Cockroaches could survive a nuclear holocaust

It's been awhile since I wrote anything about Amigo's pub precisely because I haven't been there of late. Part of the reason is my trips to outerspace, and another part is that I just grew tired of the place. Last night, however, I went there to kill some time away from the throes of a computer screen.

I threw on my Reds t-shirt and a pair of pants because it was no longer warm enough for the shorts I had been wearing all day. Hamra is still Hamra, but it's a better version of Hamra when the sun shines, the weather is warm, and I can sit all day long on the balcony.

--- WE INTERRUPT THIS STORY TO TELL YOU ABOUT A DREAM I HAD LAST NIGHT AND AM JUST REMEMBERING ---

It was a nuclear age. A bomb had been dropped somewhere and we suffered through periodic waves of radiation. The world around us seemed no different except there were strands of lights hung throughout the city that glowed red when another radiation wave was approaching. We had mere seconds to get behind anything we could - a wall, a chair, anything that could absorb even the tiniest bit of radiation, perhaps tacking on a few extra minutes or hours or days to our lives. We knew cancer was inevitable, but we tried to live as if death weren't lurking a few years away.

When the red lights flashed and we had attempted to take cover, the world around us was eaten by an orange glow, and then, just like that, the wave passed and was gone. We didn't feel any different; we just knew that more time had been taken from our lives. After one of these waves from which I had hidden behind a brown wicker chair, I was angry. I had been walking around the city and some farm fields all day marveling at how great was life. I had a strange encounter with Pete Rose. I had coffee at a cafe on a European square (but the dream did not necessarily take place in Europe. The farms looked like Ohio, only with more trees and less flat.) So when night fell and the red lights glowed and the orange wave swallowed the world for a bit, rage came over me. Why had the stupid politicians done this to us? Why had they made policies that had led to nuclear war? Why had these weapons been built in the first place?

The politicians didn't like me questioning them, and suddenly, a black gas began to fill the room I was in. I recognized it as poison and fled the room, but not before I had already inhaled some. I stumbled outside and grew weaker and weaker. I thought surely I would die. Then, an antidote! Apparently, the vast quantities of sugar in donuts could counteract the poison and there was a Dunkin Donuts in a shopping center I walked by. But when I got to the counter, they only had five donuts and they didn't have any I liked, plus I thought they were too expensive so I didn't buy any. I stumbled out of the store and prepared to die. Then, an antidote! A Krispy Kreme store stood on the other side of the shopping center. It, too, only had five donuts, but there was one that not only was a donut I liked, but it also had five mini-donuts on top of it. I bought it, ate it, and, feeling revived, went to see a musical.

High school friends were in the musical, people I hadn't seen in years. I went to find a seat and as I sat in one on an aisle, I saw our intern from a couple of summers ago. I said hi, I haven't seen you in Beirut. He responded with a slew of profanities and insults to the point where I was ready to get into a fist fight with him. But then I saw a certain Lebanese friend walk into the theater, and an immediate sense of calm came to me. I no longer heard the insults, and I no longer felt the anger, even at the politicians who had stolen our lives with their nuclear activities.

--- WE NOW RETURN TO THE REGULARLY SCHEDULED POST ---

Somewhere between 9:15-9:30 I trotted through the Hamra night to the Evergreen forest, where Almaza flows in the streams and the woodland creatures meow or crawl around in the plates of carrots and cucumbers. There were only two other people there until an English guy walked into the bar in search of food. He, like I had when I first entered the bar more than a year ago, assumed that "Pub and Reste" meant "pub and restaurant" and the "Wine and Dine" written in neon on the electric sign outside meant "Wine and Dine." He stayed for some beers anyway.

Being an evil Westerner like myself, I correctly guessed that he worked in development. He was only in town for three days. It was supposed to be two, but because the term "deadline" has no meaning for the Lebanese, he had to stay an extra day to complete the work. Not exactly painful given that back in England it is wet and cold.

When he left, Amigo made his usual jokes about spies, only this time he said he'd rather have CIA than Arab spies since at least everyone knew what the CIA wanted. It was just then that an American poked his head through the door, and upon seeing the dive bar, nodded in satisfaction and entered. Amigo, however, did not switch gears, and the poor newcomer was bewildered by the instant accusations of being mukhabarat. No hi, hello, or welcome, just laughter about another CIA agent entering the pub. I explained to the guy that he had just walked into the middle of a joke, but he didn't seem amused. He stayed anyway and drank some beers, telling me that he worked with refugees - mostly Burmese and Iraqis - in upstate New York. I thought about how I had known nothing at all about refugees living in the US until I read Dave Egger's What is the What? about the Sudanese Lost Boys. [If you haven't read it, do. But have a box of tissues next to you.] He left me as the only customer in the bar.

