Money talks

They put out the new 1000 lira bill last week (who's they? there's no government...) It looks quite nice. The 1000 was my favorite bill before and they made it even better. They've kept the best part of the bill - the chart that shows the Phoenician alphabet and beneath it the evolution from Aramaic to Nabataean to Arabic. This chart may just make the 1000 pound bill my favorite bill in the world currently in circulation.

I am a bill collector and have been since...well, actually, since my first trip out of the country to Australia in 1994. Coins, too, but those are more difficult to carry around. I put my bills in my copy of my favorite book, James Joyce's Ulysses. It's for my own odyssey...

What a country puts on its money tells a lot about the people of that country. The US puts George Washington, the leader of the War for Independence and first POTUS, on its most commonly circulated bill, the one dollar. The man who saved the union and abolished human slavery in the US, Abraham Lincoln, appears on the five dollar bill. Then it gets a bit, well, it shows what Americans value most by placing the first treasurer of the country, Alexander Hamilton, on the ten dollar bill. On the twenty you find one of my heroes, Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence. On the fifty is Ulysses S. Grant, put there for his military leadership during the Civil War, not for the mediocre job he did as POTUS. Finally, the hundred, the largest bill in the dollar arsenal, with the face of Ben Franklin, the last American renaissance man, a guy who was too old to be the first president of the country he helped create. On the backs of the bills are institutions rather than personalities. What's interesting is that all of these personalities and institutions are GOVERNMENT-centric. Tell that to all of the government haters in the US.

The very first bill you find when you open the book is my favorite bill that was ever used, the Irish ten pound note, sadly replaced by the euro. On one side is a picture of Joyce, and on the flip side is a map of Dublin and the opening lines of Finnegan's Wake, which is actually a continuation of the last line in the book.

riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius view of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

I'd write something here about how the Irish really know what to value except elsewhere in the book is a five pound note with the picture of a nun on it.

Other bills in the book:

Lebanon: An old 1000 pound note, the same that was produced during the war, though the one I have was minted in 1991, the year after the Ta'if Agreement. I also have the old version of the Lebanese 1000 pound bill, not the old old one but the one printed until this year. I used to have a 5000 but I spent that last week.

Luxembourg: A 100 franc note featuring on one side the Grand Duke and on the other a nice drawing of Luxembourg City. The Luxembourgish notes were semi-rare because they had a monetary union with Belgium and we just used Belgian francs all the time.

Egypt: One pound features on one side an old mosque and on the other the temple of luxor and some writing even older than the Phoenician - hieroglyphics. Five pound note features cool ancient Egyptian stuff on one side and a mosque on the other.

Northern Ireland: A 5 and a 10 pound sterling note issued by the Ulster Bank I picked up during a trip to Belfast. On the front of both are some hills and haystacks, the city of Belfast, and the Giant's Causeway. The back features the Ulster crest with its motto "nihil impossibile erit vobis" which I'm guessing means something like "nothing is impossible." Quite a good motto considering Ireland has been at peace for more than a decade now. The two bills are identical except for their color.

Turkey: A one lira Turkish note I picked up in Istanbul, which isn't very common since they use one lira coins. It features a picture of Attaturk on one side and what looks like a dam on the other side. I admit I don't know much about Turkey to know what the significance of the dam is.

Mexico: A 50 peso note from I picked up when I was driving from Monterey, California to BFE Texas. I stopped in El Paso and walked across the bridge to Cuidad Juarez, which is now apparently a warzone. On one side of the bill is a picture of Jose Maria Morelos and some canons. As an American I do know something about Mexican history; however, I have no idea who that guy is. On the back of the bill are some guys in boats with what looks like giant nets. Also, there are butterflies and some scary looking masks.

Australia: Five dollar bill. It's a rainbow colored piece of plastic with a clear window in the corner. On one side is Queen Elizabeth, England's queen, because Australia never broke away from the monarchy like we did in America. (It's a source of political tension and the subject of many songs by Australia's greatest band, Midnight Oil, whose lead singer quit to be a member of the parliament.) On the other side I'm guessing is the parliament building and I don't know what else. It's really a mess of a design with drawings and scribbles everywhere. You can barely see the Australian flag on it, that blue cloth with the Union Jack of Great Britain in the corner.

