American Heroes

This past week, Noam Chomsky came to Cairo and did an hour-long talk at The American University in Cairo.  The venue was an auditorium located on the old campus, the branch downtown, at Tahrir Square, the epicenter of Egypt’s most famous recent historical events.  I would have loved to have jumped aboard the metro—there’s a stop not far from my apartment—and headed into the heart of the city to watch this living legend do his thing.  Unfortunately, he talked on a Tuesday, and I was incredibly busy that day, helping my students with their essays and such, so I was unable to attend. 

I did watch, though, the very next day, on YouTube—AUC has its own channel on the site.  What I saw was classic Chomsky.  He was his typical monotone self.  But he’s never really been about style.  He’s all substance, and the talk that he gave—check it out below—was incredibly substantive.  He delivered a devastating critique of American political culture and foreign policy, two of his favorite subjects.  He’s got bull’s eyes drawn on those two.

He reminded me—as he always does—how masterfully America has managed to hide a good chunk of its history from the vast majority of its citizens.  (It just so happens I’m also reading The Secret History of the American Empire, by ex-Peace Corps Volunteer and self-described “Economic Hit Man,” John Perkins.  As the title of his book makes clear, Perkins is Chomsky’s colleague in every meaningful sense of the word.)

I’ve always been drawn to these sorts of “radicals.”  I guess I always will be.  Conventional wisdom calls such folks “sellouts,” “America haters,” “traitors,” whatever ugly term you want to choose.  To me, though, they are the bravest of the brave, the nation’s best and brightest.  Their arguments carry the seed of the only hope we have left.

Last year, I was lucky to see Norm Finkelstein when he came to do a ninety-minute talk at AUC.  They had to put him in the biggest room the university has.  There were probably six hundred people in his audience.  He didn’t disappoint, and in the end, we clapped as hard as we could.  Just as a post-script on Finkelstein:  I’m always amazed when I think about how I’ve never seen him talk on American TV.

Last, but not least, is Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for this year’s American presidential election.  At this link, you’ll find her being interviewed by Russia Today.  It’s tragic that I hadn’t even heard of her before watching this clip.         

Eyes in the Skies

I’ve been away from this blog because I was busy completing a few other pressing writing projects.  I’m back now and plan to make up for lost time.

Azza, my new Egyptian wife, recently made a travel request in relation to our holiday plans for next summer.  This past June, on our way to Texas, my birthplace, the two of us stopped in Europe—in Rome, to be more specific—to do a little sightseeing and to visit two of Azza’s nearest and dearest old friends.  The stop in Italy was also a way of breaking up the long-haul flight across the cold Atlantic so that we wouldn’t fall down dead from jetlag along the way.  Next summer, she has asked that we do things differently.  She wants to see New York City, which means that we skip the layover in Europe and visit the Big Red Apple instead.

Life is full of wonderful coincidences.  About a day or so after Azza told me about her desire to see NYC, I was sitting in a work-related meeting.  All of us at this gathering had laptop computers.  The fellow to my right was surfing the net when he should have been listening to the speaker standing before us.  I just so happened to notice that he was looking at a live-streaming webcam of Times Square.  I peeked at the URL and made a mental note to visit the same site later that day and to share it with Azza too.

These recent events have helped renew my interest in looking at webcams on the internet.  I used to spend a lot of my online time searching for interesting ones and then bookmarking those—like this one and this one and this one—I’d managed to locate.

I’ve long had this strange wish, a sort of internet fantasy I guess you could say.  I’d love to witness something embarrassing happen to someone on a webcam.  For example, to see a stranger, his back turned to me, walking down a street or a sidewalk in some faraway place.  Suddenly, his shoe will come untied or he’ll drop whatever he’s holding, and then he’ll have to bend down to lace back up or retrieve the item.  At the instant he does so, he’ll rip out the seat of his pants, exposing a pair of white underwear in the process.  Of course, he’ll be mortified and will reach around to check, with the fingers of one of his hands, to see if what he thinks happened actually did.

I think it would be such a wonderfully postmodern experience to observe something like that happen.  And I know what my reaction would be too.  I’d smile to myself and then shiver with the realization that I’m living at a moment in history when miracles really do take place.