Finally, the rocketship I had been waiting for landed, and I was easily defeated in darts in a mere two games by the ship's commander. A man of many talents.

Ground Control to Major Major

We took off from Beirut, a parking lot, as the sun hung low in the end-of-winter sky, navigating through narrow streets and metal asteroids. We mocked stupid drivers, cursed semi-trucks, laughed as an unfortunate man waved other cars around his taxi with a broken axle. Beirut turned into suburbs and we climbed higher and higher and farther and farther into the Lebanese atmosphere.

The road from Beirut into the great beyond is steep, necessitating harrowing curves and skillful navigation. With big eyes and good fortune I watched a billion possible head on collisions not come to fruition. We left daylight and approached the darkness of Lebanese space, reaching the peak of the mountain road just after the last rays of the day's sun had become forever forgotten. We hit the police checkpoint, then the army checkpoint, then around the bend, down the hill, and...wow.

A full moon flush with the ruddiness of a new night illuminated the entirety of the Bekaa Valley, whose tiny, twinkling lights were no match for the radiant sphere dominating the cosmos before us. No photo or words can recapture the instantaneous breathlessness of that moment. We pulled over in a vain effort to forever preserve the moment in binary form, but even the cosmonaut's fancy camera could not save the initial awe of the sight.

The clarity of the night lent a brilliance to the stars that one doesn't get in an urban cosmos. Orion hunted Ursula while she tried to protect her cub. Scorpio clicked his shiny claws and Leo paraded with his luminescent pride and I struggled to recall the names of constellations I had known so well as a child. The night cloaked the posters of dark stars, hiding Nasrallah and dead Khoemeini and Imam Musa, who left the building long ago.

The night also masked the potholes, blackholes, a danger to the health of our four-wheeled ship. The cosmonaut navigated the treacherous path to Planet Btedhi with wild abandon. Eventually, we landed. Yes, outerspace is cold, if you were wondering, but there was plenty of heat to get us through the night.

I woke up to this view, fortunately early enough to enjoy a sunny warmth for a couple of hours before the winds began to blow some weather in. Planet Btedhi is a lot like Planet Earth, only they don't have 24 hour electricity or internet and there are no car horns or blaring pop music to disturb the peace. The temperature began to plummet by the afternoon; comfort was a shooting star diving out of existence. I learned about photovoltaics and watched the Btedhians prepare for the next day's workshop on that topic. Wires and computer chips were everywhere. The Btedhians are a smart race of people who want to use the sun to overcome their electricity problems. What a novel idea! Maybe the Earthlings should try it!

On Planet Btedhi, stores don't have shelves. If you want to buy a toaster, you have to take it off the tree it's hanging from. On Planet Btedhi, their pizza doesn't have tomato sauce. Also, they drink pineapple beer. And they have woolly animals with tiny legs that participate in marathons on the winding roads. Oh, and they have ham from invisible pigs. I didn't see any, anyway. Also, the mystery of the Flintstones has been solved, because we found the ruins of their home near a reservoir in the hills. You can see this amazing dwelling place in the photos that follow. Not quite as impressive as the Roman ruins on Planet Earth, however.

American astronauts helped the Btedhians alleviate their water problem by building this reservoir, as another alien race with yellow skin, gnashing teeth, and Iranian weapons was stealing all the water for their crops. It's still not enough water, for climate change is causing desertification in Lebanon and there just isn't enough snowfall in the winters any more. Snowfall is vital to the Bekaa because there is no rainfall in the summer. The water table is found deep in the ground, too, so wells for irrigation have to be dug quite deep, and the fuel to run the generators for the pumps is expensive. Solar powered pumps would change the lives of the farmers out there, but that takes funding, so we'll have to work on that.

On Sunday I learned that the Btedhian weather can be unkind. Shamefully I did not attend the workshop that the Btedhians worked so hard to prepare, and I regret that, but my Earthling body was no match for the alien temperatures which had dipped into what humans would call winter. But the workshop was given in the Btedhian language and though I have learned some phrases, the complicated topic of photovoltaics - a word I hadn't even known in English until my voyage to the planet - would have left me wishing I had stayed under the down comforter in the headquarters. Which is what I did, by the way. The weather was such that we had to delay our return trip for another day; however, we had expected that, and I had packed extra undies for the occasion.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't going to miss that cosmonaut, for he is returning to Earth while I will continue to float through the vast expanse of outerspace. But it is just one mission that has finished, and perhaps we can continue to help the Btedhians overcome their energy problems.

