind of male behavior perceived as soft and feminine within certain closed male environments triggers abuse and violence and how that repression of sexual energy is directly channeled into warfare."

For more of Holden's review, click here.