France: Fifty franc note featuring aviator and author of Le Petit Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who, as we learn from the bill, died when he was 44 years old. What we don't learn from the bill is that Saint-Exupery's plane disappeared in 1944 during the war. He had joined the French Free Forces after French cowards signed the armistice with Germany. They actually found his plane a few year ago in the Med. The bill has pictures of Le Petit Prince on both sides and some airplanes. Considering France's long intellectual, artistic, political, and everything else history, Saint-Exupery seems like an odd choice to feature on currency.



Jordan: One dinar, featuring on one side King Hussein and on the other three guys riding camels who are supposed to represent the "Great Arab Revolt." Not a great design for combating global stereotypes of Arabs, in my opinion, but a pretty bill.

Poland: A fifty zloty note featuring some king who looks like he belongs on a deck of cards on one side and drawings of some Polish cities on the other.

Bulgaria: A two leva note featuring, if I can remember the Cyrillic alphabet correctly, some guy named Paisi Hilendarski, who lived from 1722-1773. He must have been some kind of scholar because there is a drawing of what looks like a university on his side of the bill. On the other is the Bulgarian lion and some Cyrillic scribbles. St. Cyril, who invented the Cyrillic alphabet, was Bulgarian.

Hungary: A 200 forint note featuring some King Robert on one side and the ruins of a castle on another.

Romania: Another plastic bill, a five lei bill, but this one is cool. The clear window is a music note. One one side is composer George Enescu and on the other is the music conservatory with some lines of music and a subtle piano in the background. It's very nicely designed, and I give props to anyone who puts the arts on their currency rather than politics.



Iraq: This is the only bill I have for a country I haven't visited. It's a 250 dinar note with Saddam Hussein's picture on it given to me by an Iraqi colleague.

USA: George Washington's face on a $1 silver certificate back when US money was based on more than just a theory and debt to the Chinese. A one million dollar bill featuring the Statue of Liberty on one side and Mount Rushmore on the other. It's fake, of course. A 9/11 deception bill featuring George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld on one side and some kind of retarded stuff on the other.

Also in the book are a postcard featuring Ireland's great writers I bought in Dublin and an old photograph of my last purely Irish ancestor holding my baby grandmother.

I wish I had kept a Belgian franc note, a German mark note, an Austrian mark note, an Italian lira note, and a Dutch guilder note but for some reason, despite going to each of those countries multiple times, I never kept any (I have coins.) I also didn't keep any British pounds, Czech crowns, Slovak whatevers (guessing crowns), or Swiss francs. And I spent my five euro note in Charles De Gaulle airport while waiting for my connecting flight to Beirut last year.

Int...ern...et...Co...nne...ct...ivity

Since my darts opponent has left Lebanon, I have spent some time making this animation using MS Paint about one day in my life as the user of the internet in Lebanon.

Even though because I used MS Paint the pictures are pixelated,it is still better viewed with a full screen.




Music is:

ATB First Love
Smetna (from The Bartered Bride)
Beatles Revolution 9
Breeders Cannonball
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Underwater (You and Me)
John Fogerty Centerfield
Beatles Norwegian Wood

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.

You know what they say about men who drive fancy sports cars

A taxi sat parked on the side of a normally busy street in Beirut, one of the common beaten up old Mercedes that have somehow survived as everything in Lebanon has somehow survived. The driver, whose face was as worn out as his car, slumped behind the wheel as he filled the vehicle with cigarette smoke. In the backseat were two women passengers whose worried expressions told more tales than an entire library could ever teach you. The three of them were listening to the Prime Minister's speech on the radio. Further down in desolation, another driver sat with his car door open on a darkened corner, listening intently with a hard face, a facade, for you could sense the truth of what he felt emanating from deep within him. Shopkeepers had televisions or radios tuned in, and you knew the blue lights glowing from the windows of houses had Hariri's oddly bearded face on TV screens.