The title of this post is a reference to the character Major Major in Catch 22 and David Bowie's Space Oddity, both chosen for a purpose. Wiki says it well:

His character also stands in contrast to the other authority figures in the book who relish their power and use the bureaucratic system and the law of Catch-22 to maintain or try to increase their power over others.

Here are some more photos of Planet Btedhi:

Making Arak

Yesterday I went back to the village of Btedhi in Bekaa. We left at 5am and hit a patch of fog in the mountains that was so thick you felt like you had reached the edge of the world and then went into the nothingness beyond it. The bad weather must have covered all of Lebanon, because when we left Beirut it was raining after a thunderstorm, and it rained all day in Bekaa Valley. You couldn't see the mountaintops. And it was cold. Winter cold. In the thirties. We got there so early that nothing was open for breakfast, even in Baalbek, which is as close to a city as you're going to get out there. Always cool to see the Baalbek ruins and say a silent prayer to Bacchus. Not so cool to see the streets lined with Hezbollah flags, but it is what it is.

The weather was such that we got stuck in Btedhi for the night, but that just made for a great night. One of the highlights was hanging out with a half a dozen guys from the village while they were making arak, Lebanon's version of Ouzo. You could smell the alcohol as soon as you got out of the car, and inside the small room the fumes were enough to make you drunk. At one point there was so little oxygen in the room that no one's lighters would light, which set off roaring laughter.

They had already processed the grapes into alcohol and had added the anise and sugar to work towards the finished product. The first jar they filled was 30% alcohol. It decreased each time to 28, 27, and further down. When they finish the batch, they mix the jars together to get about 25%. I had a sip of the 30% stuff straight from the tube and thought my body was going to catch on fire. But then water was added to the glass, as is the way arak is drunk, and it tasted nice (though it was still too strong for my beer-drinking taste buds.)

I was told the distiller worked exactly like an espresso machine. The top of it is heated and water is poured onto it, causing condensation on the inside, which is what's needed to start the flow of arak.

I've had homemade spirits before - in Bulgaria we drank rakia semi-frequently (often purchased from under the table at the Veliko Turnovo market) - but never straight from the distiller. I enjoyed the evening immensely and thought about similar times in Bulgaria and how, like the Bulgarians, Lebanese grow their own food as if it's a celebration of life.

The clouds cleared for the night and without urban luminosity you could see myriads of stars and feel your own insignificance in the universe. The moon was so bright you could see the patchwork fields and tiny towns of the valley quite clearly, and the mountains glowed white with the snow that had fallen all day. You could almost forget there were problems in the world.

I saw the sunrise over snowcapped mountains and enjoyed breathing the crisp, cold winter air as everywhere I looked were great white heights. The snow had come very close to falling on the village, and truthfully, I wouldn't have minded so much, as I had good heating.

Going back there this weekend (and wouldn't mind getting stuck an extra day if the weather is bad in the mountains.) Will take a look at the USAID built reservoir to see what my tax dollars are doing. Glad to have a reason to wear my hiking boots.

The Ingenius Gentleman of Btedhi

I spent my Saturday in Btedhi in the Bekaa Valley. Simply breathtaking. Or perhaps a better term would be breathgiving, for the air cleanses your lungs and the views cleanse your head after being in the chaos of Beirut for so long. The village is near Baalbek, whose ruins I had previously visited in July 2009. (That's Baalbek in the hazy distance in this photo.)

Some highlights:

• Clean air.
• Snow-capped mountains.
• Olive groves and wine fields.
• Satellite dishes at gypsy tents.
• Hawks instead of pigeons.
• Peace and quiet.
• Wind turbine juxtaposed with the ancient ruins it sits on.
• Roman column rising up in the middle of flat farmland that was part of a series serving as a guide to Baalbek.
• Nearly getting shot by some idiot hunter (the bullet hit two feet in front of me.)
• View of all of Beirut lit up at night.
• Going from 35 degrees to over 60 in the span of 30-45 minutes.
  
• Good company.

A friend who is working on alternative energy out there graciously let me ride with him into the valley, whose luscious farmland, snow-capped mountains, Roman ruins, steepled churches, Hezbollah flags, gypsy tents, potholed roads, and crazy drivers make a visit seem like an adventure into an impossible land.

There's something about olive trees that fills me with a sense that the past, present, and future are indistinguishable from each other. Very spiritual trees, even when they are tamed in rows. These photos contain plenty of them, including the one above.

