Poems are like
Things you find
On the beach.
They’re misshapen but usually
Sparkle in sunlight.
Some are alive
And scuttle about.
Others are dead but have left
Beautiful
White
Skeletons.
888
Visitors
Some days the poems knock
On your front door.
You go to open it
And greet them.
You get lots of visitors
On such days.
The knocking persists
Even as you turn off
The lights.
The knocking persists.
The knocking persists.
The knocking persists.
Other days
You wait. No one comes.
You feel
Lonely
Forgotten
Dead. Maybe you are dead?
How would you even
Know if you were
Or weren’t? Who
Would give you
The news?
When no one comes
You aren’t for sure
If you even
Are.
Last Saturday I met Charles Bukowski at a Starbucks in a Barnes and Noble bookstore in San Antonio, Texas. He was arriving just as my wife and I had finished up our coffees and were gathering our belongings to leave.
Because he could see that we were getting ready to take off, he walked right up to us and asked, “Are you finished here?”
“Yes,” I answered as I stared at his acne-scarred face and misshapen nose—the bulbous proboscis of a wino.
“I ask because you’re at my favorite table, and I want to claim it if you are leaving.”
“You can put your stuff here if you’d like while we get ready to head out. By the way, has anyone ever told you that you look exactly like Charles Bukowski?”
“Charles who?” he asked gruffly.
“Never mind.”
In fact, he was a spitting image of the renegade poet-madman-drunkard.
Because we’d bought books and had to put on coats and scarves to gird ourselves against the cold, it took us awhile to get our stuff together. During this period, a conversation began to blossom. “So you come here often?” I asked him.
“Every Saturday. You see, I’m retired, but I give private lessons on the side to people who want to learn English. Right now, I’m working with three young girls from Djibouti. I always teach them at this particular table.” After saying this, he leaned in to me and whispered, “Their English is very weak.”
Azza, my wife who speaks Arabic as her mother tongue, is not really a shy person, but she sometimes has a hard time inserting herself into a conversation between Americans when they are speaking a hundred miles an hour.
“I bet they’ll learn very fast, though,” I told him. “They will probably be better at learning our language than we would be at learning theirs.”
“Maybe. But who would want to learn whatever it is that they speak?”
“Ask them to speak their language to you and really listen to what they say. I bet what you hear will sound beautiful if you open your ears and mind. It’s my opinion that more Americans should learn a second language.”
He kind of frowned and then said, “So many people from crap countries want to come here. They are just flooding in. They have to learn English because it’s the lingua franca.”
I could feel the hair stand up on my neck. Only days earlier, Donny Trump, the Hairpiece, had called African countries “shitholes.” I had the feeling this old fart was likely a Trumper, and a part of me wanted to snarl.
“By the way, I’d like to introduce you to my wife, Azza. She’s from Africa. Her country and the people who call it home are beautiful in many ways.”
“I’m sure it is and that they are,” he said a touch snarkily.
“I think Americans should be a little more careful about judging others. Don’t you think this country has its share of problems?” I asked him.
“Compared to other places, America is el paradiso,” he said, suddenly shifting to a foreign language. “By the way, where, in Africa, is your wife from?”
“Egypt,” she said, finally asserting herself.
The man’s face suddenly changed and he started speaking Arabic to her. As it turns out, he was born in Egypt and lived there as a child. He asked her where, in “Misr,” she was from, and she said Cairo. He, as it turns out, had been born in Alexandria.
From that point forward, I faded into the background because the language shifted to Arabic. At one point, he asked her what her religion was and she said Islam. He then called himself a “Yehudi,” which means “Jew,” and explained that this fact had played an important role in why his family left North Africa. He shared some stories about how they had been victims of religious persecution under President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Hearing these personal accounts saddened my wife.
We ended up talking until his three students showed up. They were sweet girls. Before they arrived, we found plenty to laugh about—the irony of an Egyptian Muslim and Jew meeting at the same table in a Starbucks at a Barnes and Noble bookstore in San Antonio. We were reminded how small the world really is and how big it is too. And how much we have in common despite our superficial differences.
