Much Ado about Everything

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the recent protests in response to the film, Innocence of Muslims, or whatever they’re calling that piece of inflammatory garbage.  First of all, those taking place in Cairo have been very small and limited to the environs of the American embassy.  There has been no widespread rioting.  I know this because I live in Maadi, a neighborhood located a few miles from downtown, where there have been no public expressions of anger, at least none that I’ve been aware of.  This means that those actually involved comprise no more than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of one percent of the eighteen million people (or so) who call this city home. 

On principle, I try to limit my exposure to mainstream Western news media, but I’ve been turning on my TV in recent days to watch France 24.  What I’ve been seeing has been somewhat disappointing.  At one point, the network put together a panel of experts to discuss the situation.  The group consisted of an American, a Dane, and two citizens of France, all of them rather WASPish in their background and outlook.  I listened carefully to everything that they said, trying to see if any of them had ever stepped foot outside their North American-European cocoon.  As far as I could tell none of them ever had. 

I can only imagine what’s being shown on American TV news.  For such an incredibly diverse nation, very few alternative perspectives are ever aired there.  Some would argue that radical Islamists are the biggest threat to America.  Forget that.  Groupthink poses the most potent danger to the health and wellbeing of the nation. 

Religion certainly has played a part in the recent embassy protests in the region, but so has poverty and American foreign policy.  I’m aware that many of my fellow citizens are bound to take issue with such a pronouncement.  What can I say to such people except that the truth sometimes hurts?   

I was born into a fairly traditional family in Texas, a traditional part of the United States.  While growing up, I was taught the old-fashioned lesson that “actions have consequences.”  This certainly has to be true for nations too, doesn’t it? 

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, gloriously marketed as “Shock and Awe,” many warned that such an action would radicalize many in the Middle East.  Of course, there’s also the continued occupation of Afghanistan to consider.  Lately, the use of drones, and all the “collateral damage” that occurs during such strikes, has been capturing the headlines in this part of the world.  I almost forgot to mention America’s longstanding, seemingly unconditional support of Israel, a nation that Jimmy Carter has referred to an “an apartheid state.”  Of course, this list is very far from being complete. 

Along comes a hateful movie and the outrage sparks off.  It’s impossible to look at all this anger, roiling so many different places, without suspecting that other deep-seated grievances are also at play.

I want to finish by sharing a really intelligent letter.  (I wonder if it’s gotten much airplay in Europe and North America.)  Additionally, this Thom Hartmann video provides a new way of thinking about the ongoing instability in this part of the world.  I’ll leave you to have a read and a look. 

Silver Lining

In 1993 I was living and working in Lubbock, Texas, a Great Plains city of 200,000.  Suddenly, in the spring of that year, at the conclusion of a very strange series of events, I found myself without a job and on the dole.    

Lubbock is the home of Texas Tech University which has a large, attractive campus.  When I wasn’t out and about, pounding the pavement to look for work, I would spend a lot of time at the school, often holed up in its library.  It was a great place to read and daydream and wile away the hours. 

One day, while I was sitting there and thumbing through a Time or Newsweek (or some such magazine), I came across an ad for the Peace Corps, an organization I’d certainly heard of and had always been intrigued by.  I read the thing all the way through and saw that the feds were looking to send people far and wide to do “the toughest job” they’d “ever love.”  I recall looking up from the page and staring off into the middle distance.  Shortly thereafter, my vision blurred and I could see myself (quite vividly, in my mind’s eye) living and doing charitable work in some exotic locale.    

Five minutes later I left the library and drove home at a high rate of speed.  I unlocked my apartment door, raced to my bedroom, and dialed the 1-800 number listed in the advert.  Before you could say “get out of Dodge,” I was knee deep in the PC application process.

To make a long story short, the American government ended up deploying me to Poland.  My first stop was a place called Płock, not far from Warsaw.  I spent the next three months in that picturesque city on the Vistula River, completing something “Pre-Service Training” with my fellow Volunteers-to-be.  By the way, I’ve included a photo of our group.  It was taken not long before we graduated from PST and were shipped off to the various towns and cities where we’d serve.  I can be seen in the lower, right-hand corner.  I’m standing behind the blond and smiling Bradley Jarvis, a Californian who had recently graduated from Cal-Berkeley.  

After PST, I was sent to Tarnów, down near Krakow, to teach at a small teacher-trainer college.  Two wonderful years ensued.  I can say, without any hesitation, that that experience transformed me in more ways than I can enumerate here, in this short blog.  As a matter of fact, to this very day, I think of Poland as my second birthplace.

Just before completing my two years, I was given a certificate of appreciation which I recently ran across when I was going through a box of keepsakes. 

 

     

Crossing Borders

First of all, kudos to Bill Moyers, a fellow Texan and someone who’s been fighting the good fight for a long time.

Midway through this interview I hit the pause button, opened up a new Firefox browser window, went to The American University in Cairo’s webpage, and did a search to see if the library, at the place where I work, has any of Luis Alberto Urrea’s books.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t.  As soon as I made that sad discovery, I vowed that I would—by hook or by crook—get my hands on some of his work, in the very nearest future, and take a look.

