Category: #TheResistance

WTF?

You’ll need a little context to get your bearings.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court Justice extraordinaire, died a couple of day ago.  It’s September 21, 2020.  In about six weeks, the US will have a presidential election.  On the ballot, we have insanity versus sanity.  We have fascism versus ho-hum normalcy.

I don’t get those who are undecided, who haven’t yet figured out that American democracy hangs in the balance.  Being undecided at this point is like having two plates put down on the table in front of you.  On one, the one on the left, there is a hamburger.  It looks pretty good.  Hamburgers may not be your favorite, but you’ve had them and they’re generally not bad, especially if they’ve got both mustard and mayonnaise and maybe a jalapeno slice or two.  On the other, there is a pile of dog shit that hasn’t aged very well.  You gag a little and pinch your nostrils closed because it’s less than an arm’s length away.  The undecided person sits looking at both plates and thinks, “Gosh, I’m not for sure.  I might have to end up flipping a coin.”

Pardon me if I sound a mite sarcastic and snarky.  I’m feeling somewhat sarcastic and snarky. If these two things haven’t taken total possession of you yet, you probably need to wake up because you’ve been napping.

I’ve got a million reasons to hate Trump and Trumpism.  It would take me two months to simply list out all my grievances here.  But I’d have to put one at the top of the list.  It’s that Trump, his followers, and his movement are a boisterous celebration of willful ignorance.  They will totally believe nonsense even if they know that it’s nonsense.  In fact, the more obviously nonsensical the belief—the more transparently false and irrational—the more proudly they cling to it and proclaim its truth.  It’s like they want everyone to know that, by God, they are stupid and proud of it too.  In the old days, in the days before this weirdness took hold here, people tried to hide the fact that they were stupid.  If, by chance, they said something that was utterly dumb, they might get embarrassed and blush.  The first principle of Trumpism is that saying stupid shit is cool, that public demonstrations of not knowing anything is enlightenment.  That even if one gets caught saying really questionable stuff and there’s taped evidence to prove it, that it didn’t really happen if the right person says it didn’t.  Just trying to describe how Trumpism works is hard as hell because it requires me to contemplate the possibility that words no longer have meaning as well as confront the potentiality that aliens have long been here, living among us and developing their own way of understanding and representing reality.

What does any of this mean?  How is a thinking person supposed to live in such a world?

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You can find a lot more of my writing here, and I have a business website here.

October 30, 2018

I lived in Egypt from 2008 to 2015.  That put me in the country during the 2011 Revolution.

After the Egyptians flexed their collective muscles, others, including the Americans, were inspired to follow suit.  (Everyone remembers the Occupy Wall Street movement, right?)  Activists squatted in Zuccotti Park just like the Cairenes had done in Tahrir Square.  Then the movement metastasized.

Eventually, though, the occupiers dispersed or underwent a metamorphosis.  (Energy of that sort never fully disappears.)

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Zuccotti Park and Tahrir Square.  And I’ve gained some insights about what happened in those places.  For example, I’ve come to see revolution as a metaphor. It is a kind of human flowering that occurs even during a drought.  Actually it occurs because there’s a drought.  That makes it very ironic.

Revolution is an ending.  It is a beginning too.

It can also be seen as an expression of that which can’t be fully expressed.

October 25, 2018

pumpkin scary halloween

I’m scared.  It’s mid-October, but my fear has nothing to do with the ghouls and goblins that normally occupy the human imagination this time of year.

Trump, politics, and the upcoming midterm elections have me shaking in my boots.  If you’re not scared about what’s happening in these dis-United States of America, you ain’t paying attention.  Pull your head out and open your eyes and ears.  If you do, you’ll certainly see and hear the rambling and wildly irrational speeches of a demagogue with an impressive comb over.  He’ll likely be surrounded by a throng of red-hatted septuagenarians with angrily contorted faces and raised fists.  Many who make up such a mob will likely be frothing at the mouth and hurling insults at a variety of scapegoats.  Their Great Leader encourages their ire and expertly directs their hatred.  He plays them like a musical instrument, but the sound produced lacks all beauty.

These screaming cultists simply need to be given marching orders.  The moment he sets them loose on the rest of us is the moment of the lighting of the fuse.

