A particular detail about the massive Aug. 4 explosion in the port of Beirut caught my attention, and also reminded me of Shakespeare and of a fight in a shoe shop in Khartoum 40 years ago.
The eye-catching detail was that the 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that detonated had been stored there at the dock since 2014, after being confiscated from a Russian ship. Knowing it was exceedingly dangerous, customs officers had tried to get rid of it — they wanted to give it to the Lebanese military — but had been thwarted in court. So a vast cache of a highly volatile chemical sat year after year on the edge of a densely packed city population. Thousands of people are now dead or wounded as a result, and 300,000 have been displaced. The explosion was literally just waiting to happen.
What’s this got to do with Khartoum and Shakespeare? When I first saw video of the explosion, I happened to be with two recent residents of Beirut. We commented about the delay over removing the explosives and the habitual use of the word “bukra” in the Arab world. It means “tomorrow” and is used just as “mañana” is. It’s what people say all over the world, in America, too, when they put off needed action until later. Tomorrow becomes next week, sometime, or never.
I was in a Sudanese shoe shop in the 1970s with a friend who was complaining that the proprietor kept promising falsely for two months to repair a pair of shoes by tomorrow, “bukra,” but never got the job done. Their dispute got out of hand when the procrastinating cobbler asked my friend if he was a donkey, to which my friend unwisely responded by asking the cobbler if he was a thief. Fists flew. A shop assistant grabbed my arms to prevent my joining in.
Bukra and mañana aren’t just a sleepy, no hassle, no consequence way of life. Delay can lead to trouble, as it did mildly in Khartoum all those years ago, and catastrophically, as in Beirut this month. The introspective lament of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/ To the last syllable of recorded time;/ And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death.”
Early action, reform, is better than delay. Our cover story, “Labor’s Strong-Arm Tactics,” is about how unions delay and prevent reform. Wayne Laugesen looks at police unions protecting bad cops, and teachers unions protecting bad teachers. Our editorial excoriates teachers unions for their ideological assault on private schools.
Tevi Troy makes it clear that a demand from recording artists that politicians get preapproval to play their music is not only to deny it to Republicans but also an effort to change copyright rules on the sly. Leif Le Mahieu goes behind the scenes of a new documentary about the Covington Catholic encounter with national notoriety.
