Procrastinet

Amman, Jordan - 12/5/04: Cab Driver Wisdom

filed under: Despatches

A continuing series of periodic Procrastinet Despatches from Amman, Jordan. By Nicholas Seeley.

I had one of those exciting Jordanian cab drivers on the way home from work today – the kind that puts both hands on the middle of the wheel (‘cuz he’s got an automatic!) and just spins it like a top as he weaves through traffic.

The condition of traffic in this country has totally improved in the last four years, I have to say – the last time I was here, it was a free for all. Now, there are lanes on the road, and some people even use them. Folks slow down sometimes; and occasionally look before seizing the right-of-way. Trust me, this is progress.

The biggest danger now is what you hear in the cab.

I had a driver last week, I guess he thought he was the Jordanian version of a paisan – at least, he had family in New Jersey. He wore a leather jacket, and stared at girls in passing cars, and had a real expensive phone. He seemed to know about ten words of English, the primary one being “nigger”:

“Have been to Canada. Canada nice – no niggras; no bang bang,” he said as we sped along. He mimes shooting something with his finger. “Cop stupid,” he says, as we pass one; then he nearly hits another car while staring at a chick.

“Have… family… Batterson, New Jersey,” he continued. It figures. In Patterson that’s just the way it goes.

I wish this fucker toxic waste. But at least I don’t feel the moral obligation to argue with him. What would I say? We have no common language to discuss slavery and coercion, the pillage of nations and legacies of hatred.

Two nights ago it was different. My driver was a sweet-looking, fiftyish man in a tan and red sweater, with a neatly clipped little grey beard. It was no surprise when I learned he was a former primary school science teacher. His English was better than most.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“America,” I said, and he gave the predictable response:

“You are welcome, America.” They all say that. But then, since his English was a little better than most, he added, “You are welcome, but not Bush.”

I said I hadn’t voted for Bush. I didn’t elaborate. But he was off and running.

“America is a very good country,” he said, “But…”

He was Palestinian, of course. About 60 percent of Jordan’s population is Palestinian, and almost all of them want to tell you this story.

“Sharon stole my home -- he stole it once in ’48, and again in ’67. He killed my friends, our children, he killed my grandfather. When can we go back home? We have tried everything, to make them let us come back. We have tried violence. We have tried peace. Nothing.”

This talk of violence makes me a little nervous, but he has a point. And it’s not as if he’s actually saying he wants to blow stuff up. I guess. But he doesn’t sense my reluctance to follow him down this rabbit hole, and just digs in deeper.

“We have a saying about Bush, here –that he has only one eye. Yes, he only sees one side! He has one eye, and one half a body, and one half a brain. The other half is Sharon. And Bush – all the men who surround him, they are Jewish! Yes! Sharon holds his mouth, his eyes, his brain.”

And here, here it really is. Because what the fuck do I say?

No. They’re not. Condi isn’t. I don’t know Rove’s religion, but I’d bet he’s protestant. Ridge? Powell? Christine Todd Whitman? Ashcroft and Gonzalez sure as fuck aren’t. Dick Cheney? Definitely not a Jew.

But how do you have this argument with a man who’s been driven out of his home? How do you tell someone who’s seen his home bulldozed that he needs to be a little more critical of the news he reads. What’s Arabic for “don’t believe every piece of crap you hear on the street?”

This man is a schoolteacher, but still he’s under-educated. He’s under-informed. It’s understandable - when someone really is out to get you, it can be hard to draw fine distinctions about who that someone is. Conflict stifles critical thinking, and it’s easy to fall prey to the belief that anyone who doesn’t agree with you is just on the side of your oppressors.

But you’ll be WRONG, just like my cab driver is wrong. Elders of Zion? Gimme a break.

Hell, if you look at evidence, there’s a LOT more that links Bush to the Saudis then there is linking him to the Israeli government. And plenty on the books to indicate Bush’s flirtation with Sharon is just that, a few drinks to get America’s powerful Zionist lobby in bed with his Evangelical Christian Millennialist agenda.

In fact, if you look back a few years, before that particular unholy alliance got forged, you’ll notice that a lot of Bush’s crew were clean cut American anti-semites, the kind who went around bitching about how America was controlled by “liberal elites” -- meaning people who used words like “mitzvah.”

The neocons can’t really grok “mitzvah.” It’s just beyond them.

You can debate forever what Bush really is - there’s just as much evidence that points to him just being an opportunist, supporting anything that will put money in the pockets of his base (the have-mores). There’s just as much evidence that he really is just a deluded little boy with a messiah complex, who’s never been denied anything, and never grown out of the fantasy that you could just conquer the world and make everyone behave (remember, Bush was a kid when Israel was still seen by many as the Holy Grail of western civilization, an idealized utopian planned state. There’s evidence to support that he’s a pawn in the hands of a group of realpoliticking Kissinger disciples trying to control the world’s resources.

The fact is, none of these theories explaining our idiot president is likely to be true in its entirety. Bits of each may well be true. Bush probably does have a messiah complex, which allows him to be easily manipulated by the realpolitickers. Or something like that.

It’s worth remembering that the world we experience isn’t real in any essential sense; it’s just a construct, pieced together from all the data we have available to us. So reality is a fragile thing – bad information literally deforms our world; it distorts everything around us, everything we see and hear, and when we perceive these twisted forms as truth, the distortion spreads.

Lies are a virus. I want to say this to my cabbie, but of course I don’t. Be critical, I want to say, think about where this stuff is coming from. Think about who benefits if you believe this.

Open your eyes, I want to say: the truth is so much worse than anything you can imagine.

- Nicholas Seeley, 12/5/04

Posted by rjt at December 7, 2004 12:07 PM