Procrastinet

Costa Rica, Day 1 - 3/15/06: Settling In

[For those who tune into Procrastinet's Despatches exclusively for Nick's notes from Amman - stay tuned, hopefully there will be more soon. In the meantime, I'm hijacking the category for our travel notes from Costa Rica. Hope you like 'em!]

The alarm went off at 2:00 a.m.

I dimly remember, when I was a child, having to get up early for special events – field trips, vacations, whatever – and being able to ride the adrenaline and come shooting out of bed.

That still works. But much more slowly.

By about 2:30 we were fully awake, with bags sitting by the door, ready to wake up Max and get on our way. “Okay, family,” I cried, “let’s go to Costa Rica!” Max was a trooper – he’d already gotten five and a half hours of sleep at that point, and has been hyped about the trip for months (“Where we going in March, buddy?” “Costa WEEKA!”)

There’s no traffic on Ocean Avenue at 2:45 a.m., so we made good time towards JFK. The turnoff for the Belt Parkway isn’t clearly marked, so we got a little lost for a moment. Still in Brooklyn and already getting lost: a bad sign that I didn’t have the foresight to notice.

It was the kind of cold that gives you an ice cream headache walking to the AirTrain in the long term parking lot. New York was making sure we didn’t mind leaving.

Check in went smoothly, as did security. We got to our gate at 4:00 a.m. for our 5:15 flight. We were flying LACSA, the Costa Rican part of Grupo Taca airlines. It was great – good legroom, nice flight attendants, and excellent coffee.

We landed fifteen minutes early. Bravo LACSA!

Customs and immigration was easy, and we quickly found ourselves blinking into the stuffy hot Costa Rican morning. A helpful guy who looked like a biker and who had no formal affiliation with the airport pointed us to our car rental shuttle contact, and didn’t try to shake us down in any way. The car rental shuttle guy was an outrageously good looking man, who asked if we spoke Espanol. I said we didn’t.

Lisa later pointed out that she, in fact, does – some – and accused me of not wanting her to talk to the hot Latino. She may have a point. But mostly, I was trying to work through the discomfort of being somewhere I don’t speak the language – in case you didn’t notice, I like to talk. I had crammed with the phrase book on the flight down, but two hours of reading doesn’t engender much fluency.

Even so, maybe because Spanish is so like French, and maybe just because I’m stubborn and arrogant, I kept feeling like I should be able to speak Spanish, and therefore kept trying to be the one who talked for us throughout the trip. I met with mixed success.

We rented our car, a Daihatsu Terios. I’m convinced “Terios” is Japanese for “rollerskate.” It’s the smallest car in the world (in Jeremy Clarkson’s typically hilarious review, he claims he once misplaced his under a leaf), and we discovered on our first speed bump that, to save money, the engineers cleverly eliminated the suspension, instead welding the axles directly to the chassis.

My cousin Joe said that in his experience with Costa Rica, everyone will give you excellent, detailed, easy to follow directions and then leave out one absolutely vital piece of information. Like: “Go until you see a gas station, then turn left. Exactly five hundred meters later, take the first right at the corner with the grocery store. Seven hundred meters after that, make a left just past the big red building. Then turn right and you’re there.” And later it will turn out that the last right turn was after thirty-seven minutes, down a dirt road, hidden between two bushes with a cow standing across it.

So we missed our turn and ended up farther into downtown San Jose than we were supposed to be. Luckily, San Jose is laid out on a grid, with numbered Avenidas running East/West and numbered Calles running North/South, with Avenida Central and Calle Central as the x/y axis down the middle. Even numbered Avenidas are south of Central, odds north. Even numbered Calles are west of Central, odds east. Pretty straightforward.

Or would be, if any of the streets had street signs. Some do – but only once every four or five streets, and usually the size of a postage stamp, mounted high up on the side of a building, under a helpful awning or poster.

When we figured out we were at Avenida 10 and Calle 10, the passing similarity to NYC helped me get my bearings. “Oh,” I said, “we’re at 10th and 10th.” Somehow everything seemed easier after that.

We checked in at the Radisson, just north of downtown and hopped in a cab to go get lunch ($2 for an eight minute ride). From a brief perusal of the travel books, I was under the impression that Avenida Central, which is pedestrians-only in the middle of town, was the same thing as Mercado Central, the Central Market, which was supposed to be pretty nifty and full of fruit stands and tchotchke shops and food stands.

So I was confused when we got off at the Plaza de la Cultura and found Avenida Central to look mostly like Fulton Street at lunchtime – people wandering aimlessly among discount clothing stores.

Of course, Fulton Street rarely has giant puppets frightening children or loafing around on benches:

We had heard that you could get along on US$ if you had enough smaller bills, but we decided we were more comfortable with colones. I was under the (correct) impression that you could use a US bank card at any ATM and withdraw in the local currency. So I found a Banc Nacional ATM cluster and put in my card. All was well: it asked me if I wanted English or Spanish. I chose English, and it went on – speaking in Spanish.

It asked me how much money I wanted, in “multiples of 1,000 colones” (this was in Spanish). So when I went to type in 50,000 ($100), didn’t know if I was asking for 50,000 colones or 50,000 x 1,000. I was very nervous. I needn’t have worried – the machine, and three more in the same kiosk, rejected my request time after time.

We had one $100 bill, so I changed that at a cambio booth.

At Avenida Central and Calle 6, we found the actual Mercado Central – a big, warehouse-y building with a narrow warren of stalls and food stands:

Restaurante Be-Du looked like a tiny, enclosed diner, with waitresses and booths, so we picked it and sat down:

The waitress came by and left us little pieces of paper with the menu items pre-printed next to check boxes. At first I thought we were supposed to fill them out ourselves, like a supply requisition – but it became clear that these were, in fact, the menus. When she made our way back to us, we managed to order, despite several moments where she lectured us in Spanish and we had to sort of smile and nod and hope we hadn’t just agreed to something awful.

It’s my theory that the absolutely best approach to a new city, especially in a new country, is to get as quickly as possible to someplace that serves food – it doesn’t matter where, or how nice – and order some, and then sit tight, look around, catch your breath, and take it all in. The tension of finding your way through an unfamiliar menu and ordering in an unfamiliar language (or accent) eases instantly into a huge rush of well-being, the euphoria of being somewhere and experiencing something entirely new. I’m convinced you have to be sitting down, with food on the way and, for the moment, nowhere to go, to experience it fully.

We had been warned that standard Costa Rican fare consists largely of rice and beans – we hadn’t been warned that it also provides massive plates of extremely tasty food for practically nothing. Lisa’s plate of the day included rice, beans, chicken, shredded cabbage, friend plantains and fresh fruit juice – for $2. My olle carne was a big slab of cow with rice, beans, a masterfully fatty golden soup, and every root vegetable known to man – some of them plainly inedible (like the potato-like beasts that were mostly gray as if fungal) but many of them delicious. Squash, yucca, whatever – they were great. Liberally slathered with salsa lizano, the omnipresent local Tabasco-substitute, it was simply fantastic.

It was also $2. In fact, if I hadn’t ordered us a fruit salad while thinking I was ordering a fruit drink (remember what I said about insisting on doing the talking without any Spanish?), we would have stuffed ourselves for less than $8.

Max knocked out in his stroller, and we wandered Avenida Central aimlessly until he woke up, had some helado at Pop’s (best coffee shake EVER), and witnessed the mugging of an African explorer by Zulu tribesmen, who then handed out Hellman’s Mayo. Strange.

We took a cab back to the hotel, the jolly cab driver bantering with us in Spanish about the “Gran Mama” whose medal he kept on his dash, and helpfully pointing out the midget we walked past (“Esta hombre es mas poco!” he shouted with delight).

Procrastimom joined us at the hotel, and we killed some time before heading out to dinner at Café Mundo, a Fodor’s choice which sounded lovely and was within ten blocks, with – said the guidebook – on site parking. Of course, I got us lost leaving the hotel, and then we couldn’t quite decipher the map and went around the block about ten times before we found it. Even then, there was no parking in evidence, so we parked on the street (a San Jose no-no) within view of the bouncer/hosts at the front of the restaurant.

Café Mundo is one of the most beautiful restaurants I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, the food was somewhere in quality between Friday’s and a really good wedding hall – edible, but mass-produced and generic. It was populated mostly with tourists, clearly on the Fodor’s say-so, and we were put in a side room with another American family with a 2 ½ year old. Lucky waitress. Max knocked out on the big bench seat within ten minutes anyway.

Mediocre food, to be sure, but the drinks were strong and cheap, the prices were good, and the front patio and inside dining rooms were hauntingly beautiful. Not a bad evening, overall.

