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.   

  

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…