The sunshine was nice and the empty roads begged one to wander them. As the afternoon wore on, the wind began to whip its way around the curves and corners with an iciness that reflected the snow on the mountains. Still, for a good part of the day it was warm enough to be outside, so I meandered around the village and sport a bit of sunburn to prove it.

As always, the thoughts that filled my head were various and roaming. There were the usual musings about history, about all of the empires who have controlled this land, with the bias of my Western education providing me with extensive knowledge about what the Romans did here while teaching me next to nothing about the non-Western empires. There was another failed grasp to understand how something so ugly as Hezbollah and sectarianism could exist amidst such beauty. I thought about how Lebanon's greatest writer, Kahlil Gibran, was born just over one mountain but achieved his prestige in New York and how Syria was just over the mountains on the other side of the valley. I marveled at how my sight deceived me in the distance to the mountains and thought how odd I was so warm when up there was much colder, though not enough to keep the snow from melting before my eyes.

I thought of more practical things, too, about how there are no water systems in many of the villages in Lebanon so everyone has to have their own water tank and how foreign governments were trying to help build new systems with the aid of local NGOs but progress was extremely slow, with bureaucratic nonsense and politics mostly at fault. In Btedhi, a sign proudly proclaimed that the Italian government is aiding in the development of an irrigation system.

And then there was the windmill.

It may seem a bit quixotic to be putting up wind turbines and solar panels in a land where corruption is so severe that they can't even make the street lights run at night, let alone provide electricity for 24 hours a day. But change doesn't come when people sit back and do nothing. Kudos to those who are doing something. They're astronauts exploring the vast expanse of Lebanon energy problems. Or, er, cosmonauts.

Other photos, twenty hours after I started to post them. (Thanks, Lebanon internet.)

Achtung Baby!

I'm old enough to remember jubilant Germans standing atop a graffiti-covered wall with sledgehammers and euphoria, but I was twelve years old and not yet able to fully comprehend why what I was watching was so significant. The feeling of seeing that joy turned out to have a profound effect on my life.

But that triumph belonged to another generation. I was a child when the Cold War was escalating itself out of existence while the Islamic revolution in Iran was just getting underway and Lebanon fought its apocalypse and Arab dictators padded their bank accounts. I was three years old when Hosni Mubarak took power. I was a teenager when Islamic fundamentalism replaced the Soviet Union as "The Enemy," a result of Iran and Lebanon and the various dictatorships in the Arab World. Right now, I am listening to Ahmad, who owns a liquor store across the street, light firecrackers in the road after watching the same jubilation more than two decades after the sledgehammer crushed the hammer and the sickle. This is my generation's Berlin Wall.

Oh what a day after last night's heartbreak! I couldn't take my eyes off the Blackberry when I wasn't in a place with a television. When it was announced yet another presidential statement would be made, I hurried home and flipped on the tube. It only took 30 seconds to ignite euphoria. Aljazeera English once again showed how good it is by having not one talking head say a word for a full ten minutes as we listened to the crowd of more than 3 million make the name Liberation Square mean something again.

This is not just a great day for Egyptians or Arabs, but a great day for all of humanity. Congratulations, people of Egypt. You have been an inspiration to the whole world.

I dedicate this song about the fall of the Berlin Wall to you. (Oh, Bono and Edge, you look so young. I can't believe it's been 20 years since Achtung Baby came out. Talk about something else that had a profound effect on my life - and probably did more than any history book to help me understand just how significant those sledgehammers were.)

Bang and Blame

Allahu Akbar echoes through the concrete streets of Hamra as a slight drizzle caresses the city's scars and keeps the flowers alive. It is a gray day but it is still quite bright with distant white clouds hanging somewhere over the sea. Not too far from here, Egyptians are gathering in mass protests against the 30 year dictatorship of Pharaoh Mubarak. A bit further off, Tunisians are trying to reassemble their country after a popular and mostly peaceful revolution overthrew their own dictator of thirteen years. In Yemen, thousands of people took part in demonstrations against their government, and Jordanians, too, participated in demonstrations on a smaller scale.

Here in Lebanon, they handed the government over to Hezbollah and Syria. Come on.