Back at the hotel we dumped Max unceremoniously in his crib (which he took to just fine, despite having been in a “big boy bed” at home for six months) and passed out at about 9 pm, to recharge for our big tourist day – Day 2 – which was slated to start with a 6:00 a.m. wake up call.

All we’d seen were the mountains from the air, and the cramped, poorly marked streets of downtown San Jose. But it was already clear we were going to like Costa Rica very, very much.

Amman, Jordan - 12/6/05: Suicide Girls

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

And the award for worst reporting goes to… Craig Smith, of the New York Times, for his piece on the ugly death of Muriel Degauque, the Belgian suicide bomber. (I know, I know -- I should wait to hand these out until the end of the month, at least, but I just get too excited.)

You’ve probably all heard the basics by now: Degauque, born in a crappy coal mining town in Belgium, spent most of her life un- or under-employed, bouncing back and forth between motorcycle gangs and a series of crappy men, until she finally met one who killed her. This may be the oldest sob story in the book (think Lilith).

But check out how the papers cover it. I was first introduced to the unfortunate Ms. Degauque from two articles, one in the Guardian, the other in the New York Times. Now, the Guardian piece (link below) is not going to win any Pulitzers either – it’s pretty uninspired, a basic who-what-where, with a touch of tear-jerking family commentary thrown in.

But I was completely blown away by how the Times spun this little yarn:

But her story supports fears among many law enforcement officials and academics that converts to Europe's fastest-growing religion could bring with them a disturbing new aspect in the war on terror: Caucasian women committed to one of the world's deadliest causes. European women who marry Muslim men are now the largest source of religious conversions in Europe, the experts say.

Or, in this rough translation:

Git out yer shotguns, boys, them darkies is comin’ fer our wimmin!

The article, of course, leads with a big photo of Miss Degauque – after all, she’s pretty and white, a perfect symbol for what our “enemies” are destroying. It then goes on to crown her “the first European Muslim woman to stage a suicide attack,” which, I suppose, is true, if you conveniently leave Russia, the Caucasus and the Balkans out of “Europe.”

(It may actually be true, since it’s possible that the female suicide bombers and kidnappers in Russia came from somewhere else; still, it seems a bit early to be crowning this girl Miss Jihad, n’est-ce pas?)

And the article goes on, punching up the “white girls marrying scary dark men” angle, drawing comparison to the “waves” of women who went south in the ‘60’s and ‘70s to have torrid affairs with South American guerrillas, or went to Afghanistan in the ‘80s. What is this paranoia white guys have with their women running off with colored guys? Insecure much?

And still, on we cruise with Mr. Smith, re-inventing the white racist rally cry of the civil rights era for a new generation:

But her devotion became disturbing several years later after she met and married Issam Goris, the son of a Belgian man and Moroccan woman. Mr. Goris with his long beard was already known to Belgian Police as a radical Islamist.

Because we all know, the beard makes the jihadi.

What’s really sad is that, based on the details he brings in, it looks like Mr. Smith has his finger hovering right over the real point of all this, but he invariably avoids it in favor of racist rhetoric.

Smith points out that Degauque “had some trouble at home, but no more than many teenage girls.” Huh? She dropped out of high school to join a motorcycle gang, and picked up a drug habit! That’s not exactly normal… well, perhaps it is, in the sense that it happens a lot, and it almost never ends well. Smith consistently underplays Degauque’s rebellion whenever it doesn’t relate to Islam, but the Guardian provides more details.

Because what Mr. Smith, and the rest of America, don’t want to look at is the fact that, based on the details available to me, Muriel Degauque’s story is very, very similar to that of lots, and lots of other terrorists, regardless of gender or ethnicity. Unemployment, hopelessness, a lack of opportunities, a lack of meaningful skills that make you feel like you have a place in the world.

I have friends from Zarqa who remember Abu Musab Al Zarqawi from way back - back before he was this big terrorist, and public enemy number one, when he was just a knife wielding thug who cut people’s faces up for fun, and got arrested every week. And he wasn’t religious at all. Hmmm. Sounds like he had some problems of his own, way before Islamism.

So why doesn’t Mr. Smith mention Zarqawi? Or Chechen or Palestinian female suicide bombers? Or Mohamed Bouyeri, who killed Theo Van Gogh?

And why doesn’t he mention the thousand other horrible things that can happen to little white girls who get lost in the woods? Why doesn’t he mention Jonestown, or Waco, which were full of girls like Degauque? (why has no one noticed how similar jihadism is to Christian cult ideology in general, for that matter?)

The only answer I can see is that he wants to make the villain of the piece Islam, and in particular, Muslim men, because these villains are much easier to hate and fear than things like poverty, despair and ignorance.

The reason why Muriel Degauque’s story ended the way it did is something we will never know. What made her turn to Islam (or, I should say, a perverted Islamic cult) rather than to evangelical Christianity, or heroin, or suicide, or self abuse with cutting tools? The answer to that probably lies in some combination of opportunity, and in the specific set of experiences and beliefs that made Muriel Degauque an individual.

And that’s it, in the end, isn’t it? The New York Times would like to tell you that Islam killed this girl, and the five policemen who died with her. Or, they’ll say, her husband killed her, or Zarqawi killed her, or bin Laden's ideology killed her. But that’s all grade A bullshit. Muriel Degauque killed herself, and five other people.

Guardian Article

Times Article

- Nicholas Seeley, 12/6/05

Amman, Jordan - 12/2/05: Afterburn - the Month in Review

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

Ages ago, I promised you all further updates on the bombings, and I haven’t really delivered. In my defense, there hasn’t been much to deliver. Or maybe there’s been a lot, I don’t know.

In the days after the bombing, Jordan saw a sudden eruption of nationalism, strangely reminiscent of the United States in September, 2001. The King’s face, of course, was already a commonplace, as it is in most monarchies, but suddenly, the flag was everywhere. People had five or six of them on their cars – often obscuring windows, but then again, no one watches the road here anyway; huge flags appeared on the fronts of offices and in shop windows, and giant posters of this rather scary national socialist looking cartoon were everywhere.

And, like September in New York, it was at once reassuring and unsettling. People rallying together is good, but nationalism is like sugar: a little more than a little is a lot too much. One of my friends here described it as the hollow, bleating patriotism of people with no actual power to redress their wrongs. He’s a bit of a psycho, but hey, when the shoe fits.

Just after the attacks, there was a lot of chatter from people who feared a backlash against Iraqis in Jordan, but I don’t think it’s happened. Or rather, prejudice against Iraqis was already there, (based on them pouring money into the economy and raising prices way over the heads of most Jordanians) so a little bit of terrorism hasn’t made it much worse.

Half the government got thrown out, which probably didn’t have anything to do with the bombings – the King throws out the government here about four times a year, and there were rumors a new one was coming long before Nov. 9. What almost certainly IS because of the attacks was the shift of Marouf Al Bakhit, a career general and former ambassador to Israel, from the head of the secret police to the Prime Ministry.

Bakhit took over the mukhabarat on Nov. 14, the same time everyone else got thrown out, replacing longtime Blofeld Sami Khair. But then, a few days later, the King designated him PM (leaving a certain amount of uncertainty in my mind about who is now actually running the secret police. In theory there’s an interim head, but I have frightening visions of the stormtroopers being commanded out of the PM’s office).

Anyway, all this MIGHT have a serious impact on how Jordan reacts to these attacks. In a nutshell: The government here has been using reform and democratization as their mantra for years; pretty much since Hussein died in 1999. However, there has been about zero actual reform: the press is still not free, the King is never openly criticized, the only political parties are the mosques because they’re the one thing the government can’t shut down, union-busting is still a preferred Sunday pastime, the economic boom from the Iraq war remains unregulated and there is no trickle down of benefits to the poorest sectors of society, etc. The massive National Agenda, supposedly the blueprint for reform, has been shuttled back and forth interminably among the desk jockeys, and gotten nowhere, and it doesn’t have much popular legitimacy anyway (the best analyses of all this crap are probably on Abu Aardvark and Khalaf’s blog).

So, basically, a lot of people fear that a military PM means that the “reform” craze is now officially over, and total autocracy is the new black. Others say that that doesn’t mean a damn thing, since reform never happened anyway. Then there are others who say Bakhit is actually a wicked sensitive chap, and might just have the balls to do what the liberals want, and try to use economic and political reform to fight terror by giving people jobs, free speech and a little hope, rather than just repressing them.

I find this unlikely, less because I doubt Bakhit’s credentials than because it has never happened ever in the entire history of the human race.

End the world’s problems by giving everyone a voice and a chance for a decent life? Dream on folks, that only happens in Beatles movies. A return to fascism also seems unlikely and unpopular, but I think there’s plenty of status quo in Aisle 6.