Like the author, I am very much interested in borders.  As a frequent traveler and longtime expatriate, I often cross them.  Doing so takes me to places where people speak languages that are unintelligible and behave in ways that are unfamiliar.  Of course, this exposure to “foreignness” is jarring.  It is also terrible refreshing and very educational. 

Over the years, I’ve published lots of writings, in all sorts of places, lauding the value of travel.  It may sound like an exaggeration, but joining the Peace Corps, back in the mid-90s, saved my life.  It certainly saved my sanity.  Those two years in Poland was my first exposure to life outside the confines of my home country.  The experience opened up my thinking, provided me with the opportunity to grow in all sorts of ways.  It also turned me on to a style of living that was very addictive.      

My American family—as opposed to Azza’s kinfolks, my Egyptian family—lives in Texas.  I go back, once a year, to the Lone Star State to visit everyone and reconnect.  I cherish those trips back.  They give me an opportunity to cross borders—to move between what some might call “the developed world” and a place that’s “developing.”  I always learn more about myself when I move through space and time this way.

Speaking of travel, I see that I’ve made it to the end of this particular entry in my blog.  So, until we meet again… 

Just for the Aladeen of It

About a week ago, to celebrate the start of Eid al-Fitr, a holiday that comes at the conclusion of Ramadan, Azza and I drove to Bandar Cinema, a multi-screen complex located in Maadi, and bought tickets to see Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest, an over-the-top, campy thing called The Dictator.  To give you a little taste of what was on offer that evening, I’ve included the official movie trailer.

 

Earlier in the day, a few hours before we set out for the theater, I had Azza call the place just to make sure it would be open for business and to check that the film would come with Arabic subtitles.  The woman who answered the phone gave us an affirmative to both queries and then warned, speaking in a really serious voice as she did so, that the film was definitely not for children, a fact that was also made clear to anyone who happened to look at the movie poster on display at Bandar’s front door. 

     

Because I was familiar with some of Cohen’s earlier work, I knew what we were in for, and I tried to warn Azza about the director’s acting style and sense of humor before the film began.  I explained how much he liked to lampoon things.  I told her that he enjoyed making many moviegoers feel really uncomfortable.

To this day, I feel that Borat is one of the funniest and most interesting films of all time.  At the conclusion of The Dictator, I was a lot less sure that Cohen had succeeded.  I felt, many times during the movie, that he was being way too self-indulgent.  That said, I would still recommend the film to anyone who hasn’t seen it.

I suppose I mainly wanted to see the movie because I was curious how an Egyptian audience would respond, especially given the country’s recent history and the current political situation.  How, I wondered, would viewers in this part of the world react to a film about a dictator?  Plus, I wanted to know if they’d be able to handle a work that portrayed North Africans in stereotypical (and even offensive) ways. 

My answer to these questions came as soon as those around me laughed uproariously at Cohen’s first gag.  From that point forward, I sat back, relaxed, and got into the film.

On the Streets

I’ve got culture shock again.  I’ve just returned to Egypt after spending weeks in America, visiting family and friends.

Azza met me at Cairo International Airport on the morning of my arrival.  Of course, I was very happy to see her and immediately began telling her about my trip, especially about the flight across the Atlantic and the days I’d spent in Madrid.  I recalled how I’d felt like yelling “hallelujah” as soon at the big Boeing had touched down on the runway at Madrid-Barajas Airport.  The ride across “the pond” had taken place in the middle of the night, and about mid-ocean or thereabouts, hundreds of miles away from the nearest land, we ran into a storm.  With nothing but deep blue beneath us, the jumbo jet buckled wildly for what seemed like forever.  I’m not a good air traveler even during the best of circumstances.  When the circumstances are the worst—I can’t imagine a more turbulent and scary trip than the one I just had—I become an emotional basket case.

The three days I spent in Spain’s vibrant capital were just enough to whet my appetite.  Had I stayed there longer, though, I probably would have gotten exhausted.  One often hears cities being referred to as places that “never sleep,” but in Madrid’s case, it’s more than a cliché.  The metropolis seemed eerily uninhabited during the day, but then exploded with activity an hour or so after sundown.  The Spaniards also struck me as proud, impulsive, and wildly inventive.  One way the latter most clearly manifested itself was in the number and quality of street performances I ran across while walking about.

I used my Nikon to record some of these.  Unfortunately, my camera battery went completely dead on me at the moment I wished to capture the most impressive of all those I witnessed—it involved levitation and those participating must have employed some sort of very effective optical illusion to float the way that they did.  I had a hard time choosing which video to embed here.  I finally settled on this one, which shows a performance that took place in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, one of the city’s iconic locations. 

I eventually dropped a Euro into the tip jar and promptly got the bejesus startled out of me when the three lunged forward.  My face immediately reddened and then I faded back into the crowd as nonchalantly as possible.  A few minutes later, I left the scene to see what else the city had to offer.

Later that same day, I discovered that some of Madrid’s buildings also like to perform, as you can see from the following clip.