Not long ago, seeing where things were going, I made sure I knew where my passport was located.  And because I’m married to a North African émigré who practices the religion of Islam, I very quietly and without causing alarm, put together a Plan B just in case Plan A—staying in America—became, suddenly, unworkable.

I’ve lived in countries where things rapidly unraveled because of politics.  What I see happening now, in this “first-world” country, reminds me a lot of what went down in the “third-world” nation-state of Egypt during the run up to the deposing of Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

I know that might sound like hyperbole to many Americans who think IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE.  To those who feel this way I would say that IT’S ALREADY HAPPENING HERE.

For folks who are as concerned as I am and want to know what they should be doing to prepare for the Zombie Apocalypse, I leave them with this fantastic piece—an oldie but a goodie—by the brilliant Timothy Snyder.

 

Goodbye, Tony

anthony rip

I still find it hard to believe that Anthony Bourdain is gone.  On the morning of June 8th—not yet a month ago—I woke up, brewed myself a cup of Joe, looked at my Twitter feed, and saw that he’d used the belt from his bathrobe to hang himself in his hotel room in Kaysersberg, France.

I immediately Googled his name and started reading.  I needed to confirm that such a thing had really happened.  After looking at the internet for a few minutes, I turned on CNN and a variety of journalists—many of them just hearing about this and now teary-eyed—were talking about Bourdain’s life and his death.  Indeed, this horrifying news was true.

Anthony was one of the most decent people I’ve ever known.  I wrote “known” without consciously deciding to do so.  It is perfectly normal that I wrote it, though.  So many of us knew him.  He was our brother, our father, our son, our uncle, our best friend, the guy we could see ourselves hanging out with.  He was a fellow traveler.

It goes without saying that we are all travelers.  We are all on our way.  We are all wandering and looking for the right path.

While I was living abroad for nearly two decades—in Poland, the UAE, Turkey, and then Egypt—I only occasionally got to see Tony because I rarely looked at television in those faraway places.  But when I came home for vacation during the summertime, I watched, as regularly as the beat of a human heart, No Reservations and then Parts Unknown.  In Anthony, I saw myself.  He was the famous me.  Both of us traveled and explored.  His adventures made it to TV while mine didn’t.  This meant he spoke for me.  I turned on the TV to watch him tell my stories.  Thank you, Tony, for telling them even better than I could have.

Tony was an unapologetic internationalist and we will miss him for that too, especially now that so many Americans seem to be proudly proclaiming themselves “America First!” ultra-nationalists.  (Every time I hear America first, I can’t help but think “Deutscheland uber alles!”)

By the way, blessed be the internationalists because they promote a message of peace and mutual respect.

If you ever watched Tony on television, you know he had a really good time when he was out and about, but he also carried an enormous responsibility.  He explained other countries and the peoples who live in them to a nation of individuals many of whom don’t own passports.  This made him a teacher who didn’t lecture or draw up lesson plans.  In other words, he taught without teaching and he preached without preaching.  And we all sat raptly listening and learning and were converted.

So, Tony, I end this by simply saying goodbye.  I will miss you, and this nation and the world will miss you too, especially now.

 

 

 

Building Bridges

building bridges

I met my wife, Azza, when I was employed by the American University in Cairo as an Instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition, a position I held for seven years.

When Azza and I started going out, she owned a successful catering and food vending business in Cairo.  She’d been trained by an Italian chef named Samantha.  As soon as Azza became proficient in the kitchen, the two of them started making money together, and eventually Azza went “rogue,” breaking away from her mentor to open Azza’s Italian Kitchen, a one-woman operation that helped her earn some really good dough.

In 2015, I left Egypt, bringing Azza with me to the United States.  After a month or so of looking for work, I landed a position in San Antonio, Texas, my birthplace and a city with a cool, international vibe.

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Less than a month ago, after scheming and dreaming and filling out scads of paperwork, Azza opened up a home bakery—Zoozoo’s Sweet Treats (and More)—in accordance with the Cottage Food Industry laws of the state of Texas.  During the intervening weeks, we have done a few events and have made a pretty good start to her little kitchen enterprise.

Last Saturday, we sold Azza’s baked goods at a first-Saturday-of-every-month farmer’s market that had sprouted up in the parking lot of Marbach Christian Church, located on Marbach Road in southwest San Antonio.  We threw our tent up in the middle of a huddle of other tents and then covered a couple of tables with delicious, homemade edibles.  Right next to us, Ayse, our Turkish friend and a neighbor, sold some of her paintings and a few lovely ceramics that had come over with her from Istanbul.

