2009

Happy New Year, and Happy 500th Post for this blog.

Beneath the Stains of Time

In my last several days here, I found myself awaking at odd hours. Questions seared through my dreams, ripped me from my late-night slumber and trounced upon my conscience. Whether they had just arrived, or whether they had always been there and I just wasn’t aware, remains painfully unknown. I try to piece together broken thoughts with the glue of a thousand different emotions, but sometimes I can’t even decipher my own language. I often wonder if I'm drifting aimlessly, like I'm wandering through the endless sands of Wadi Rum with a broken compass.

What started off as a bit of a nightmare has, by the end, come to seem a bit surreal, and I can’t help but look back and wonder if it all really happened. Memories of Amman are becoming as hazy as the desert sky in winter, and as I carry my wounded ideals past false prophecies and over hills littered with success and failure, off on the dusty horizon awaits a bitter cocktail of fear, doubt, conquest, exhilaration and melancholy.

I leave the Middle East as fascinated with the region as I was when I first arrived. Exploring nine of its countries in less than two years has has left me befuddled; simultaneously laughing and shaking my head in disbelief at the potent mixture of calm and calamity. I think that only when you develop a love-hate relationship with a particular part of the world can you really discover a semblance of truth in it. The romanticism of this place evaporated for me long ago, and while it might be fucked three ways from the weekend, I’ve found a certain placidity that is palpable; a kind of purity that I struggle to find in my own country.

I can’t say I’ll miss the precise locale, but I’ll certainly miss the experience. The boundaries that you’re able to cross as a well-intentioned white man (and a journalist, at that) offer the kind of illumination that you’ll only get on the other side. The paradox, of course, is that the one barrier you really sought to breach--the one that separates foreign and local--remains impenetratable.

Alas, I now wander anew, putting journalism aside to try my hand in international security and relocate to the most insane place of all. It’s likely six months before I get the itch again. Hopefully by then, I’ll have fixed my compass.

Yeah it’s time to move on
Time to get goin’
What lies ahead I have no way of knowin’
But under my feet baby,
The grass is growing
It’s time to move on
Time to get goin’

On Classes and Communities

"A society may be measured by whom it admires. No class of Americans has done more to damage America than the financial class. A generalization is an ugly thing, but every day's newspaper refreshes my impression that the titans, the insiders, the big players, the boldfacers, the movers and the shakers-the hoshover menschen, as we say where I come from-have been, many of them, fools or thieves.

I'm hollering, I know. But recently I have been spending some of my hours teaching little schoolchildren and helping a frail and beloved woman with her food, and I have been reminded of all the life that flows past all the fanciness. There are so many worlds in the world. A friend of mine is slowly dying on Park Avenue-"the gates are closing," he declared the other day-and it makes Park Avenue look stupid. Its insulation does not work. It holds back the imagination of misfortune, which diminishes the scope of natural sympathy-so that, say, Caroline Kennedy is only now discovering Syracuse-and inculcates the illusion that fate has an A-list.

The media that used to be fascinated by the pleasures of the rich is now fascinated by the pains of the rich, but the fascination is the same, and it contributed to the bubble that burst in all our faces, and it interferes now with what we really need to know" [TNR].

An Unorthodox Ride Home

I don't think they could tell how annoyed I was. The car speakers blared Hotel California yet again, reminding me of that equally-obnoxious time when I was riding somewhere along the Oman-Yemen border and cursing a native for putting that same track on repeat. I never thought the day would come when I would contemplate hating The Eagles.

The front-seat passenger looked back--his name escaped me--and started rambling about his year-in-hell in Riyadh. No booze, which wouldn't have bothered him but he's Christian and depends on alcohol to duck the iron fist. "Fuckin' Saudis," he spewed bitterly. If I had 50 piasters for every time I had heard someone say "Fuckin' Saudis" in the Middle East I could afford a first-class ticket out of here.

"It's not enough that they have oil; they have to go and charge 7,000 per hajj," said the Muslim driver. I remembered that he was called Hassan. I remembered because at the bar where I had met these two chaps a half-hour earlier, Hassan had started pleading with me to not let the Americans pull out of Iraq, since he's in the military supply business and the U.S. Army is his most valued customer. I don't think he had ever heard of the military-industrial complex. I don't think he even knew what a complex was.

As we flew through the outskirts of Amman they started explaining to me that the aforecursed Saudi Arabia is the best place to get laid and that the best hashish in the world comes from the remote mountains of Afghanistan. Funny, I thought the Afghan's only trade was opium. I also thought that Hassan had said that we'd be going to the cinema. But this is what I like about living here--or liked, anyways. If I had jumped in a truck with a couple of random Americans back in southern Wisconsin and they began driving me out to no-man's land, then I'd be afraid. Very afraid.

Like many locals, they really liked my name. It was "Arabic name", and I made a note to thank my parents for calling me something that's so culturally versatile. We finally stopped at a monstrosity of a house, in a monstrosity of a neighborhood, where Hassan was preparing to live with the fiancee that he seemed to really despise. For the next two hours they laughed hysterically as they showed me clips of Ahmed the Dead Terrorist.

And in true American form, I didn't have an exit strategy.

A Stocking Stuffer for the Purest of Meritocracies

"Exceptionally successful people are not lone pioneers who created their own success. They are the lucky beneficiaries of social arrangements. Gladwell told Jason Zengerle of New York magazine “The book’s saying, ‘Great people aren’t so great. Their own greatness is not the salient fact about them. It’s the kind of fortunate mix of opportunities they’ve been given.’ ”

Most successful people begin with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so. They were often showered by good fortune, but relied at crucial moments upon achievements of individual will.

The less successful are not less worthy, they’re just less lucky" [Brooks].

I gotta get my hands on this book. I can't say I've drank the Gladwell Kool-Aid--I got through barely forty pages of The Tipping Point before I hurled it against the wall--but he may be the first "success scribe" to focus on the element of fortune (aside from rambling televangelists who just tell you to pray more) in the context of social interaction. When you graduate from college and you're thrown to the wolves of "reality" it's easy to overlook how important your environment and proximity social networks are for fostering and generating personal success. Perhaps this is why moving to America's most bustling city would inspire one to reflect on the "tribe's" importance.

Perhaps it is precisely why I am charting a new course.

These Walls

Walls are symbolic of a lot of things here. They speak much louder than the politicians and the proxies for whom they serve as cold comfort; yet they comprise the most unsophisticated of "solutions"--the kind that don't belong in this century.

West Bank Love