At the moment, all we see actually happening here are some new security measures, but they look pretty cosmetic to me – hey, call me a pessimist. There are metal detectors and body searches at hotels and restaurants now, but word on the street is you can just walk around them if you look rich and pissed off. All the streets around hotels are closed for driving or parking, which I suppose is fine, but – why just hotels? They’ll only blow up something else.

The big worry seems to be just how vulnerable Jordan’s economy is. Tourism, and foreign aid organizations that do their business here because they think Amman is safe, together make up a FRIGGIN’ HUGE chunk of the GNP. Trade, another big slice (10%) is already taking a hit because Iraq is such a mess. So, if Amman stops being “safe,” the economic consequences of losing the tourists and the UN are – potentially - disastrous. Worst case scenario is that Zarqawi attacks again and gets what he wants, namely, the economic bubble bursts badly enough to destabilize the entire country, giving him and his mafia room to muscle in and make big with the killing.

Now, I should say, I think this is a very, very unlikely scenario, for a couple reasons: 1) the spy guys here are still pretty tough; so, knock wood, the chances of Zarqawi getting lucky again in the near future are quite low, 2) one terrorist attack in Jordan immediately caused a lot of the country to rally around the King, the government and each other, and against Iraqis. Even if Zarqawi did manage to pull off another, and did manage to seriously hurt the tourism industry, the backlash against him and for the government that would induce seems likely to provide a certain counter-force to “destabilization” in the short run, that would probably help Hashemites maintain order, and keep AQ the fuck out of our backyard.

So, I’m not an analyst, but that’s what I’m hearing. The bottom line: Security’s nice, but “impregnable” sounds a bit too much like “unsinkable” (cue Celine Dion). We’re all gonna get hit again sooner or later, the big question for Jordan is when and how hard. The longer the security apparatus holds off another attack, the smaller the potential impact on the economy gets. Best-case scenarios never happen, but then, neither do worst-case ones. Most likely, we’ll all just muddle through as things get increasingly dangerous and unpleasant, until this whole “clash of cultures” issue gets eclipsed by something more important – like us all dying of dehydration when the water runs out, 10 years from now.

So, from Jordan, salaam aleikoom, and have a nice day.

- Nicholas Seeley, 12/2/05

EDITOR'S NOTE:

Comments have been closed on this post because it has clearly landed on a comment spam list somewhere, and is getting spammed repeatedly. If anyone cares to continue the discussion, please email me via the mail link on the right and I will post your comment.

Amman, Jordan - 11/10/05: Blinded by Rainbows

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

So, here’s the morning after picture of what’s going on here. I got up this morning in Tla’a al Ali, on the edge of town, and drove back home to the first circle for an interview with a former political prisoner. (The first circle is marked on all the maps in the big papers). There didn’t seem to be a lot of checkpoints up, but the streets were deserted.

The interview goes well; halfway through we get text messages on our phones saying that al Qaida Iraq has claimed responsibility. We’re not particularly surprised. Anyway, it doesn’t mean much – those fuckers would probably take responsibility for the Tsunami, the earthquake and the next solar eclipse, if they thought anyone would believe them.

I’ve written before about the legendary infallibility of the Jordanian mukhabarat -- a common refrain in conversations here is something like: “of course we don’t have terrorism here, because if you even think about planting a bomb, five minutes later, there’s gonna be a knock on your door.” Several references in the media have been made to this, including in the New York Times, and in a slightly hysterical article by Rana Sabbagh (one of Jordan’s best journalists).

The mukhabarat have foiled a number of terror attacks in the past year – both the ones made public, like the attempted chemical bombing in April, 2004, and others. Sources at some foreign diplomatic services say they’ve been warned at least twice in the past year by Jordanian government officials when mukhabarat agents have found and defused bombs in Amman. So, (and this is probably the only time I’ll ever say this) cheers to the secret police!

But then again, nobody’s perfect. And when you’re dealing with a loose-knit group of psychotic opportunists, it’s really just a numbers game. Sooner or later, someone’s going to take their shot and hit.

The real interesting question here is the motivation – assuming there is any motivation beyond simply “taking a shot.” Destabilizing US-allied Arab governments is one of al Qaida’s stated objectives; but it’s not clear if this kind of random-ish attack is really a step in that direction – nor is it clear what A.Q. thinks they could do, even if they DID topple a regime somewhere without the help of the US State Department. And, there remains the question of how fast they are burning their credit on the Arab Street. Blowing up weddings isn’t a great way to make friends. We’ll see.

After the interview, I drive back across town to the office. By 10:30, there are police at nearly every intersection and soldiers around every hotel. At the 4th circle, I see a white guy in green camo standing by a hummer, and for minute, I’m terrified that the Americans are here – but its just Jordanian special forces, who (according to gossip in the newsroom) wear uniforms similar to those the US uses.

I get to work, and start strategizing how the magazine is going to handle this – a tough question, of sorts, since we are licensed as a “social” magazine, meaning we’re technically not allowed to cover politics. But an event like this has social repercussions as well. Jordan is an interesting place in that it is not OBVIOUSLY a police state – you don’t get searched and questioned all the time, the military presence is typically subtle – but that may be about to change.

The Jordanian press covered the event with their usual tact and aplomb – photos of bloody bodies on the front pages of all the dailies. I come into the office to find my editor looking at a picture of a head that’s smashed open on the sidewalk in a puddle of brains. And I was eating, too. Insult to injury, the Jordan Times (English language, government mouthpiece) runs a front page full of articles about terrorism in their own city on which the three lead stories all draw from other news services, and only one uses a JT author at all. Yay!

In a surprise move, politicians at home and around the world condemned terrorism, saying “it’s bad.” Translation: no one has anything better (like actual information) to put on the front page. On the other hand, W. came out with a lot of offers of help to his important ally in the war on terror, so depending on how the next days go, this could actually defuse (or at least, postpone) the drifting apart of the US and Jordan that I mentioned last night.

Newswise, the only thing we got here that’s not in the internationals is an unconfirmed report from al Ghad TV that a truck bomb was detonated last night in a remote area outside Amman, presumably as a diversion to draw security services out of the city in order to clear the way for the big bombs. If true, that’s interesting because it speaks of a certain amount of strategy – and it’s a point against my “pure opportunism” theory, stated above.

Aside from that, the day has been pretty information-free. If we get anything else here, I will keep you posted, but at the moment, I’m inclined to just write this in with Bali and Sharm al Sheikh on the long and growing list of semi-random attacks by assholes whose political ideology is so thin on the ground that they’ll blow up anything they can get to.

Another day in paradise…

- Nicholas Seeley, 11/10/05

Amman, Jordan - Special Emergency Despatch

Just got this from Nick in Jordan:

Two major 5-star hotels in the Jebel Amman area, where I live, appear to have been bombed tonight. Reuters is reporting 5 deaths in the Radisson SAS, and more injuries, and the AP reports injuries in the Hyatt but no known deaths. When I drove by, both hotels were surrounded by ambulances, police and military, and of course vulturelike TV reporters, but there was no externally visible damage.

Since I am writing this, I have obviously not been blown up. More to come.

Nick

The Grand Hyatt, Amman Jordan
One of three hotels bombed today
(AP file photo)

4:10pm EST - Nick just checked back in:

Well, I don't know that much more than you right now, as I'm well on the other side of town. There was a third bomb that went off about a half hour after the other two (at the Days Inn) and all the wires are saying there are a lot of people dead.

The best coverage is on Al Jazeera and CNN - A.J., it's worth noting, seems to be the only service that doesn't say the Radisson and Hyatt were "popular with Israeli tourists." Bollocks: there AREN'T israeli tourists in Amman.

Some folks are saying suicide bombing, but that seems very sketchily sourced...

Still, it's all a bit more disturbing given the article linked below, which ran earlier today: the position of the Jordanian government is looking mighty unpleasant (I wouldn't go so far as to say precarious... yet). Then again, these attacks may bolster Jordan's international support, who knows...

For some good background on Jordan's role in Arab politics, check out Abu Aardvark.

N.

Here's the story he was referring to: Jordan Fears Loss of U.S. Favor

Links:

Early CNN/Reuters coverage
AP Coverage
Boom Without Bombs - a sadly ironic month-old LA Times editorial
More AP coverage, now saying three hotels hit and 18 dead
NYTimes coverage (reg. req'd)

Amman, Jordan - 11/9/2005: Exile in Guyville

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

[Note: this despatch refers to Nick's recent trip into Northern Iraq.]