About four months ago I was hired to manage the Integrated Reading and Writing Learning Center (INRW LC) at Palo Alto College (PAC) in San Antonio, Texas.
“INRW” stands for “Integrated Reading and Writing.” Our center is a place where students can come to participate in reading and writing workshops and get hands-on tutorial help with tasks that have been assigned by their INRW instructors who teach in the Department of English.
I absolutely love the job for a whole bunch of reasons. For one, I get to supervise several extraordinarily talented tutors and oversee the daily operations of the INRW LC. I also get to design and lead workshops as well as work with student-writers on a one-to-one basis. They bring drafts of papers they’re composing, and I act as reader and consultant as they go through the writing process. Our ultimate goal, as we work collaboratively, is to have them produce pieces of writing they’ll be satisfied with and that will receive positive evaluations once they’re turned in.
Before coming to PAC and the INRW LC, I was employed as a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition at the American University in Cairo (AUC), a position I held for seven wonderful years. What I like about my current job is that I still have the opportunity to teach but get to provide more personalized assistance, thus turning teaching and coaching into acts of great sharing and intimacy.
Students often ask me what it takes to become a really good writer. There’s a lot that goes into answering such a question, but if I’m forced to boil it down, I’d say that the single most important thing a person might do to get better at writing is to focus on becoming a more skilled thinker. I make this claim because writing is really just thinking on paper, in a visual form that can be shared with others.
In my case, I started getting much better as a writer when I became a graduate student and professors started pressing me intellectually. By holding me to a really high thinking standard, I had to evolve as a communicator because words were the things I was using to share the ideas I was positing. If I wanted my ideas to be compelling and precise, then my language had to be compelling and precise.
Graduate school is Boot Camp for would-be intellectuals, and my professors were working hard to turn me into a kind of Thinking Ninja. I was being tested and stressed and worked out so that I could become formidable. Because we live in a world where ideas matter, the strongest ideas, presented the most strongly, end up mattering more. Those who hold them and become skilled at sharing them, become very powerful.
This is why I ask so much of all the students I work with. I want to empower them. I want to help them gird them for battle.
I have a tendency to go on and on when I blog, but I want to be short and to the point on this one. I am an American man who couldn’t be prouder to be married to an émigré from Egypt, an African country and one of those places the “President”—I don’t find him one bit presidential so I’m required to use quotation marks—recently besmirched by referring to them as “shitholes.”
I am proud because my wife is kind, honest, hardworking, creative, and generous, just to name a few of her positive attributes. I find it ironic that a day after the “President” belittled those who’ve come here from other places, my wife completed the paperwork needed to start her own sole proprietorship, a home baker business she’s calling “ZooZoo’s Sweet Treats.” She owned and operated such an enterprise in Egypt and did very well, mostly because she is an artist in the kitchen and a skilled entrepreneur. I expect that she’ll be a smash here as well.
By the way, has the “President” seen this country in its entirety? There are places in these United States that could use a little enrichment and beautification.
Why, one wonders, did Trump choose the term shitholes? He could have referred to locales in Africa and such as “beautiful places,” but he didn’t. He used such a descriptor because he thinks of large swaths of everywhere else as the “Third World” which equates to “third-rate.” (Unfortunately, this whole “first-world-versus-third-world way of thinking is widely held in America.) Those from the Third World are thought to be third-rate because they are poor and backward, which says a lot about what Americans put value on. Such a way of looking at the world fails to take into account the fact that many in the Third World are actually first-rate when it comes to their spiritual development and the like.
I wrote this a little more than a year ago, but it seems, once again, very apropos…
***
I can’t believe I’m being dragged back into politics. But that is exactly what’s happening.
In 2015 I quit visiting all the political websites that had held my interest for many years. I stopped thinking about politics and discussing the topic with others.
2015 is also the year I left Egypt after living and working there for seven years. During that time, I was very political, at least from 2008 to 2014. In 2011, I witnessed the mass uprising against Hosni Mubarak and found myself swept away by the euphoria that followed his deposing. Then, two years later, during the month of July, I watched in horror as Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was overthrown in a military coup. Some very scary characters referred to it as a “second revolution,” but the more apt term was “counterrevolution.”