During the course of the day, the church’s pastor, a fifty-something fellow named Darnell with a greying beard, came over to welcome us to the market and then chat.  He was a loquacious fellow with a bass laugh that came directly from his core.  He told us about the halfway house—he pointed at it across the street—that his church was sponsoring.  Then he told us about all the other initiatives—for instance, he acquired and repaired old bicycles for those in the area with no other form of transportation—he and his parishioners were involved in.

My wife and Ayse are both practitioners of Islam.  Ayse quite conspicuously covers her hair with a hijab, so the pastor, quite surprisingly, greeted her with a “hamdullah,” an Arabic word that means “thank God.”  A more appropriate greeting would have been “Salaam Ahlaykum,” but we were all thrilled that he’d even made the attempt and were surprised that he knew as much Arabic as he did.

When I told him that Azza was also Muslim but that she didn’t cover her hair, he seemed a touch baffled.  “So why do Muslim women cover their hair anyway?” he wondered.  Then he followed that up with, “And why does one woman choose to do so and another one not?”

We explained that it was all personal preference and that the idea that all Muslim women were required to wear the hijab was a misunderstanding of Islam and its precepts.  It was an example of a misconception that many have about the religion.

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As you might guess from what I wrote earlier, Pastor Darnell is a busy man, so one thing and then another kept pulling him away from our tent; however, after tending to whatever needed looking after, he always came back to where we’d set up shop, and we eventually invited him to pull up a chair and spend the day with us which he ended up doing.

One of my favorite pastimes these past several years has been educating Americans about the Middle East—I lived in the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Egypt for about a decade and a half—and the predominant religion of the region.  Given the current climate in America, where fear of “the other” is being used for political purposes, this pastime has become a vital mission.

After learning that I am a published writer and interested in the arts, Darnell started presenting ideas about projects he and I might collaborate on.  For example, he wanted to know if I would like to help him organize poetry readings.  For another, he asked me if I’d like to help him edit some of his writings.

All these ideas sounded interesting, but they prompted me to make a proposal of my own.  I told him that I thought we ought to organize a kind of “mixer” that would bring Muslims and Christians together for the purpose of building interfaith bridges.

He liked the idea a lot and we exchanged telephone numbers.  In my mind’s eye, I can even see Azza and I doing a little presentation on Arabs, Islam, and Muslims at his church.

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The idea of bringing people together during the Age of Trump excites me and fills me with hope.  Speaking of hope, I think everyone should check this out as a way of becoming a bit more informed and enlightened.

Strange Fruit

strange fruit

I am married to a Muslim woman from Africa.  One of my closest friends is a gay man who was born and raised in a small town in flyover country.  I am an avowed socialist.

Question:  What do I have in common with my wife and good friend?  Answer:  We are all outliers.  There is something about each one of us that is “abnormal.”

I’m not the sort of person who feels comfortable thinking in this way.  What, after all, is “normal”?  Even using the word, to describe myself and others, is troubling.  I don’t think about “normality” when I think of human beings.

Suddenly, though, America is changing.  Islamophobia, homophobia, and hatred of “liberals” is on the rise in many quarters.  So, even if I don’t like labeling folks, there are plenty of my compatriots who have no problem doing so and then shunning (or worse) those they think of as foreign, deviant, or un-American.

That and the country is certainly more divided than I ever remember it being.  I keep hearing pundits say that “tribalism” and “tribal” thinking is on the rise.  Actually, tribal thinking is really an oxymoron.  Tribalism and primitivism are the ultimate knee-jerks and have almost nothing to do with sober consideration or rationality.  Primitivism is a celebration of some mythic past, some simpler time, a time that never truly existed except in the imagination.  (When I hear radical Trump supporters say that they “want their country back,” I think I’m hearing a kind of primordial wail by those who believe in fairytales.)  I also think of snowflakes and those who suffer from some form of persecution complex.

Trumpism is really an interesting mix of primitivism, nativism, and fascism.  Too many pundits use the terms “populism” and “populists” when they describe the movement and its adherents.  Populism is a euphemism.  Populism sounds innocuous, and the reason many use it is because they are afraid to admit that there is a large fascist movement afoot in America and elsewhere.  By referring to fascism as populism, we feel more assured that there is no monster lurking under the bed.  The use of populism is us sticking our heads in the sand.  It’s our way of whistling past the graveyard.