It’s maybe my third night in Iraq, and I find myself sitting at a poker table inside Fortress America with a bunch of ex-military and commando types. They’re huge guys, grizzled and tattooed like in movies. A few of them still have their sidearms in their holsters. And I’m winning. This can’t be good, I think.

It’s Thursday night, and there is very, very close to absolutely nothing to do in Erbil on a Thursday night. It’s a goddamn wasteland. Erbil leaves everyone sitting like birds on a wire: it’s not so dangerous that it really sets your adrenalin pumping, fight or hide or thank God you’re alive – in fact it’s quite peaceful. Read: boring. But its not so safe that you can range around town with impunity, either. The streets are mostly safe to walk or drive, but there’s nowhere you’d really want to go. And the farther away you get from your guards and your concrete walls, the worse it gets. The potential for danger is always there.

So what social life there is goes on deep in the heart of the fortified American compound, which is where I find myself, playing low-stakes poker in the back garden of a house belonging to a foreign quasi-NGO and filled with these commando types. There’s ten guys crammed around a little plastic table – by turns surly and funny, desperate for anything that will relieve the boredom of life in a walled cell, sweating out the tension of a dangerous job where nothing ever happens.

There’s one drunk-assed and heavily armed American, who seems determined to throw all his money away, and a brit (ex-royal marine, ex-bodyguard, turned humanitarian worker) who’s been drinking tonic water all night, and seems determined to take as much of it as he can. International politics played out in cards. The RM is obviously the guy to beat – already, he’s sitting behind a nice stack of his friends’ money. Everybody here plays more poker than I do. I start off sober, but after 45 minutes I’ve mostly given up on being able to read so many people I don’t know, so I decide to have a beer and relax: I’ll just see out my buy-in and soak up the local color.

The sad reality is that Erbil isn’t much but one giant gossip mill. Nervous guys sit around tables in fortified buildings, drinking too much and arguing about politics: will the constitution be ratified? By who? What will Barzani do? Who has the votes, who pulls the strings, who understands what’s really written on all the little pieces of paper… which aid organizations are in, and which are out.

What’s blowing up.

Things are tense tonight because of rumors of VBIEDS in the area - that’s Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices, i.e., car bombs (I had to ask what it meant too, don’t worry).

“Well, I’ll tell you,” says one Texan security contractor, “I was in Baghdad, and I saw plenty happen there. But it felt different. There’s just a feeling you get when things gonna go wrong, an’ it don’t feel like anything’s gonna happen here,” he says, “not yet.”

“I’ve seen the intel,” drawls the RM, and everyone looks at him. “And the thing is, when things are about to go bad, there are signs. There are things that happen before things start going wrong, and I haven’t seen ‘em.”

Everyone listens to the RM, so they relax, a little. And then there’s a rumble from the street, and we stop playing and look across the garden as a string of armored US gun-vees cruise past the building.

They’re a lot bigger than you expect them to be.

Everyone but me knows where they’re heading. There have been threats posted on some Islamist web site – perhaps even credible threats – against a couple of specific humanitarian organizations. Why? No one knows, really, but now those agencies have Americans with big guns parked on their front lawns. Their front lawns, unfortunately, happen to be right down the block.

A prissy chick from another NGO comes by, looking to borrow some movies, and starts chatting with one of the players, and the temperature in the room goes up a few degrees. Then the drunk American starts shouting about niggers. The Texan tries to calm him, but it won’t help. “There’s plenty of blacks in my family tree,” he shouts, “some of ‘em are still hangin’ there.”

The NGO chick shoots him a look as she leaves, and the RM says, quietly.

“You should watch your mouth in fronta her, lad.” Apparently, this one complained to her NGO’s head office because someone in the organization had had Maxim magazines in the house. She was deeply offended. Tried to get someone fired. The men glare after her as she leaves, unwelcome.

“I don’t care about that bitch,” the drunk shouts, “She can’t do shit to me, I’m leavin’!”

“Makes it hard on the rest of us, you actin’ like that,” someone else says.

The table goes quiet for a while, as everyone focuses on their cards. People drop out one by one, and finally the drunk makes it off to bed.

“He’s not always like that,” someone explains, when he’s gone. All the usual reasons. He’s been here a while. He’s having family problems. Seen too much. Not seen enough. A million reasons why guys start getting a little wild, stuck inside concrete walls in a war zone, in a city that doesn’t even seem to offer any hookers, much less women, much less men, much less a conversation about anything other than what’s blowing up where, and how hopeless it all is.

The conversation goes on through all the usual lines. Allawi’s really fucked up, he can’t go anywhere from here. The United Nations coming was the worst thing that ever happened to Iraq. This NGO wanted to hand out copies of the constitution in Kurdish, ‘cept they didn’t even realize there was three different dialects, the dumbshits.

At one point, the Texan looks up at the RM, and says “You oughta know, we don’t blame you boys for what you done in Mosul, blowin’ up that prison. We’re all gonna feel the fallout from it, no mistake. It’s gonna make things harder for everyone, but ain’t nobody blames you. You had to get your boys. We’d all a done the same thing.”

My head is spinning a bit.

And this, of course, is when I start pulling cards that even I can’t lose with. The pile of chips in front of me grows. I’m having a heck of a night. Okay the stakes aren’t very high, but the guns give it a bit of extra flavor.

Soon the table is down to the last four or five; the people who didn’t just come for the food. They’re all much better than me, but we’ve already fleeced out six people, so everyone’s riding a bit high. I get one guy’s bluff figured out, and pull in a couple good hands off it. The cards just seem to keep falling my way.

Last hand of the night is five draw. I start with a pair of jacks and three hearts, and bet slow. The RM bets the limit, and he never does that unless he has the cards. The Texan is staying with him, so is the fourth. I figure I should fold, but I’m up enough, so I decide to see the draw. After a moments consideration I ditch the hearts and keep the jacks; I figure I got a better shot to improve that than pulling two cards in a flush.

We draw.

The RM goes high again. Whatever he’s got, it’s good. I slow play again, but the Texan raises, and the fourth folds. I see the raise, and re-raise – not quite the max. The RM and the Texan both stay.

The Texan puts down a straight, a bit worried. He knows the RM has us dead to rights, and sure enough he shows a full house, kings over something, and reaches for the pot. I don’t say anything, I just lay my cards on the table. The Texan notices first, and his eyes get kinda big as he reaches out and catches the RM’s hand.

“Holy crap,” he says. The RM stops for a second and looks at my cards.

“Wow,” he says, with a sage nod as he pushes the pile my way.

I’d have come out way ahead however the hand turned out, pulling in that last pot hits me like four shots of Jack Daniels. When there’s nothing to do, little things get important.

I’m still buzzing as we walk through the streets of the American fortress towards the Exit.

The Exit isn’t so much a bar as a house that’s never been cleaned; but they serve drinks and a guy plays karaoke on Thursday nights, so it’s where everybody goes. On the lawn outside, a hose runs perpetually, and the grass around it is a sodden, muddy puddle in the middle of a desert country.

Like everything else here, it’s filled with men with guns. The only woman in the whole place is the prissy NGO chick. The karaoke is terrible. I have a drink; then another. Somehow, I find myself talking to an enormous Colombian security contractor – and I mean the size of a house, with arms the size of small trees and thighs as big as my waist, but he seems like a nice guy. He tells me he doesn’t like my tattoos, and I give the standard answer.

“Well, that’s all right, since it’s my fookin’ arm they’re on.”

We have a laugh, and we chat about football hooligans and martial arts and body modification and tribalism, and someone from Company F starts buying us all shots of tequila. The Colombian drinks his with lime, I take mine straight, and we rag on each other about it.

The room is hot, and full of guns and shouting and bad music, and the conversations just keep getting louder and edgier, as the men get drunker, and realize there’s not a goddamn thing to do except drink until they fall down, or try to hit on a woman who thinks Maxim is a crime against humanity, and somewhere, perhaps, I lose track of time, or it loses track of me, and then suddenly I’m standing at the bar, and the enormous Colombian is pressing his face into mine, and screaming:

“You wanna step outside? Huh? You wanna go outside?”

And it’s a bit like a bad dream, because I have no idea what has set him off, or why he’s upset, or if he’s actually pissed or just screwing around, and I’m so surprised that the only thing I can think of to say is:

“All right. Let’s go.”

As I follow him out onto the muddy lawn, I’m thinking: great, he’s about nine times my size, and he’s some kind of commando, and he’s still carrying his nine millimeter. Well, at least this isn’t going to last long.

He turns to face me and I ask, with genuine curiosity, “What’s up?”

And I get a funny feeling of déjà vu. Something about this is so familiar – and then the enormous Colombian leans toward me, weaving a little, and, as if to prove that the universe is laughing, and everything you do comes full circle somehow in the end, he says:

“C’mon then. Hit me. As hard as you can.”