The counterrevolution crushed my spirit but not because I was a Morsi fan. I was devastated because I had seen how hard brave Egyptians had fought to free themselves. And I saw the sacrifices they’d made. Suddenly, though, they were right back at square one or even worse. The only way I could survive such devastation was to numb myself. So, I withdrew from politics and became apathetic, which takes me back to the point I was making about myself in the second paragraph.
I had a bit of a revival when Bernie Sanders decided to run for president. The old political juices began to flow again. From the moment he declared his candidacy, I felt the Bern. Eventually, he built an incredible following and I began to see a glass that was half full. Egypt had certainly lost its way but America, it seemed, was on the verge of finding its soul.
Then the Democratic Party machine decided that Hillary Clinton was somehow owed the nomination. Bernie was treated unfairly and his supporters were pushed aside. Many of us warned that Clinton was too compromised and therefore vulnerable. Too few listened to those warnings. Too many people were too certain about what they thought was a foregone conclusion. There were many ominous signs for those with the ability to see and read them. With Bernie out of the race and everyone saying Clinton was a shoo-in, I began to lose interest again.
But I never drifted entirely away. That weird sense of foreboding I felt wouldn’t let me turn completely off. The mood of the nation reinforced the sense of dread I felt. It seemed all too possible that something catastrophic might happen. And it did on November 8, 2016, a date that go down in infamy.
Now that the world as we’ve known it is in the process of vanishing, the old jump-up-on-a-soapbox Troy has reawakened.
I grew up during a period when Americans smugly believed that the nation and its people were somehow special—or exceptional. They watched as other countries fell apart or came under the influence of evil powers but felt that such things could never happen in the greatest country the world had ever seen. America would always remain the beacon. It would always set the model for others to follow.
But just look where we find ourselves now. Just look. Look long and hard. And while doing so, make sure not to turn your eyes away. Don’t delude yourself into believing that what you see isn’t as bad as many are suggesting.
The truth is, it’s every bit as bad as people are saying. We cannot know for sure how bad it may get, but it is already way beyond horrific.
From 2008 to 2015, I lived in Cairo, Egypt, and taught at The American University in Cairo. In the spring of 2011, about midway through my seven-year stint in North Africa and only two months after Hosni Mubarak was pushed out of office by an enormous uprising of fed-up Egyptians, I met Azza, a born and bred Cairene and the woman who would become my wife less than a year later.
When I met Azza, she had a successful catering business, specializing in Italian food. Now that we are living in the US—in interesting San Antonio, Texas, a place that feels a little like an American city with a whole lot of Mexico mixed in—my wife is once again considering starting her own enterprise. This time, though, she’s looking at opening a home bakery. (The Lone Star State doesn’t heavily regulate the cottage food industry, thus incentivizing those who wish run such a business out of their own kitchens.)
We just finished up with the Christmas holidays. By the way, my wife is a Muslim and she just loves this time of year. In fact, she single-handedly destroys all the ugly stereotypes that many close-minded people—I’m thinking mostly about the Trump Evangelicals as I write this—have about practitioners of Islam. I bring all this up because she did a ton of baking in the run-up to the twenty-fifth of December, and as is usually the case, because she is such a professional in the kitchen, she wrapped a turban around her head to keep stray hair out of the food she was preparing.
One morning I saw her with such a wrap on her head and told her she looked like Aunt Jemima. Knowing that wouldn’t understand such a reference, I tried to explain who this person was. As luck would have it, I went to the grocery store a few minutes later and found the appropriate aisle—the one where they kept the syrups for pancakes and waffles and such—and took a picture of the label with America’s beloved Aunt’s photo on it, only to discover (and quite surprisingly too) that the Jemima of today bears little resemblance to the Jemima of old.
The conspiracy theorist in me immediately jumped to the conclusion that they took her turban off because it looked too much like a hijab. I figured that Quaker Oats didn’t want to feature a character who looked too foreign or too exotic or too Islamic. After all, this is Trump’s America and the rest of us are only living in it.