The tone of the speech was uncharacteristically defiant as the normally weak leader challenged the militia that now threatens the (relative) stability his country. The pulse of the city itself was uncharacteristically slow. This was not the Beirut that has been featured in the travel sections of Western newspapers so many times over the last two years. No, this was the Beirut of history books.

You really have to be here to understand how it feels - the air, the atmosphere, I don't know how to describe it - but it is like there are supernatural forces at work. The feeling is something deep, like the whole universe, all of existence, all of time and space and history is inside you, and you can look inside the souls of people and see their fear in all its nakedness.

During daylight hours, one doesn't notice there is something dangerously wrong here, for the fruit vendors push their carts and the taxi drivers stand on the corners and the shwarma cooks sell their questionably safe meat. The coffee shops are filled with studying students and elderly elders and housewives both covered and not, and people buy shoes and clothes and belts and other things they don't really need just as they always would. Car horns honk, generators generate, and construction workers shout from great heights to the ground below as usual.

But with dusk come the demons and the ghouls who have haunted this land for many millennia. The streets have been emptier, never more noticeably than last night as Hariri spoke to put Hezbollah in a position where they'd have to take responsibility for any violence that may occur. And they are responsible. No one else is threatening violence. Everyone else is sick of it, sick, sick, sick. Everyone else wants to live normal lives. Everyone else wants a job, electricity, decent internet, and good schools for their kids. It isn't fair. It isn't fair to the innocent Lebanese who have suffered time and time again for the stupidity of a few.

Hezbollah may have been good for Lebanon once (pushing out Israel), but now it's acting like the playground bully. Be a man, Sayyid Nasrallah. Stand up and say no to violence. It's not the size of your gun that matters, but the courage to lay down that gun that truly makes a difference.

Thug Life

I'm watching black smoke pour from the roof of a building. It's nothing more than burnt fuel coming from a generator, but if you were standing on the ground in front of the building, you could be deceived into thinking the building was on fire. Today is the 12-3pm block of power outage, and the streets of Hamra reek of diesel. A strange quietude pervades the neighborhood, and a few shops have even closed, all because of the actions of a few thugs early this morning across Beirut.

The didn't DO anything except stand around in bunches on the streets, but their purpose was clear: intimidation. The Lebanese people were standing directly in front of that building, and thinking it was on fire, rapidly spread rumors which caused parents to pull their children from schools, businesses to close, and various news outlets to erroneously report that myriads of soldiers had been dispatched across the city to quell demonstrations.

I walked into my usual coffee shop around 8am this morning and the employee asked me if I had heard the news about the fighting taking place. He was clearly nervous. A few other employees were huddled in a corner around a laptop. All I had with me was my Blackberry, and since there aren't really any good mobile sites for Lebanon breaking news in English (when I am agitated it becomes difficult for me to read Arabic), I went to Twitter.

After about ten minutes I was convinced tanks were rolling through downtown Beirut. But by the time I had even heard about it, in reality the crowds had already dispersed.

The law-abiding Lebanese people don't deserve to be bullied like this.

Christmas in Beirut

My Christmas Eve started around, well, about five o’clock when I went out to snap some photos around Hamra in dusk beneath the flutter of the bats of Beirut. The capitalist presence of Christmas is alive and well in Beirut. The spiritual Christmas? Not so much.

I ventured to downtown around 8pm, walking the half hour from Hamra so I could look at the Christmas lights along the way. There weren’t too many to see. I was a sight myself, for I was walking. No one walks anywhere in Beirut. They complain for hours on end about the traffic but heaven forbid anyone gets out of his car and walks anywhere. I took the long way, cutting down to St. George’s Marina where Prime Minister Hariri was killed five years ago in a car bomb. The “Stop Solidare” sign was back up on the bombed out St. George’s Hotel. (Solidare is Hariri's company that rebuilt downtown after the war. The protest is a result of the destruction of many old buildings and the development of the coast, which is cutting the people off from the sea, among other reasons.) The sea was darker than the night; it was as if I walked along the edge of the world. Even the Christmas lights the city had strung up along the road weren’t enough to escape the feeling of darkness.