Somebody is definitely laughing.

And part of me is still wondering why this guy feels like picking a fight. I’m wondering how I can not get killed tonight. I’m surprised that I’m not more terrified – I wonder if I’m really drunk, but I don’t think so.

“No,” I say.

“C’mon,” he says, “hit me,” and, with the same sense of playing out a scene I’ve been in before, I reply again:

“No, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

I’m not gonna run and hide from anyone who’s got a problem with me, no matter how big he is, but I’m sure as hell not going to hand this guy an excuse to use me for target practice. I’m dumb, but not that dumb. He looks at me, befuddled.

“If you wanna set some rules and spar, then let’s go,” I say. “How do you want to do this.” He just glares at me.

“Look,” I say, “you can call me a coward if you like, but I really can’t just deck a guy I more-or-less like without at least a reason. I’m not capable of it.” Not anymore, I think – but I leave that out.

Now I’m starting to get scared – not because he’s going to beat me up, but because maybe he isn’t. He’s just staring at me, like someone who’s gotten off a train after falling asleep, and suddenly isn’t sure if he’s really there yet. I wish he would either hit me or go away, already.

“Look,” I say, “if you got something to say to me, go ahead. Otherwise, we’re done here.”

The Colombian slowly turns and wanders back inside, and I stand on the lawn for a moment, wondering if I won or lost – and what. Then I go back in, too, and head for the bar. As I get myself another beer, I’m surrounded by guys from Company F,

Gossip, gossip, gossip. All the usual questions. Are you all right? What did you say to him? Why’d you go out there with him, anyway?

I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

You gotta excuse him when he gets like that. When he gets drunk, he just looks for fights. He’s been here a long time. He’s having family problems. Seen too much.

I’m quickly getting tired of this. Look, I say, I don’t know what it was all about. He wants beat me up, he’s welcome to give it a shot. But I’m not starting it.

Don’t say that. Don’t provoke him. You could get hurt.

That’s how it goes, I snap back. People start fights, people get hurt. I don’t know how to have a fight with a guy without trying to hurt him.

Shhh… don’t say this stuff. Just stay away from him- don’t look over there – don’t make eye contact.

“Why?” I snap back. I’m not going to run away from some liquored-up psycho who starts fights cause he can’t find a hooker. “If he wants to hit me he’s gonna hit me, and I’ll try to stop him, and I probably won’t be able to, and that’ll be that.”

I take my beer and leave the bar, disgusted with this place and these people. There’s something nagging at my brain, something just doesn’t seem right, though I can’t put my finger on it. I have another drink, and I think another, but the encounter with the Colombian has rubbed all the glitter off the evening. I leave the Exit and sit in the garden, drinking in the warm night air, listening to the men inside: gossiping, intimidating, jockeying for position on the top of this shit hill. The prissy NGO chick goes home, and I still sit there, drinking.

Is this all men can do when you take them out to the edge of the nowhere? Start fights and then gossip like women about who’s winning them? Human behavior in a bell jar. Wasn’t there supposed to be some reason why we were out here, other than this? But whatever it was I was looking for, it isn’t here, and I find my head is spinning way too fast, I’m tired and angry and disgusted and then I’m on my knees, vomiting over and over into the wet grass.

- Nicholas Seeley, 11/9/05

Amman, Jordan - 10/19/05: A Country That Doesn't Exist

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

SEPTEMBER 27 – AN AIRPORT LOUNGE – 6 A.M

There is an old man who lives on my street who spends all day sitting outside his sons’ vegetable shop on an old olive oil can, spinning his prayer beads and staring up at the sky. I have been acquainted with him for pretty much the entire time I’ve lived in Jordan; I pass his shop often, and wave and say “marhaba.”

Last night, the night before I left, as I passed, he reached out, unexpectedly, and grabbed my hand as I walked past. His legs were shaky, and he had to use me to help him pull himself to his feet, at which point, he shook my hand vigorously, and then reached down and pulled up an extra oil can, and asked me to sit. So I did.

And then he hands me his prayer beads. He looks at me, then up at the sky, then back at me. “You hold those,” he says, “and you think. You think about God.” Again he looks at me, then the sky, then back. He raises his steepled hands to his lips, and then shakes them at the sky – a gesture stuck somewhere between supplication and “hey, God, how ‘bout those Yankees?”

I smile at him, which I can’t understand – possibly because I’m wondering why it is this particular day, when I’m about to get on a plane for a country that doesn’t exist, that he chooses to press these beads into my hand and tell me to think about God, but I don’t have an answer for that one. So I tell him I have to go, my friends are waiting for me, which is true, and that I will see him soon, which I hope is.

SEPTEMBER 29 – MAYOR’S OFFICE, G** -- 11 A.M.

The NGO I’m working, Company F, has a meeting with the mayor of this small town with no vowels in its name, to discuss a site for a refugee camp. Of course, for some reasons, half of Company F has to go to this thing, so we all pile into the hulking white SUV’s with the tinted windows – humanitarian workers, drivers, and guards with AK’s – and head off. Of course, all these oversized vehicles get into a huge bottleneck at the front gate of the NGO’s walled compound, because there’s some complicated security protocol about how people have to enter and leave, and everyone’s getting in and out of cars, and moving back and forth and trying to be helpful and making sure there are enough Gun Dudes in every vehicle.

My boss tells me a story of how the company used to lunch at a restaurant 5 minutes away over the ring road, but as security got tighter it started to take more than half an hour every day just to get everyone into the cars and out the door. Finally they just built a restaurant in the compound.

In the car, I notice that the guys who ride shotgun hold their AK’s between their legs with the muzzles pointing up at their faces, and I wonder what the life expectancy on that job is.

Once we get to the mayor’s office, I realize why everyone came: that’s what makes it official. So there’s the head of my NGO, plus five more guys, including me; and an equal number from the project sponsor (a major international aid broker), plus the Mayor and two or three guys from his office, plus all our Gun Dudes. We all pile onto the couches in this shabby little office, arranged in a big semicircle in front of the Mayor’s big old formica desk, while the Gun Dudes hover in the hall outside – there’s four or five I can see, and at least as many more out in the parking lot.

I’d hate to be the CIA guy assigned to assassinate the mayor of this town of 100,000 people.

I’m wondering if this is what working in the old Soviet Union felt like. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the omnipresent military force, maybe the shabby attempts at ostentation, or maybe just that everyone is speaking Kurdish.

Kurdish sounds rather like Russian, spoken backwards, and liberally mixed with words from seven or eight other languages, most of which are now extinct. I asked a co-worker over lunch how many languages he spoke every day, he said four – Kurdish, Arabic, English, and Assyrian.

People speak to me in Kurdish all the time, because they of course assume I’m a Kurd, just like everyone in Jordan assumes I’m Arab, for no discernable reason. God knows what would happen if I went to Uganda.

Welcome to the nonexistent country. There are nearly ****** stateless Kurds liberally distributed between Turkey, Iran, other bits of Central Asia, and Northern Iraq, where I am. Supposedly. But almost the first thing you realize here is that it is not Iraq. Of course, it’s not Kurdistan either, though it puts up a good show. Everybody knows there’s no such thing as Kurdistan; kind of like the tooth fairy. And even after a few days here I can tell that the thing called “Kurdistan” and the thing called “Iraq” have about as much in common as my ass and a barrel of monkeys (to wit – though I may once or twice fall ass-first into a barrel of monkeys, that should not be taken to imply any relationship or affinity between the two).

So, back to the Mayor.

First, he has to go on in Kurdish for a good ten minutes before my boss asks someone to translate, and then they go back and forth for a while. Here’s the deal: Company F wants to build a refugee camp, and the Mayor of G** has volunteered this lousy little strip of dirt on the side of the highway, baked dirt in the summer and mud in the winter, which, ironically enough, is only empty because Uncle Saddam kicked out the original inhabitants in the 60’s to build a collective town there which conspicuously failed to thrive, leaving a tiny slice of the space so lovingly cleared of its former inhabitants unused. And the Mayor is assuring us that the land belongs to the municipality of G**, he can provide a piece of paper (which is of course utterly meaningless), and the head of Company F is saying, no, there has to be a consultation with the official property claims commission, because it wouldn’t do to drop three million U.S. on a refugee camp and then have someone show up and say the land it’s built on is really his because he was displaced from it in the early ‘70’s. So the argument goes.

Now, I should explain something about land in Kurdistan, or at least in Erbil: its crap, but everyone seems to want it.