The world is changing before our eyes. I have vague recollections of images of Germans with sledgehammers standing atop a graffiti covered wall overcome by what can only be described as joy. What followed was a decade when the Western world was filled with hope for the future, but while we were celebrating the triumph of what we call freedom over the injustices of a failed revolution of a different sort, this part of the world in which I now sit continued to suffer from the same crushing authoritarianism that plagued the Russians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Germans, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukranians, Belarussians, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Azerbaijanis, Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Slovenians, Croatians, Armenians, Georgians, Macedonians, and all the subsets and everyone else I may have forgotten (the list is off the top of my head). It wasn't called communism in the Middle East except on occasion and in part of Yemen, but communism is just a word assigned to one variation of dictatorship.

The worst is that the United States supported so many of these authoritarian regimes over the years. We looked at the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire while at the same time allowing Pharaoh Mubarak to rule absolutely by what he called "Emergency Decree" for three decades, giving him a pile of dough so he'd make peace with our BFF Israel. Our other BFF, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, didn't need the money but we promised them to suck from the teat of their land if they would just ignore their Jewish neighbors. Our too big to fail car companies simply adored this foreign policy, and it was porn for the filthy minds of the military industrial complex.

After 9/11, Americans asked "Why do they hate us?" as if they had been living in a bubble to keep them immune from the disease known as Realworlditis. And trust me, they do hate us. Not just the hell-bound jihadis who blow themselves up, but common folk of all backgrounds. They do have just cause. But that hate isn't a willful hate. It's a frustrated hate, more of an envy, almost, because they see our hypocrisy in preaching freedom while supporting dictators.

But Americans have their own problems to deal with, things like mortgages and failing school systems and high unemployment. We don't sit around twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week devising new schemes for hurting the people of the Middle East. Most Americans - of the 300 million of them - don't think about the Middle East at all unless something extraordinary occurs, and when that extraordinary thing happens, it usually has to do with someone blowing themselves up in the name of religion. Yet the Arab world seems obsessed with blaming America to the point of counterproductivity. The controversy surrounding the "Ground Zero Mosque" (translation: Muslim community center located two blocks away from the WTC site) was given as proof that all Americans hated Muslims.

Nevermind that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama whose father was a Muslim is President of the United States of America, elected by popular vote by a wide margin.

What I am getting at here is that I am growing increasingly frustrated by the way the Arab world blames the US for ALL of its problems. Look, I am the first person to criticize US foreign policy, as anyone who knows me is all too familiar with. What Israel gets away with makes me sick. I also view the entire system of foreign assistance as neo-colonialism (though for the most part it is not intentional. It's just a lack of awareness by foreign policy bureaucrats and NGOs in Washington who think they are doing righteous work.) But the Arab world needs to look at itself in the mirror and acknowledge that it is not innocent in its plight.

For example, I've only seen one mention of how Mubarak came to power in the first place - Sadat, beloved by Arabs, appointed him in his government and saw his rise. And nobody seems to acknowledge that the pro-Mubarak thugs are, in fact, Egyptian, too, or that in a country with 72 million people, most are not demonstrating. (Contrast that with the Cedar Revolution (R.I.P.) in Lebanon, where a quarter of the entire population of the country marched in downtown Beirut.) Now is the time to rise up, so why aren't there 20 million protesters out there? Mubarak would never survive a protest of 20 million. Also, why now? Why sit and take it for 30 years until some frustrated kid sets himself on fire?

I pray that United States foreign policy changes as a result of this uprising. I'm not going to hold my breath, especially with Israeli cheerleader Ros-Lehtinen as Chairwoman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. (Another consequence of American-voter stupidity in the last elections.) And shame on Senator Feinstein and the others who blocked a Senate resolution last fall demanding more democracy in Egypt. Why don't we spend more of our tax money on domestic programs instead of giving it to Egypt and Israel? Why give them anything at all? Seems most of what we gave Egypt went into the pockets of the Pharaoh, and the money we give Israel just makes people hate us more and makes us less safe. (I know the answers to these questions. Still, it feels good to say it aloud. If only more Americans would...)

Anyway, it's an interesting time to be in the Middle East, even if I'm sitting in a country where nothing is really happening except the same old same old Syrian puppets and Hezbollah and blah blah blah. I just played Jesus Jones' "Right Here, Right Now," a song about the fall of the Berlin Wall that feels right at this time, too. Maybe once this is all over and Pharaoh Mubarak is deposed, Arabs and Americans can finally have a real dialogue based on mutual interests in having what Americans have and Arabs want - freedom - and we can put all of this finger pointing behind us.

So, go Egypt! You have the support of the world. And you, too, Yemen. And you, Jordan, and you, Tunisia, and you, Algeria, and you, Morocco, and you, Palestine. At the end of the day, Americans really do believe in the democracy and freedom that we preach, and we are watching you with pride. Your courage is inspiring.