Downtown was bright, though. It was bright thanks to Beirut Souks, the shopping center that seemingly is the only thing in existence downtown, the thing rebuilt by Solidare. Someone had made the bombed out building at the westernmost edge of the souks beautiful with lights and Christmas trees in every window. A thinking person couldn’t escape the bullet holes, however. They had tried to mask the destruction with Christmas but the bullet holes were still there, turning green and purple and blue and red while the people beneath them drank coffee and smoked and talked about trivial things.

The lights were plenty but there was no Christmas spirit, not the kind of magic you feel when there is snow on the ground and you're gathering in warm houses with fireplaces and stuffing yourself full of food and eggnog. There's something about palm trees and sixty degrees that makes a fat guy in a thick red coat a little out of place. I walked around the corner by ancient mosques and the Roman archaeological site beneath the souks and the glitter of stores selling nothing necessary and the people that made Christmas seem like a carnival.

Before I reached the church, I wandered passed Martyr’s Square that had once been a beautiful space full of trees and people and now it is just a parking lot and rubble. Some of the rubble is Roman, uncovered by bombs during the war after everything on top was destroyed. The stones had sat for a thousand years but now they seem as uninteresting as cinder blocks. A Christmas tree stood on the square, surrounded by hijab clad women and jabbering men fresh out of the Hariri mosque, wielding cameras and arousing a clamor as if they were participating in some sort of pagan ceremony around the pagan tree. The traffic was thick and even more unruly than usual. Car horns and Arabic music blasted into the night beneath random displays of fireworks. A parade with three floats full of Santas blocked up traffic. It felt more like Mardi Gras than Christmas.

St. George’s – the largest of the Maronite churches in Beirut – didn’t open its doors until 10pm. I had an hour to kill so I stopped in for an apple pie latte at Costa. (It was disgusting.) St. George’s is building a massive bell tower – presumably because the massive Hariri mosque next door makes the church look like a chapel in comparison and the Maronites feel insecure about it. (Maronite insecurity about their minority status is the source of a heckuva lot of political tension and conflict in Lebanon.)

When the church doors opened I went inside expecting to see something beautiful like the Lebanese version of the Vatican or something, but I was forgetting that the church had been on the front line of a 15 year war. If you really looked you could see patch marks from bullet holes, but the restoration folks did a pretty good job of hiding the war, though the stainglass windows looked like they had been made in haste, as they lack the adornment and color characteristic of older churches. The inside of the church is something resembling a European palace – French, Italian, I couldn’t say – but it didn’t look like Western churches. It was all rather square aside from the nave, which is divided into three rounded sections like Orthodox churches. On the left side was a painting of Mary and on the right was Jesus, while in the middle were four saints holding scrolls – I can only assume they were the gospel “writers.” Then in the very center of the church was a painting of St. George slaying the dragon just like in the Orthodox churches. Silly Christians, there’s no such thing as dragons. St. George must have been reading too much Harry Potter.

But the mass itself followed Catholic liturgy to a T. It didn’t matter that it was all in Arabic – I understood everything that was going on. It was fun to hear the Apostle’s Creed and Our Father and even though I didn’t know the words, I knew exactly what they were saying. Amen is pronounced “all meen” and peace be with you is salam alakum and when the priest in his red and gold priestly robes and his pointed hat said peace be with you, I smiled when the response was “wa maka idhen” because I knew that was what the response would be. That’s the cool thing about Catholicism – it doesn’t matter where on earth you go – the mass is exactly the same and you don’t even need to understand all of the words to understand what is going on.