In fact, the town of Erbil is without doubt the single ugliest place I’ve ever laid eyes on. It’s flat and dry and featureless – imagine Illinois if it never saw rain, and the soil was incapable of supporting anything but tiny little tufts of brown grass, and even if it were, every patch of soil seems to have been ripped up for some construction project which remains uncompleted. Even in fall, it’s too damn hot, and there’s no shade from anything, and the air is a haze of orange and brown dust.

Despite this, there’s a construction boom going on: every third lot is vacant, filled with piles of stone and building materials and garbage; half the houses are in the process of being torn down. The streets are all in ruins; most are down to one lane, and even when they’re not, people drive on the wrong side just for fun. Everything not surrounded by concrete blast barriers is surrounded by rubble and stacked piles of cinderblocks and road barriers. And of course, every pile of rubble has six armed guards around it, to ensure security.

The place looks like a war zone, which is curious, since the war was not actually fought here; only a few bombs have gone off in the city, and most of those were outside important buildings which have since been repaired and reinforced – they’re the only buildings that look solid at all.

As if to make up for this palpable disrepair, the buildings that do get completed are unconscionably horrid. There’s a new monstrosity being erected on every corner. The bigger and gaudier, the better. Three-story Italianate villas made out of stacked grey cinderblocks are going up beside enormous government buildings in some kind of neo-fascist Bauhaus, but faced with glittering pink reflective tiles. Huge neocolonial mansions go up next to cement factories with giant rusting water tanks and smokestacks belching black all over the white porch columns. Yet despite the fact that anyone with any sensibility would flee Erbil immediately, land prices continue to soar, as do costs of labor and construction.

EXTERIOR – MIDDLE OF NOWHERE – MID-AFTERNOON

After the Mayor’s office, we all have to drive out to this tiny strip of dusty land, in a caravan of SUV’s bristling with automatic weapons. Guards form a perimeter as we get out and stand, and a new issue emerges: the collective town next door to our site is the worst of northern Iraqi rural. A cluster of low mud huts with walls built out of tin cans, and a rusted out water tank connected to a tangle of ancient pipes. You can’t build a resettlement camp – with roads and schools and ten story concrete housing units – next to this disaster. Nearly as much money would have to be put into the local population as into the refugee community that’s being resettled.

As the argument drones on, one of my bosses – who everyone agrees is a little bit touched – breaks away from the group and wanders through the village, snapping pictures left and right, and calling out to the women who stand on top of the houses re-turfing their roofs. The guards try to follow him over the rough ground in an SUV, but eventually give up and get out and walk.

He laughs at the security, out here, in the middle of nowhere, and wanders on – looking, perhaps, for a moments relief from the omnipresent menace of the armed guards.

There are guards everywhere. In the offices, along the roads, at checkpoints, outside buildings and construction sites; nearly every building of any structural stability has concrete barriers out front, and a table full of dudes with automatic weapons guarding it and playing cards (possibly not in that order). These are the people you say hello to as you walk down the street.

You’re never really alone here, never unwatched. It’s a constant, unnerving part of the fabric of life.

SEPTEMBER 29 - NIGHT

A strange thing just happened. I couldn’t sleep. I can never seem to sleep here; maybe it’s the heat, or the roaring of the generators, or just Iraq. Company F has two houses, across the street from each other, and I stepped out of the house for a moment, to cross to the other side.

The street was dead quiet. Not even a wisp of smoke from the ashtray on the Gun Dudes’ card table. Two AK-47s were leaning against the guard house wall. There was no one there. It was perhaps the first moment since I arrived I felt unobserved. It made me nervous. Any break in the routine here is enough to set off alarm bells in my head. Why was no one at their posts?

I went back inside the house, to look for someone to tell, but there was no one else there, so I went back to the street, figuring if the guards were still gone, I might walk up to Fortress America, around the block. But when I emerged again, the usual guys were back, sitting at their table, talking quietly. They’d stepped out for a glass of water, or a chat, or a joint in the guard house; nothing much. All quiet again.

Just another Saturday night.

- Nicholas Seeley, 10/19/05

Amman, Jordan - 9/21/05: Evil Empires, Part III - But Is It Art?

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

I’m sitting in the Cham Palace Garden restaurant in Hama, Syria, chatting with a couple fellow tourists, drinking watery local beer and looking out across the river. On a small promontory next to us, one of the city’s famous giant waterwheels creaks away, filling the restaurant with an ominous creaking and rumbling. The wind picks up and I pull my collar tighter. After the oven that was Damascus, the north of Syria is pleasantly cool.

All the way across the river we can see the ruins of the old town. The vine-wrapped remains of a mosque peep out through the thick jungle greenery like the lost city from some science fiction film. Overhead, the bats and the swallows are waging an aerial battle for control of the long abandoned buildings, and the croaking of frogs in the canal blends with the groaning of the waterwheel.

All in all, Hama is a beautiful little river town; filled with parks and public squares. The streets here always seem to be full of people walking with their children, eating, or just hanging out. In one of the parks there’s even a tiny, unsafe looking little funfair, made up of ancient, rusting kiddie rides and a ferris wheel that spins altogether too fast for comfort. Street life is one of the things that stands out in my mind, separating Jordan from Syria.

There are a few place in Amman where people can be seen outside of their houses, doing things, but for the most part, the streets roll up before anyone ever rolls them out. I’m shocked, in Syria, to see Muslim couples holding hands; in Jordan, men and women rarely if ever touch each other in public.

Almost since the day I arrived in Amman, I have been hearing from my ex-pat friends how much cooler Syria is than Jordan – specifically, about how much there is going on in Damascus – an art scene, a music scene, a huge national theater that people actually go to.

I don’t know if those claims are literally true – as I’ve said, there is a lot going on in Amman, the problem seems to be that people don’t know about it; a combination of lethargy and poor PR – but true or not, Damascus makes them feel true.

I didn’t actually get to see much of this fabled Art. The heavy metal guitarist I was supposed to ask about concerts never called me back. I came back from the north early, to try to get tickets to a show at the national theater, but everything was sold out for weeks.

But it’s not just what’s going on, it’s how you feel about it.

In one music shop in Old Damascus, run by two young guys who burn cd’s of progressive and death metal they’ve downloaded off the internet, we are told to go to a bar called Kassafji 32, which is where we can find out about everything that’s going on in town.

We take a cab there, through sections of town that stir odd memories of New York; past rows of townhouses and hardware shops that look like they could be in Astoria or Bay Ridge, or some small town in Ohio. Kassafji is the only thing open on an otherwise residential street. But inside, it feels like one of the trendy little dives in Park Slope or Fort Greene: orange, mock-70’s décor, with fishtanks and Japanese paper lamps hanging from the ceiling, and a table stacked with flyers for shows and bands and art exhibits.

There are girls inside with tattoos, another rare sight in Amman. We hang out for a while, and have a beer, and find flyers for a show at the national theater – an adaptation of Antigone called Antigon Emigration, by what appears to be a local writer. I’m surprised again.

The last time my play reading group was talking about doing a show in Amman, the name Antigone came up – as a play we would definitely not be allowed to do, if anyone found out about it. One thing you can’t be, in Jordan, is anti-monarchy. Not even in general. The ironies hit home again – is Syria more free than Jordan? Certainly not. But, then, in certain areas, maybe it is – as I mentioned in my Secrets and Lies column.

One of the reasons for the restrictions on speech in Amman, of course, is that the government here does walk a fine line with the hard-core Islamists in the country, and can’t risk people saying things that would spark anti-government sentiment in the Umma. That way lies Egypt.

Of course, Syria doesn’t have that problem. And it’s mostly because of Hama. In 1982, when Hafez Assad decided to ban political parties from Syria, the one group that opposed him was the Muslim Brotherhood. Their strongest following, and according to some sources, most of their leaders, were in the town of Hama.

So Assad shelled it – less to inflict damage, it is said, than to destroy the roads and bridges, and make it impossible to get out. Then he sent in the army to kill every living thing in Hama; finally shelling the ruins with poison gas. Between 20,000 and 40,000 people were killed in one day, in a town that today has a population of less than 250,000.

After that, Syria didn’t have an Islamic insurgency problem any more. The old town was more or less abandoned, the craters and graves were bulldozed, and a hotel was built on top of them, where tourists can sit looking out over the Orontes river, drinking watery local beer.

I’m not a superstitious guy, but there’s not enough money in all of Syria to get me to spend a night in that hotel.

We leave Hama after two nights, to go back to Damascus in time to see Antigone – the show that was sold out, so I’ll never know if it was any good. The late bus back is crowded and hot, and there’s some kind of massive accident on the road that keeps us sitting for almost two hours, until well after dark.