As it turns out, there was a reason for the company to modernize Aunt Jemima’s image, but it had nothing to do with them trying to make her look less like a Muslim. I’ve included a video that explains the whole interesting story about the politics behind the revamping of the image of this cultural icon.
I have this friend named B*** S******. We got to know each other while we were both teaching at The American University in Cairo. I returned to the US in 2015 and he did so a year later.
When I came back, I got a pretty lucrative education and training job with the Department of Defense as a private contractor. I was hired to work with foreign military personal—both enlisted and officers. I had students from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Djibouti, Jordan, Mauritania, Togo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Georgia, Bulgaria, the Ukraine, Mongolia, South Korea, and Indonesia. I might have left out a country or two, and I apologize if that’s the case. Then, student enrollment declined, beginning in the springtime, and I got laid off exactly one year after hiring on, making me collateral damage which sounds a lot better than a bullet-riddled corpse that had been mutilated beyond all recognition. It was the first layoff of my life and it came at the worst time imaginable. In fact, it’s left me with ugly scars and something akin to PTSD.
B*** came back and got a job at a community college in some Podunk in the Midwest, an area sometimes called “flyover country,” and for good reason, because to land there puts one at risk of contracting a deadly form of ignorance, the sort that turns the brain to mush, making someone like Donald Trump look like a reasonable human being who might make a good president.
I might be giving my friend’s current place of abode away by saying it garnered national news a while back when the police arrested three scraggly, lily-white, neo-Nazi-looking guys who were in the midst of plotting to blow up a building inhabited by Somali refugees who had committed the heinous crime of leaving their troubled homeland to start life anew. I’ll go back and look at the reports again, but I believe one Donald Trump, the fellow who froths at the mouth like a rabid skunk when you suggest he’s opened up Pandora’s Box of hate in the country, had been the rednecks’ primary inspiration.
To quote one of my favorite writers of the 20th century, a kinky headed dude named Kurt Vonnegut: “And so it goes.”
B*** and I talk about politics on the phone from time to time. During one of our pre-election conversations, I said, “There might be a silver lining to the election of DT if it happens.”
“What the hell would that be?” B*** asked incredulously.
“Well, in the short run, I agree it would be catastrophic, but in the longer term, it would likely be a powerful impetus to kick start a truly robust progressive movement the likes of which American has maybe never seen before.”
Do I see such a coming together of progressives happening now that we are living in the alternative universe known as Trump Reality? Quick answer: Hell yes.
The last time we talked—about two weeks after that very flawed presidential election—B*** was terrified. (I could hear him quaking in his boots through the phone.) His fear was that we were entering a phase where the fascist brutes, aligned with law enforcement, would just start rounding people up or mowing them down—whatever was most cost-effective and convenient. I advised my buddy to get on Twitter and just have a look around at the pushback that was taking place against the Chief Nihilist of the US and his fascist minions. If he did so, I exhorted him, he’d feel a lot better.
I have always felt that STEP ONE in the resistance of despotism can only come after millions of people have linked arms—this linking can start virtually, on places like Twitter—become comrades, and have declared a common goal. This is happening as I write this. If you’re feeling alone, hopeless, and isolated, reach out to others who are your political brothers and sisters. Once you do this, you will begin to feel a part of something that is much bigger than yourself. This will embolden and inspire you. You’ll see that lots and lots of people have your back.
You will also discover resistance movements and find out about street protests and planned acts of resistance and civil disobedience. Join one and become an activist. Use your feet to move through the streets. As your feet carry you along, your voices will rise up to say “No!”
My feeling is the fascists are really mostly bluster. (It is no accident that the most obnoxious ones hide behind fake Twitter handles, afraid to show their true identities.) Stand up to them. Get in their faces. And they will ultimately slink away.
My Egyptian wife and I left Cairo and moved to America in 2015 to escape political instability and the personal danger that comes with it. And now, a little more than a year after arriving in what was supposed to be a sanctuary, we find ourselves in the same predicament, in a country that seems to be politically unraveling or exploding or just going to the fucking dogs.