But the people in the church…well, I have never seen such disrespect in a church. I arrived two hours before mass began because I 1) wanted to get a seat and in the US midnight mass is always full, 2) wanted to have time to look around the church since I’d never been in, and 3) wanted to watch the people. The first people to arrive were many Filipinos who sat in the last three rows. I thought how sad it was that they felt the need to sit in the back. After about a half hour, they all disappeared. They didn’t even stay for the mass, and I wondered if their Lebanese employers dictated that they had to be home at a certain hour.

At 11pm people began to trickle in, and at 11:30 the choir started for real, but they didn’t sing any Christmas songs I knew. In fact some of the songs they sang were rather scary and sounded like they were meant for a funeral rather than the birth of someone who is supposed to save them from their own destruction. (Maybe it’s because they haven’t been saved from their own destruction…)

It was like musical chairs as the people came in. Everyone kept changing their seats, and it never really stopped throughout the mass. Many of them had never been in the church before, for they looked around and snapped pictures even though the sign said it was not allowed. Then a group of four Muslim women and a man walked in, snapping photos and laughing and generally being disrespectful. I guess it didn’t matter much because no one in the church was praying or reflecting. All we needed was some coffee and we could have been in a café with all the talking and socializing. Throughout the entire mass people got up and moved around and a quarter of them didn’t even stay until communion, and only half got up to take communion.

This is a country with 18 official religions, but just one mass said a lot to me. Religion to the Lebanese has nothing to do with a soul or spirituality. It is an identity, a tribe, something you are born with and have no responsibility to think about. Then again, that’s true with most religious people anywhere. People just say the creed because they were told to say it when they were children. They “believe” something because they are told to believe it. They are Catholic or Protestant or Sunni or Shia because they were born in a place and to a family that is Catholic or Protestant or Sunni or Shia.

I walked back from the church downtown and went to Amigo’s. After he closed we went to another place where the people were dancing debka, and I felt jealous because they were young people who were dancing a cultural dance and in America what people call dancing is just jumping up and down. About the only people in America that have anything like that are the bluegrass folks and square dancing. There’s also country line dancing but that feels mechanical and lacks life. The people in the bar were singing the songs like you would find happening in an Irish pub or a Greek Taverna or an Italian whatever it’s called in Italian, but the only time people sing songs in a bar in America is when drunk college kids sing Don’t Stop Believing or Living on a Prayer.

The spirituality that is lacking in Lebanese religious life can certainly be found in the debka and the old Arabic songs and the appreciation for music and culture. It was a pretty great Christmas.

(The only Christmas music I have on my computer are the U2-related ones in the video. I never ripped the Christmas music because when I'm listening to music on shuffle in July, I don't want to hear Mitch Miller and the Gang singing Jingle Bells.) By the way, internet in Lebanon is so slow that it took me AN HOUR to load this video!!!!!!!!!

Scrambled Eggs Fry My Ears

It was an unplanned attendance. Scrambled Eggs, a Lebanese rock band, was playing at The Basement in Gemeyzeh, and I found myself there with a friend. The Basement is another one of those ridiculously overpriced pretentious places in Gemeyzeh that are so expensive nobody actually drinks anything inside. Once we paid the 20000 ($15) cover, fine for a show, we headed to the bar for beers. Almaza. The stuff you can get for a dollar in a shop. 20 thousand, the bartender said. 20 thousand for two crappy Almazas. For that, I can get 6 Almazas at Amigo's pub.

The band wasn't bad, but the sound was horrible. The drums were way too loud and the guitar distortion way overdone. You couldn't understand a word from the singer, which was a big deal because they passed out CDs when you entered and on the cover it said "Peace is overrated, War is misunderstood" and I really wanted to see if they were being ironic in printing that or if they actually believed it. Normally, I'd assume it was irony, but this is Lebanon, where everything is literal.

The crowd itself was dull. They just stood there, lifeless, not drinking because of the outrageous prices, and not moving like they were suburban brats at a Coldplay concert, too cool for dancing, or maybe they didn't know what to do at a rock show, since rock music isn't exactly big here.

