삶에 밀착 for midnight radio

ebb : 썰물
reign on : 치세 군림하다
blurry : 흐릿한 더러워진
front line : 최전선의

KIBUMBA, Congo — The moment the truck pulled into town, the whole village began to sprint.

Into the road dashed old men in threadbare sport coats, teenage boys with mismatched flip-flops and 7-year-olds with protruding bellybuttons who should have been in school. They all swarmed the truck, hoisting cabbages, carrots, kebabs, papayas and toasted ears of corn they hoped to sell, yelling “Gari ! Gari!” Truck! Truck!

dashed : 낙담한 의기소침한
swarm : a large group of insects, especially bees, moving together in the same direction

A group of rebel soldiers lounged nearby, most with assault rifles, one incongruously carrying a spear. Just up the road, a captain from the Congolese Army, with whom the rebels have declared a tenuous cease-fire, sat atop a mound of biscuit wrappers and cigarette butts, studiously reading a paperback titled “The Way to Happiness.”

lounge : 어슬렁 거리다
assault rifle  : 돌격용 자동소총
incongruous :strange, and not suitable in a particular situation
studiously : in a way that is carefully planned and deliberate

A certain sense of desperation — and weirdness — seems to be creeping across eastern Congo as more territory slips into a jumbled world between government and rebel control.
 
jumble : to mix things together in a confused or untidy way

  Most of the fighting has stopped, and on Tuesday the rebels agreed to vacate certain areas to allow aid workers unfettered access to the thousands of needy Congolese. But it seems that the longer the instability continues — it has been about three weeks since the rebels began a major offensive, casting this whole region into crisis mode — the more dysfunctional and confusing life here gets.

The front line, as people here call it, is basically a blurry edge, where the government and rebel zones peter out. There are no checkpoints or fortified positions. No troops eyeballing each other through carefully calibrated rifle scopes. Definitely no formal demilitarized zone.

peter out : to decrease or fade gradually before coming to an end
용두사미로 끝나다
unfettered : 자유로운 구속을 벗어난
eyeball : 1 눈알, 안구(眼球), 눈망울 2 감시 활동 3 날카롭게 쳐다보다
calibrate : 1 구경을 재다, 눈금을 정하다 2 조정하다, 목표를 정해 공부하다

  On Tuesday, a few Congolese soldiers boiled potatoes over a small campfire. After a gap of 300 yards, most of it thick, uninhabited bush, five or six rebels sat in the wet grass, listening to a radio.

Some of the Congolese soldiers on patrol do not even speak Swahili or French, the two most widely spoken languages in eastern Congo. This has fueled rumors that the Angolans are back in the fray. In 1998, Angola sent thousands of troops into Congo to repel a Rwandan-sponsored rebel group. On Tuesday, a Congolese lieutenant named Joao rushed up to a Western journalist, flashed a huge grin and yelled, “Hola, amigo!”

fray : 싸움 소동 공포 닳게 하다
enter the fray : 설전에 참여하다
lieutenant : 중위

He said he had trained in Angola and Spain, but was indeed Congolese. His tight-fitting uniform, cut with boxy shoulders and a trim waist in the spirit of a finely tailored Italian suit, was completely different from the other Congolese soldiers’ attire.

trim : 다듬다 산뜻한

 Congo has been in turmoil for more than a decade. But this round of fighting seems different from the scattered battles in the past several years over strategic sites like gold mines and airfields. This time, the conflict seems broader and more focused politically, with the rebels’ leader, Laurent Nkunda, talking at times of marching to the capital and toppling the government. On Sunday, he ditched his signature military fatigues for a crisp suit and met with United Nations officials to negotiate about negotiating.

ditch : 도랑

The situation has left large swaths of the country in limbo. It is not so much that the government is in charge or the rebels are in charge. Nobody, it seems, is in charge.

swath : 낫을 휘둘러 한 줄로 베어나간 자리 
limbo : 지옥의 변방
 
In Kibumba, a village at the edge of rebel territory about 20 miles north of Goma — the provincial capital the rebels were poised to seize before declaring a unilateral cease-fire late last month — hundreds of children have been turned into desperate street hawkers because their schools were looted last month and no authority has decided what to do about it.

loot : 약탈하다

A boy named Severai, who said he was 12 but did not look much more than 8, was scampering after the few trucks that passed through Kibumba on Tuesday, trying to sell their drivers armloads of onions for the equivalent of 20 cents.

scamper : 재빨리 달리다

“Haven’t sold one yet,” he said, smiling shyly. “But I’ll keep trying.”