This morning I had a long and heated telephone conversation with my mother, a septuagenarian who lives in a beet red part of a mostly backward southern state. (By the way, calling a state both mostly backward and southern seems to be a tad redundant, don’t you think?) The purpose of my call was to see if she’d read an editorial that had been published on DallasNews.com, the online version of the Dallas Morning News, a daily—one of those old-fashioned things composed of real ink that’s been printed on large sheets of paper—which is destined to eventually go the way of dinosaurs. I’d emailed the article to her several days earlier and had introduced it by saying, “It has come to this in the US—that sober experts, people with real credentials, are actually writing and publishing this sort of stuff.”
By the way, I advise everyone to read the piece at the link and then follow the writer on Twitter @TimothyDSnyder. Snyder is a well-known historian at Yale University who offers advice on what Americans can do to prevent totalitarianism from arising in the US. The underlying premise of the piece is that such ugliness is on its way and that we all need to be planning how to resist it (or at least survive it). If you do read the editorial, you might want to spend the next couple of evenings sleeping with all the lights on. Otherwise, slumbering in the dark after such a reading might cause you to have really terrifying dreams.
My mother said, and I quote, the writer of that article, “has gone off the deep end.” My mom is obviously one of those Americans (of a certain generation) who believe “It can’t happen here.” Because Americans have grown up thinking the nation’s shit don’t stink, many of them can’t recognize seedling fascism/despotism/totalitarianism when it sprouts up right in front of their eyes.
American exceptionalism is something I’ve discussed with her before. The idea is deeply ingrained in her that the nation is somehow protected by something resembling a force field. This weird belief that the US is somehow “chosen” and special is a danger unto itself. The more people who think this nation is immune from fascism and the like, the less likely they are going to be able to see danger and realize that the time to take appropriate action was yesterday.
My mom, it seems, is one of those who is trying to rationalize or normalize what’s happening. For more on the dangers of doing so, listen to the podcast found at the link below.
Anyway, getting back to my conversation earlier today with my mother. Toward the end of our exchange, she said, “I trust the American people to not allow anything like tyranny to happen.”
I asked her, “You mean you trust those same people who voted for a man who ridiculed a handicapped person, called Hispanics rapists and murders, talked about grabbing women by their pussies because his fame allows to get away with such, and has blurred the line between ordinary Muslims and terrorists?”
Of course, my query flummoxed her and thus she didn’t have an immediate comeback. I then followed that question up with a declaration: “Clearly, your faith in the American people seems to be a touch misguided.”
I do think there are good Americans out there and that many of them, like Professor Snyder, are bravely writing about what’s happening, making them something akin to heroes. I’ll have more to say about such types of people in a future blog.
I can’t believe I’m being dragged back into politics. But that is exactly what’s happening.
In 2015 I quit visiting all the political websites that had held my interest for many years. I stopped thinking about politics and discussing the topic with others.
2015 is also the year I left Egypt after living and working there for seven years. During that time, I was very political, at least from 2008 to 2014. In 2011, I witnessed the mass uprising against Hosni Mubarak and found myself swept away by the euphoria that followed his deposing. Then, two years later, during the month of July, I watched in horror as Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was overthrown in a military coup. Some very scary characters referred to it as a “second revolution,” but the more apt term was “counterrevolution.”
The counterrevolution crushed my spirit but not because I was a Morsi fan. I was devastated because I had seen how hard brave Egyptians had fought to free themselves. And I saw the sacrifices they’d made. Suddenly, though, they were right back at square one or even worse. The only way I could survive such devastation was to numb myself. So, I withdrew from politics and became apathetic, which takes me back to the point I was making about myself in the second paragraph.
I had a bit of a revival when Bernie Sanders decided to run for president. The old political juices began to flow again. From the moment he declared his candidacy, I felt the Bern. Eventually, he built an incredible following and I began to see a glass that was half full. Egypt had certainly lost its way but America, it seemed, was on the verge of finding its soul.
