Well then, a bin number is surely forthcoming.
There’s an ongoing, open state of civil war between at least three separate blocs (plus the pirates, who’re just doing their thang since there’s no one to stop them). You tell me how smart sightseeing by your lonesome sounds. Dude’s lucky he didn’t catch a bullet on general principle.
Well, he’s a journalist. Going to warzones is something journalists do. And obviously sometimes they get killed doing it.
I’m just wondering how risky it was. Like a driving without a seatbelt level of danger or more like a playing Russian roulette solitaire level of danger?
War correspondents, yes. Travel and surfing writers…no.
It’s like the time *Entertainment Tonight *sent Mary Hart off to cover the killing fields of the Khymer Rouge . . . poor dear was never quite the same after that.
Moore grew up in Southern California and wrote a book about how the spread of surfing is a good metaphor for globalization. The Economist, which isn’t a fluff magazine, named it as one of its books of the year. Moore’s a Fullbright Fellow for journalism, has worked for the Atlantic Monthly, the Los Angeles Times, SF Weekly, Slate, Miller-McCune Magazine, and Spiegel, and lives in Berlin.
So I think he went to Somalia as a real grown-up journalist and not as a hippy going to check out the gnarly waves.
The question, though, is not if he was a journalist, but if he knew what the fuck he was doing. If a famous fashion writer / journalist suddenly decides to write about outdoor adventures, grabs a backpack and heads out by his/herself into the wilderness of Alaska, would it be a surprise if he/she were to die? Even if there were a top level journalist?
IANA war journalist, but I suspect that there are a few tricks you have to learn in order to not get killed or kidnapped.
I read somewhere that the organization that one of the rescued aid workers works at was one of the few remaining. That’s telling. It doesn’t sound like country you just walk into, without knowing what you are doing. If that was the case.
The only way to get to be a war journalist is to go into a war zone and report on it. The only way you are an experienced war journalist is if you have done it before. Sometimes they get kidnapped or killed, but I, for one, an damned glad there are some people in the world willing to do this.
Can we conclude that this fool was suicidal?
Next: intrepid journalist decides to “see if I can stick my head into a blast furnace-and survive”!
File this under stupid people trying to climb Everest, and attempts to outswim sharks.
I truly hope Mr. Moore returns home unharmed and enlightened; and that Somalia, since it’s no worse off than Germany during the Thirty Years War, eventually becomes a happy nation.
But in the meantime, I can’t help envisioning a pitch for an updated version of The Ransom of Red Chief, with exasperated pirates and an obnoxious surfer dude.
“You take him BACK! We give you all this chaff!”