The decibel level of the whole show was like they thought they were playing in a stadium. IT WAS TOO LOUD. The Basement is a tiny venue. (My suspicions that Beirutis are half deaf were only bolstered by the decibel level. It's why they can bear the incessant honking and shouting and construction and blasted music at all hours.) I did see a few people holding their ears, so we weren't the only ones. It made what could have been a good show turn bad, and I was glad when they left the stage, though we were not given 30 seconds before a DJ blasted music and a couple of people began to dance. An older man who looked like a Western diplomat to me was really getting down on the tiny dance floor and made for an amusing sight.

I think I'd like the music, but they really need to rethink the volume.

Visit Scrambled Eggs MySpace page here.

It only took an hour to upload, but here are my photos from Tripoli

It was a dark and stormy night. And day.

It wasn’t until I left that I could describe completely how I had felt in Tripoli. Three letters. S-A-D. I walked its ancient streets and ran down the list of people who had lived here. Phoenicians. Seleucids. Romans. Byzantines. Ummayads. Abbasids. Fatimids. Crusaders. Mamluks. Ottomans. Temples became churches became mosques, each built on top of what was already there, making for some interesting architecture. The city was truly a gem in times past.

Now it’s a cool, cruel wreck of a city. Not that it hasn’t been wrecked before. It was pretty much wrecked by each one of those peoples when they sacked it. The worst was probably when the Mamluk sultan Qalaun massacred most of the population and razed the old town in 1289. He rebuilt it and much of the old city is covered with the black and white style of Mamluk architecture. Some of it is in marvelous condition for being seven hundred years old, likely thanks to the Ottomans, who had a healthy respect for building maintenance when they weren't destroying churches. The Ottomans were big into recycling buildings, turning churches they liked into mosques, schools into mosques, castles into mosques, mosques into mosques...

These kind of sieges feel like they are made for history books and blockbuster Hollywood movies, but they are real, and they continue. Though Tripoli didn’t see as much damage as South Lebanon during the civil war, they were still trying to slaughter each other up there, and the city was wrecked again as late as 2007 when Fatah al-Islam briefly took over the city before the Lebanese Armed Forces fought them back to the Palestinian refugee camp Nahr el Bared just 16 km from the city center. At that time the apartment of one of the taxi drivers I rode with was blown up by a jihadi bastard who is rotting in hell with the rest of the suicide bombers these and the rest of days.

Stupid War. So sad. Tripoli could be a beautiful town, but it probably never will be, because I'm quite certain that thousands of years of being under siege is not over. Someone else will come in and be possessed by the sea or whatever it is that makes people in this part of the world crazy. They'll come in and destroy the new high rises and cafes and restaurants that are popping up everywhere. They'll destroy the orange trees and lemon trees and palm trees that line the city streets and are found as commonly as a maple tree in an Ohio yard. They'll destroy the odd sense of calm that one finds in Tripoli after being in the cosmopolitan insanity of Beirut.

It poured. It poured the entire sea into the streets, creating rapid rivers with pavement for beds. We drove over a bridge with a foot of water on it and I wondered how long before the bridge collapsed and all of the cars with their stupid drivers who created a monstrosity of a traffic jam with their self-centered vehicular navigation plunged onto the concrete below. As the car moved slowly along the seaside through half a foot of water, the Mediterranean swells tossed a fish into the air and onto the walkway where feet would travel on a sunny day. I couldn't help but laugh at the sight of the silvery fish flapping around like a deranged bird. The storm seemed to travel in circles, pouring, brightening, pouring, brightening, dripping, flooding, flash, flash, boom.

I'll have to go back when the sun is shining and my shoes aren't soaking wet. I have a video of photos but don't have a fast enough internet connection to upload it.

Hamra Christmas

One of the Christmas trees that have appeared in Hamra over the last week or so. I'm looking forward to walking around Beirut closer to Christmas time to look at the various decorations in the neighborhoods. It's always interesting to experience Christmas time in other countries. This one is strange because it's so warm. Even though the days are awfully short (it's only 3pm and I ordered a beer thinking it was about 5 or so), it does not at all feel like it should be Christmas.