Then the Democratic Party machine decided that Hillary Clinton was somehow owed the nomination. Bernie was treated unfairly and his supporters were pushed aside. Many of us warned that Clinton was too compromised and therefore vulnerable. Too few listened to those warnings. Too many people were too certain about what they thought was a foregone conclusion. There were many ominous signs for those with the ability to see and read them. With Bernie out of the race and everyone saying Clinton was a shoo-in, I began to lose interest again.
But I never drifted entirely away. That weird sense of foreboding I felt wouldn’t let me turn completely off. The mood of the nation reinforced the sense of dread I felt. It seemed all too possible that something catastrophic might happen. And it did on November 8, 2016, a date that go down in infamy.
Now that the world as we’ve known it is in the process of vanishing, the old jump-up-on-a-soapbox Troy has reawakened.
I grew up during a period when Americans smugly believed that the nation and its people were somehow special—or exceptional. They watched as other countries fell apart or came under the influence of evil powers but felt that such things could never happen in the greatest country the world had ever seen. America would always remain the beacon. It would always set the model for others to follow.
But just look where we find ourselves now. Just look. Look long and hard. And while doing so, make sure not to turn your eyes away. Don’t delude yourself into believing that what you see isn’t as bad as many are suggesting.
The truth is, it’s every bit as bad as people are saying. We cannot know for sure how bad it may get, but it is already way beyond horrific.
I want to start by saying something that should be obvious to everyone: I’m the boss of this blog.
Oddly enough, even though I’m the owner and CEO of Thinker Boy, Inc., it wasn’t entirely obvious to me, though. My most recent posts, all of them personal reflections on my profession—I’m a teacher—had started to feel stale and I was growing bored while writing them. Still, I hadn’t turned away from the topic because I had promised to complete the project. Guess what? I’m going back on my word. I’m discontinuing the series of blogs I’d been calling “The Accidental Teacher.”
I blog a lot like I travel. When I go somewhere as a tourist, I never make a plan before arriving at my destination, nor do I carry a guidebook. I like to arrive in a state of naiveté, which assures that I’m going to be surprised as I roam around. When traveling like this, I wander upon an interesting spot, one I’d never expected to find in the first place, and stop to look for a while. When the time feels right, I turn my back and walk away.
I’m using this analogy to tell you that I’ve been looking at the topics of “education” and “my life as an educator” long enough. I’m now ready to stroll away from them and make new discoveries. I guess I could be a more focused writer if I were a more focused person. Part of the reason I’m unfocused is that I have so many interests. I’m all over the place and so is my blog.
One of my interests is American politics. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the competition between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. (FYI: The Republicans only interest me to the extent that their current crop of candidates are capable of disturbing my sleep by giving me nightmares. One of them in particular—I think you know which one I’m talking about—seems hellbent on causing the whole sane world to have really bad dreams.)
I’m a Sanders guy and I FEEL THE BERN every day of my life. If you want to follow my thoughts on the contest, go to my Twitter page and have a look.
My Egyptian wife and I live in San Antonio, Texas, and we are very active people. While moving around and through Texas’ second largest city, we see many streets with houses that have Bernie Sanders signs in their front yards. To date, I have not seen a single Hillary Clinton sign even though she won the Texas primary a while back. Who are these Clinton supporters and where are they? They sure seem like a shy bunch, at least in these parts.
Sanders is constantly calling for a revolution in America. By this, he means we need to revolutionize our thinking. Sanders, of course, would never ask others to do something that he hasn’t already done himself. If you want to see what he means by this sort of thinking, watch the video below—it’s the speech he gave at the Vatican—and you will certainly see a politician who has embraced the sort of progressive ideas that many would find revolutionary.
When was the last time you heard a candidate for president talk about the weak and downtrodden and argue that America’s profits-before-people economic system is “immoral” and even “unsustainable?” If you can’t hear the voice of saint—or a jewel of a politician—when Sanders speaks, you need to get your ears checked. You might want to check your ticker too—to make sure you haven’t become heartless.
We in the 99% are those who Sanders is looking out for and talked about in Rome. By running for president, he’s throwing us a lifeline and we need to be smart enough to grab it. If we don’t, we may find ourselves sinking to the bottom of the deep, blue sea.
Thinker Boy: Blog & Art 