I’m sitting near the back; behind me is just one more family. I notice them because they don’t look local – A man with two women in brightly colored headscarfs, and two daughters in heavy makeup and Britney shirts that show a lot more cleavage than one is used to seeing in the Middle East. Best guess, they’re probably Lebanese; Lebanese girls have a rep for wearing whatever they want. Unfortunately, I’m right under the television, which makes trying to sleep futile, because there’s some crazy Egyptian movie playing full of singing and dancing. It’s after midnight when we finally pull into the Damascus bus depot, and, as always happens, the bus turns into a writhing, shoving mass of people, trying to get their luggage and get out.

Arabs and their lack of a sense of personal space. I hunker down in my seat in the far back, trying to keep out of the fray.

Then a man in a brown uniform gets on the bus, and says, quietly, “take your seats.”

Everyone does, immediately. We all sit in total silence as the bus slowly fills up with soldiers. There is a group around each entrance, and perhaps six in the main aisle. Beginning in the front, they start taking checking the passports of everyone on the bus. The soldiers scan the faces of each passenger in turn; they seem to be looking for someone.

One by one, the people in the front of the bus are allowed to leave; they walk off the bus with slow, forced calm. My heart is beating faster and faster as the soldiers move to the back. The bus empties out, slowly, until there is no one left but myself and my companions, and the Lebanese family behind us, and the soldiers.

They take a look at me – I don’t recall if they even asked for my papers or not. All I remember is one of them waving to me to go. I pull my bag from the overhead rack with all the calm I can muster, and get off, with my friends. The last thing I see as I’m going down the back stairs, is the six soldiers standing in a circle around the family in the back of the bus.

And that’s all.

- Nicholas Seeley, 9/21/2005

Amman, Jordan - 8/24/2005: Pastorale

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

Subtitle: A Brief Interlude Before We Get To The Point

Never underestimate how much fun it is to be a tourist again; at least for a little while. What a strange collection of impressions it all leaves: a new place, new people; it feels somehow like waking up from a doze – seeing everything a little clearer. Sure, I’m a junky for novelty. Sue me.

Damascus, of course, has a very different feel than Jordan: Levantine, Greek, European. Even in Damascus, despite the heat, it feels like there’s so much more that’s green. Is it somehow the difference between a landlocked country and one that has, somewhere, a port on the Mediterranean?

I pay a visit to the Syrian Military museum, and spend hours mooning over the rooms full of medieval armor and scimitars of elegantly etched Damascus steel. There’s of whole room dedicated to the 1973 war with Israel – of course, my friends note in hushed tones, they make it look like Syria won.

Outside Damascus, in the desert part of the country, the little villages you pass on the highway look a great deal like the villages you see in Jordan; the same collections of little brown stone and concrete boxes – the biggest difference seems to be that in Syria they don’t all have satellite dishes.

Up north, where you go for the crusader castles and the tourist stuff, the elevation rises steeply. In the mountains, the land becomes green, spotted with grey and brown where promontories of rock peep through the vegetation. From the castles, you can see for miles over rocky clefts and grassy valleys, with not a trace of baked desert in sight.

As I’m exploring the tiny, smoke-blackened rooms of the Ismaeli stronghold at Misyal, wondering what the assassins must have lived like in these cramped quarters, an amazing thing happens. From inside, I see the sky grow dark, and a cold wind blows through the corridors. Surprised, I step out onto the parapet of one ruined wall, and look up. A tiny drop of water strikes me in the face.

It’s the beginning of July; Amman won’t see a drop of rain from February to November. But here, on the heels of the chilly breeze, a tiny shower of rain begins to fall. We drive away from the castle in a continuous, gentle drizzle.

What a sudden relief to see gray skies, and rain!

Up here, suddenly, we could be almost anywhere – Scotland or rural Pennsylvania or the south of France. The narrow roads wind around the mountains spotted with small houses and apple orchards; we drive through tiny villages with fountains in the central squares, where old men in worn suits lean in the doorways of the shops and talk to each other about the weather.

At the height of the range is the Krak des Chevaliers, massive compared to Misyal – a huge stone monster, a dragon curled atop a mountain; its white walls look impenetrable as a glacier. Many of these castles were called back into use during the first world war, for the fight against the Turks.

Then it’s down the mountain again, and north, to Tartous, the port city; one of my friends has an urge to look at the sea.

On the way there, I have one of my few encounters with the other side of Syria, the monolithic state. Of course, it’s in the form of cab driver wisdom. The fellow who takes us to the bus station in Hama indulges in a lecture on the way – about how there is no democracy in Syria, or the Middle East. Assad is a dictator, he says, Saddam was a dictator; all the princes of the Arab world are a mafia, in league with the leaders of the West against their own people.

Why is he telling us this, I wonder; especially in a place with Syria’s bloody history? I have friends with family rotting in Syrian jails for less.

From Tartous, it’s the launch out to Arwat island, a small fishing community where the folks from Tartous go to unwind and eat seafood. The island has a tiny souk that winds through streets barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast; all it seems to sell are children’s toys and prayer beads strung out of seashells.

In the café where we eat lunch, there hangs a sign: “from Assad to Assad flows the blood of the nation.”

On one side of the island is a real, working shipyard. It smells of sawdust, and the sound of power tools hovers in the air like a chorus of voices singing words that can’t quite be made out. An army of cats and chickens stands guard over the wooden skeletons of boats, marching in patrol between their bare ribs.

On the boat back, I’m reading a book by Lawrence Durrell, and thinking how his descriptions of the blending of races, of religions and eras still captures something about the Levant that is different. I wonder, for a moment, if all the talk of “national character” spouted by people I don’t like has some basis in fact. Because how is it that this place feels so varied, tumultuous and free, despite all the little outward signs of oppression, unless it has something to do with the personalities of the people who live here themselves?

- Nicholas Seeley, 8/24/2005

Amman, Jordan - 8/13/2005: Evil Empires

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

Coming from Amman, the first thing you’re likely to see of Syria – assuming they let you in at all – is yet more trackless desert. Damascus is only a few hours drive from Amman, but the scorching wind blowing in the windows of your rented taxi just gets hotter and hotter; somehow it seems to drain the energy right out of you.

Maybe it was imagination, but I felt, during that first drive, as if I could clearly see the post-soviet influences in the countryside, in the huge, machine tilled farms and the rows of ancient harvesters squatting like ugly old women in blocky, concrete sheds. My understanding is that Syria has a much higher proportion of arable land than Jordan, and the advantage that all of it isn’t on the steep hillsides of the Jordan river valley. The farms in Syria are bigger, more productive and more mechanized – but by the same token, bleaker and more menacing.

Or maybe it’s the giant, technicolor picture of Hafez and Bashar Assad hanging over every shed and garage that makes the image of Stalinism so inescapable. There was actually a second Assad brother, Basil, but he got hisself kilt in a car crash. He’s still on a lot of the posters, tho’. Some Syrians, under their breath, refer to them as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Fuck, you think that’s strange? Jordan’s main airport is named after someone who died in a plane crash. Go figure.

The outskirts of Damascus are as bleak and ominous as the farms, made up of row after row of huge gray, identical apartment complexes. Its exactly how you would expect East Berlin to have looked in the 60’s, except for the palm trees. But approaching the center of the city, the atmosphere changes. There are parks and fountains – containing actual grass and water – and wide streets with sculptures in the roundabouts, and little, incongruous apartment buildings in a profusion of styles more European than Middle-Eastern, with double-hung windows and ironwork balconies and painted facades. The air actually seems to get a little lighter.

Up close, many bits of Damascus look like someone was trying to build Paris, but lacked adequate materials. There are houses with that very western-European overhanging second story, but it’s held in place by what looks like driftwood and scrap iron. Some buildings appear to be made of Styrofoam, others have walls of corrugated tin or aluminum. But seen from the distance, the effect is of a city. Compared to blocky, gulf-y architecture of Jordan, which looks like piled cardboard boxes, this is rich profusion. If Amman is the L.A. of the Middle East, Damascus is the Chicago (making Jerusalem the East St. Louis?).

I’m on vacation here with some friends, and the first evening in town, our little party decides to buy some beer and venture up Jabal Qassioun, the big mountain that divides this city of seven million people into two halves, to watch the sun set.

Halfway up the mountain, we pass something that looks like an art-deco spacecraft from a 60’s space opera. We ask the cab driver what it is, and he says it’s the tomb of the unknown soldier. Some confusion ensues when I ask which particular war this unknown met his maker in, and the driver appears to reply that they put a new one in every year. Eventually we decide he probably means they have a ceremony re-dedicating the thing every year. But I have my doubts – I mean, a lot of people go missing in Syria; they’ve gotta be putting them somewhere, right?