Not long ago I asked my gay friend if he was ever afraid.  His answer went something like this.  I used to not be, but now I don’t know.

Could gays ever be scapegoated?  Well, we have seen scapegoating in the past, haven’t we?  We’ve seen genocide in the past, haven’t we?  We’ve seen lynching and cross-burning and bombing.  We’ve seen almost everything in the past, haven’t we?

For those who think such horrid things couldn’t happen here, I’d like to remind them that this sort of ugliness has already happened right here.  Just Google “lynchings” and then click on the “image” link.  It would also help if such skeptics went to the nearest bookstore or library and checked out Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, penned in 1935.

Read the novel and then turn on the TV.  Watch for a day or two and then get back to me.

 

The Total Unfairness of Conservative Thinking

albright

In my last blog I wrote about a Twitter exchanged I had with @SamGipp, a Baptist “preacher” who thinks that it is his Christian duty to hate Muslims, political progressives, gays, lesbians, immigrants, and “perverts”—a catchall phrase he likes to use to describe anyone who doesn’t look like him or live like he does.  He would not use this word to describe a president who gets off on stomping on the downtrodden or having sex with porn stars or grabbing women by their pussies or participating in extramarital affairs.

Sam Gipp lives in a very twisted world and practices a very twisted logic.  According to his way of thinking, Republicans cannot be perverts, no matter what sort of behavior they engage in.  It’s only political progressives who are capable of perversion.  If I think about his reasoning for a moment, I see that the idea of perversion is not tied to the sort of acts or behavior a person engages in; instead, it’s about who it is that is acting.  If a political conservative engages in sexually predatory behavior, then such behavior is acceptable because of the perpetrator’s political affiliation.  As we all know, conservatives are godly people and thus incapable of behaving wrongly.  Godliness, therefore, nullifies the predation.  This is circular reasoning at its finest.

On the other hand, if a progressive acts predatorily, then no one should be surprised because liberals are just inherently sinful people.  In other words, political conservatives can do no wrong because they are children of god, and even if they do stray away from the straight and narrow, it’s just because the devil made them do so.  Progressives, on the other hand, can do no right because they are devils themselves.  Because liberals are inherently evil, everything they do becomes sinful.

Politicized evangelicals of Sam Gipp’s sort have really shown, in a multitude of ways, that the Bible has become subordinate to the Gospel of Conservatism.  And in the age of Trump, the Gospel of Conservativism looks frightening like the Gospel of Authoritarianism or The Gospel of Fascism.

By the way, Madeleine Albright, a woman who knows something about politics, international relations, and fascism, has just written a Book entitled Fascism:  A Warning.  When asked, in a recent televised interview who she was trying to warn, she spoke up very clearly and said, “Americans.”

Gipp, the asshole, has been tweeting again and he’s really got my dander up this time.  He sent out an obnoxious and hateful tweet about Muslims.  The gist of his posting is there is no such thing as a peaceful Muslim and that they should be wiped off the face of the earth.

Does he really think that Jesus would be in favor of his followers committing genocide?  I’d like to ask Gipp where, in “The Good Book,” genocide is advocated.

Being married to an extraordinarily kind Muslim and having lived among them for approximately fifteen years, I responded to Gipp by tweeting, in effect, that his hatefulness would help him find his way to the front of the line of those being ushered into hell.

I know this was harsh, but sometimes harshness must be met with harshness.

He then responded by telling me that unless I had nail holes in my hands and feet, I had no business telling him who would, and who would not, be going to hell.

I responded by asking him to show me his nail holes—I actually asked him to post photos of them.  I said that since he always seemed to pass judgment on others and thus enjoyed playing at being god, he surely had the marks of Christ on his body.

It’s been two days now and he hasn’t responded.  I think it’s because the cat’s got his tongue.

 

Weirdness of the Weirdest Sort (Or on Being a Trump Supporter)

clown

I really want to remain civil.  I really do.  I try hard.  But in this age of Trump, an era when so many celebrate irrationality, it’s hard to be patient and humane.