The land around here is amazingly fertile. It is the rainy season, and everything seems green and ripe.

Still, many people are refusing to go back home after fleeing the recent fighting. Kahombo Sebeyeko, a 50-year-old farmer with six children, stood in the rain on Tuesday at a camp for internally displaced people. Behind him, for miles, stretched tents, lean-tos and little domes made from dried banana leaves, the same type of flimsy structures in which hundreds of thousands of people across eastern Congo now live.

flimsy : 얇은

“We are waiting for the order to go back,” he explained.

From whom?

A blank stare.

“The government,” he said, in a way that was less an answer than a question

Suddenly, everything old is New Deal again. Reagan is out; F.D.R. is in. Still, how much guidance does the Roosevelt era really offer for today’s world?

The answer is, a lot. But Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious.

About the New Deal’s long-run achievements: the institutions F.D.R. built have proved both durable and essential. Indeed, those institutions remain the bedrock of our nation’s economic stability. Imagine how much worse the financial crisis would be if the New Deal hadn’t insured most bank deposits. Imagine how insecure older Americans would feel right now if Republicans had managed to dismantle Social Security.

Can Mr. Obama achieve something comparable? Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s new chief of staff, has declared that “you don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste.(낭비하다, 수포로 돌아가다)” Progressives hope that the Obama administration, like the New Deal, will respond to the current economic and financial crisis by creating institutions, especially a universal health care system, that will change the shape of American society for generations to come.

But the new administration should try not to emulate a less successful aspect of the New Deal: its inadequate response to the Great Depression itself.

emulate : to try to do sth as well as sb else because you admire them

Now, there’s a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse. So it’s important to know that most of what you hear along those lines is based on deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. The New Deal brought real relief to most Americans.

propagate the idea that ~ 퍼뜨리다 생각을 전파시키다

That said, F.D.R. did not, in fact, manage to engineer a full economic recovery during his first two terms. This failure is often cited as evidence against Keynesian economics, which says that increased public spending can get a stalled economy moving. But the definitive study of fiscal policy in the ’30s, by the M.I.T. economist E. Cary Brown, reached a very different conclusion: fiscal stimulus was unsuccessful “not because it does not work, but because it was not tried.”

This may seem hard to believe. The New Deal famously placed millions of Americans on the public payroll(지급명부) via the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. To this day we drive on W.P.A.-built roads and send our children to W.P.A.-built schools. Didn’t all these public works amount to a major fiscal stimulus?

Well, it wasn’t as major as you might think. The effects of federal public works spending were largely offset by other factors, notably a large tax increase, enacted by Herbert Hoover, whose full effects weren’t felt until his successor took office. Also, expansionary policy at the federal level was undercut by spending cuts and tax increases at the state and local level.

And F.D.R. wasn’t just reluctant to pursue an all-out fiscal expansion — he was eager to return to conservative budget principles. That eagerness almost destroyed his legacy. After winning a smashing election victory in 1936, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and raised taxes, precipitating an economic relapse that drove the unemployment rate back into double digits(두자리 수) and led to a major defeat in the 1938 midterm elections.

What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.

This history offers important lessons for the incoming administration.

The political lesson is that economic missteps can quickly undermine an electoral mandate. Democrats won big last week — but they won even bigger in 1936, only to see their gains evaporate after the recession of 1937-38. Americans don’t expect instant economic results from the incoming administration, but they do expect results, and Democrats’ euphoria will be short-lived if they don’t deliver an economic recovery.

The economic lesson is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.

In short, Mr. Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.