Let me start with the sweet. Took ten minutes Hooked on of WNL on Monday evening, but I think the neighborhood walk with electoral geographer Josse de Voogd should have lasted longer. Josse de Voogd knows where each voter lives, and he also knows quite precisely how voters live. He walks through the Spijkerkwartier in Arnhem, a neighborhood where the junkies have been replaced by yups. Stone Street. This is, he says, a typical transition area. A hip bakery next to a sewing machine shop, a shawarma tent and a vegetarian butcher. Then a shortcut to a street so Groenlinksig that it becomes cliché. Green vegetation against the facades, wild and a bit messy. He rarely sees such a thing in CDA and VVD neighbourhoods. It is as if he smells that intellectuals and “artist types” live here. He sees it by the bookcases that are visible from the outside. And the lush greenery planted here and there.
If you live at Geitenkamp in Arnhem, you will most likely vote Forum for Democracy, PVV or maybe SP. Not that you will really make a box red on March 15, because most local residents don’t vote here. You live in a social rental home and your front yard is tiled. The government that never gives home when you need it, wants to fly over the neighborhood with a drone to check how many paving stones you have lying around. They have to be removed by the municipality to make way for greenery. Reason for local residents to drop out, says Josse de Voogd. Stop participating and ignore politics.
Another Josse fact: dog owners more often vote right than cat owners. You see more rabbits at CDA members. Tuesday is Hooked on in Borger Odoorn, Drenthe, the soil seems to determine what you vote for.
American bombs
Then let’s talk about the war. Weather. Not the Russian-Ukrainian one, although I saw a few similarities to the one in Iraq 20 years ago. Just replace the name Saddam Hussein with Putin in the speeches of US President Bush Jr. Same words, same rhetoric. The enemy is lying, denying, trampling, endangering freedom. The invasion of March 2003 prompted journalist Tom Kleijn to make a three-part series, Back in Iraq (NTR), the first part was broadcast on Monday. At the time, he reported from Baghdad until the first American bombs fell.
The question is where Tom Kleijn goes back to Iraq. The guide and interpreter who accompanied him in 2003 is certainly not thrilled to see him, if he recognizes him at all. Is that because he has fallen into disrepair, as Kleijn thinks? Or does he no longer want to be openly associated with Saddam Hussein’s regime? He led many television crews around his country, he says later, and it was his job to limit what foreigners saw and understood. One wrong turn and he was in jail.
Tom Kleijn visits the roof of the hotel from which he reported live, in between images have been edited in which we see him doing that. He has a nice conversation with a young woman, still a girl when the war broke out and convinced that American soldiers were half-robots, she had seen that herself in films.
Still gets Back in Iraq not with it Our man in Afghanistan by Thomas Erdbrink. He knows the language and therefore understands the country and the people. Tom Kleijn goes in search of traces of a war that was started on the basis of lies (weapons of mass destruction!). But if he goes back to the places where he was twenty years ago, what does he find there, except the reports he made there and his memories?