I am on Twitter.  I like tweeting but probably not as much as your average sparrow does on a typical day.  I certainly don’t tweet as much as America’s douchebag president does.  (By the way, that’s probably a first for me; I don’t ever remember using the word “douchebag” in anything I’ve ever written.)  I do have one rule of thumb while on Twitter:  I try to send out things that are not stupid or nonsensical.  This puts me automatically at odds with Trump.  He seemingly prefers to tweet dumb and absurd things.  I recently heard Eugene Robinson, well-known columnist at The Washington Post, say that Trump is certainly venal and probably senile.  That sounds about right.

Lately, I’ve gotten my back up against the evangelicals.  Many claim to be supporters of an immoral and sadistic president while simultaneously (and piously) referring to themselves as “children of God” or Christians.  At least they’ve got the “child” part right.  Many are childish, and they see Trump as their “daddy,” the one who’s going to protect them against everything and anything that’s scary (think caravans of scary foreigners coming to America).  The question is, who’s going to guard them against daddy.  Being children, it’s likely they haven’t gotten that far in their thinking.

When I was a boy and going to church, I naively thought that a person was automatically good because he or she would spend a few hours each week warming a pew in some house of worship.  Now that I’m a man, I realize that some of the very worst people warm pews on Sundays.

All this has been a roundabout way to mention that I recently ran across this Baptist preacher who tweets some of the most bigoted, ludicrous, and dishonest stuff you can imagine.  His Twitter handle is @SamGipp.  In a recent tweet he misquoted George Washington as saying, “When government takes away citizens’ right to bear arms, it becomes citizens’ duty to take away government’s right to govern.”  I thought that sounded weird—like some kind of NRA slogan—so I looked it up and found that the authenticity of the quote had been disproved.  I pointed this out to Gipp, and after doing so, even more people who’d seen his tweet began to like and retweet it.

gipp false quote of washington

This is just plain old weirdness of the weirdest sort.  It’s odd that adults, when presented with evidence that contradicts something they believe in, would continue to cling to that which was clearly shown to be crap.

Perhaps it’s a new form of derangement, some kind of Trump Syndrome?

Unfortunately, I Give a F*ck

On Saturday and Sunday mornings, I rise and shine quite early, get myself dressed, usually donning shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, and drive over to a Barnes and Noble, the one located just off 410 and across from North Star Mall in San Antonio.  I do this to meet a Venezuela woman who wants to develop her conversational skills in English.  When we first started working together, she was pretty cryptic when I asked her what she was doing in Texas.  She said things about visiting family and wanting to be a tourist.  Slowly, she began to open up, and I’m now convinced—though she’s never openly said so—that she’s trying to leave her home country because of the chaos there.  I guess she thinks the political and economic situation in the US is better.

Of course, I frequently remind her that America is being led by one Donald J. Trump, Russian agent and head of a crime syndicate, as a way of subtly reminding her that she might want to think things through before making any rash relocation plans.

As usual, it’s taking me forever to get to my main subject.  I’m really hoping to blog about a book that I saw while working with my Venezuelan friend this morning.  It was shelved directly in front of the table we were sitting at.  Its title—one of the best I’ve seen adorning the cover of any book in recent memory—The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck:  A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life— immediately grabbed my attention.

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As soon as my English lesson ended and my student had taken off, I walked over to the shelf and got a closer look.  I saw that it was written by Mark Manson.  I picked it up, opened up to the first page, and saw a reference to Charles Bukowski.  (The author immediately scored bonus points with me.)  I then turned it over and saw that it was selling for $24.99.  Because I am a cheapskate by nature, I decided I’d see if I could find it at any of the libraries I have access to.  Free, in my way of thinking, is always preferable to $24.99.

bn 2

This is certainly a book I very desperately need to read.  For almost my entire life—I did have a brief “bad boy” phase that doesn’t count—I’ve given too much of a f*ck.  From just about the moment I exited my mother’s womb, people have used words like “conscientious,” “responsible,” and “meticulous” when describing me.  Of course, these aren’t necessarily bad things, but when taken to the extreme, such attributes can turn one into a neurotic perfectionist who obsesses about everything.  Such a person wakes up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat because the water bill is due in less than five hours and the possibility that the online payment might not be processed in time fills him with existential dread.

Such a person is me.  That’s yours truly in a nutshell.

 

 

 

A Third-Rate President

 

were n egypt
In Wadi Gedid, Egypt

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.