There’s an entire mini-tourist industry that’s grown up on top of Jabal Qassioun, and the road that rounds the peak is packed tight with tacky little restaurants, with garish awnings and blaring pop music, serving argileh to people at little plastic tables. Unlike most of Amman, it’s also packed with people. Families sit clustered along the edge of the road, drinking cokes and eating ice cream, looking out at the view.

My friends and I find a strip of hillside that breaks off from the road and sit down on a rock, sipping cheap local beer from brown bottles. A few families are picnicking on blankets not too far off, but we’ve chosen a spot that’s a bit out of the way – we do have beer, after all, and while Syria is secular we don’t want to offend anyone’s sensibilities too much.

After a few minutes, a group of local kids run past, in the middle of some complicated game, but stop upon seeing us. They ask where we’re from, and I tell them, and they stand, staring at us. So after a moment, I stare back, and ask, in Arabic, what they want. They push off to the next rock over.

This time it’s not me being paranoid, but one of the American girls in our party keeps casting glances over their way. “They’re saying nasty things about us,” she says – she understands Arabic better than I do.

“Let them,” I say. But she’s worried, she can’t shake it.

“Well, where are their families,” I say, looking around. “If they come bother us again, we’ll march them back to their fathers and say they’re being rude.”

“We can’t do that,” she says, “we’re the ones out of place here. This is their country, we can’t tell them to be quiet.” She’s getting hysterical, and the kids giggle, loudly, as they watch. Kids can always tell when they’re getting to you – it’s one of the lessons I remember well from my own childhood. “For chrissakes,” she says, “we’re drinking beer,”

“Yeah,” I reply, “One beer. Which we bought at a Syrian convenience store. If the kids bug you, let’s go tell their parents they asked us to give them some,” I suggest, “that’ll fix them, but good.”

It’s the same argument that always comes up, when someone treats you badly in a foreign country. One person will blame themselves: “It’s because we’re not culturally sensitive enough, we deserve to be treated badly, we’re the Evil Empire.” One of their companions will then take the opposite stance: “there are jerks everywhere, and if we treat people decently, we shouldn’t be judged on our culture any more than they should.”

Before it can get too heated, however, it is cut off, a man with a sheikh’s beard and a long dishdasha gets up from his blanket, and starts shouting at the kids. “Get out of here,” he says, “can’t you see these people are students? Stop bothering them, you know better.” Then he offers us slices of watermelon, and has a brief conversation with us.

There are jerks everywhere; there are also pleasant, generous people.

Below us, the city spreads out like a fairy tale, long flat avenues lined with trees, and rows of white buildings, gradually getting taller towards the center of town, where the big hotels and government buildings stand out like ships in a sea of white. Off to the left, a huge swath of dark green disappears into the horizon. I had never expected Syria to have to many colors to it.

But the argument about cultural communication has put us all in a reflective mood, and we stare out at the vista in silence – as if realizing afresh what a knife edge this part of the world is walking. All it would take is one bomb in the wrong place at the wrong time – one demonstration too many in one of a dozen countries – one leader dying before his time – and this whole world we inhabit, where cultures more or less, grudgingly coexist, could vanish. The clubs in Amman where we dance and shoot pool, the big hotels, the bars where expats go for a beer in the shadow of the huge Ummayyad mosque, where families go to pray, and children run and play on the slick, glassy tiles of the courtyard; even the little restaurants balanced on the hill next to us could vanish in a moment, if someone makes the wrong decision.

For a minute, in my minds eye, I see the streets packed with cars, plumes of smoke rising from the windows of charred buildings and tiny shapes picking their way on cut feet through the flattened suburbs. Then it’s gone again.

“What a shame it would be if someone were to destroy this,” someone says, finally giving the idea voice. If someone came with bombs, and leveled this crazy, beautiful, thriving, confused city, and made another Kosovo, or Baghdad or St. Petersburg. Dresden. Troy.

In the city below us, people are having fun, living their lives as best they can under the gaze of their own Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Their government is far from perfect, as are they, but they’re just people; people who follow whoever leads them. They’re not the evil empire.

And what if there is no Evil Empire? What if there isn’t really anyone who’s the cause of all the trouble; be they neocon or islamist or zionist? Then there’s just another city, waiting for someone to come along and level it. Funny how someone always does.

- Nicholas Seeley, 8/13/2005

Amman, Jordan - 8/2/2005: Ahlen Wahsalan

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

Ahlen Wahsahlan. That’s the Arabic (or at least, the Jordanian) for “welcome.” It’s what everyone says to you when they find out you’re a foreigner. Ahlen Wahsahlan. Welcome to Jordan.

It’s been a long time – three months, I suppose, since I had anything I felt like sharing with my faithless readers (all five of ya’!). It’s hard to say exactly why. Part of it is that I’ve been working a lot. Then I went to Syria – I’ll tell y’all about that, sometime. I went out into the desert again – I guess I’ll tell you about that, too. I wrote a lot of articles, and life continued pretty much as it has been for the past 10 months.

And maybe that’s it: that even as I gain something more like an understanding of this place – its people, politics, art - I find it at the same time becoming invisible to me. The way any place you live sooner or later stops being a place and becomes a backdrop. I don’t notice things as sharply as I did. And, at the same time, I begin to notice the threads that hold me to America getting thinner. Things that would once have shocked or surprised me, I dismiss with a shrug and “ahlen wahsahlan” -- my sarcastic code for “that’s life in Amman.”

Two weeks ago a friend of mine got a bullet through the windshield of her car because she parked to close to a wedding. They fire up into the air in celebration, blissfully unaware that what goes up must come down. Ahlen Wahsahlan.

Every summer night there will be fireworks, and when they go off, you always see someone jump, thinking they’re bombs. Ahlen Wahsahlan.

I spoke a cab driver about Palestine today -- I got told I couldn’t write an article that would offend someone -- someone tried to rip me off because I’m a foreigner, someone else welcomed me with a smile. Ahlen Wahsahlan.

Somewhere, a disabled man tries to decide how to split his JD 130 a month pension between his two wives, one of whom has 10 kids, the other has 4. He gives each wife JD 50, and spends the rest on cigarettes. Somewhere a glittering new apartment complex with 100,000 square feet of retail space goes up. Across town, someone preaches a sermon about the evils of the western music and culture that are corrupting Islam, and someone listens. Someone got denied a visa; someone else lost an eye trying to defuse a landmine from the ’67 war. Ahlen Wahsahlan.

Some nights I’ll drink a pint of whiskey and throw beer bottles at the wall. Other nights… I won’t throw the beer bottles. Ahlen Wahsahlan.

I walked into Books@ the other day, and there was my psychotic Iraqi translator buddy, sitting at a table (some of you may remember him from a previous despatch, “Killing is My Business…”). He looked a bit different than I remembered, though I can’t be sure that wasn’t just a trick played on me by my own expectations. Was he really thinner, scruffier, older looking? Tired around the eyes? Or was that just what I figured anyone coming from Iraq must be?

(MORE BELOW...)

As much as I dislike him, I was surprised to find myself pleased to see him again. At least he was alive.

“How was it?” I asked as I came over.

“Hell,” he said, shaking his head. Something in the gesture seemed both hopeless and rueful to me -- though if he had any regrets, he never told me of them. I asked how long he was here for, he said ten days.

“I am being targeted. I have had three friends of mine killed in the past month. Others have tried to kill me. See this here—“

On the top of his head is a small, hairless patch, puckered in with fresh skin. “That is shrapnel from a mortar. It went through my helmet.” He’s not bragging, this time – at least it doesn’t seem so. He sounds more astonished.

“All the men in my unit get purple hearts, except me. Because I am not a regular soldier. I get a ‘good job’ from my major.”

Whether he’s fed up, or scared, or tired, or some part of all three, a good portion of his previous bravado is gone. He wants out, he says. He’s going to try to register as “regular army” when he goes back. If he succeeds, he says, he will rotate out when this tour is up, with an American passport, and be able to go live in the states. He wants to live in Texas.

I know nothing about how military recruitment works, or how it relates to US citizenship, but I’m suspicious of this story. Asking around, I hear rumours about members of various militaries – British, in particular – lying to their Arab ‘fixers,’ promising them visas they will never get in order to get them to risk their lives in Iraq. It’s sad to say, but I know a lot of people in this part of the world who will believe anything, however patently false, if it appears to offer the chance for them to go and live in England or America.

The translator starts talking about the book he wants to write; his own story, of an Iraqi who invades his own country, working as in interpreter, side-by-side with the soldiers. He asks me to help him find a ghostwriter; and I promise to try – why? Perhaps because I feel like it would be a terrible thing if even this thoughtless, arrogant, violent SOB’s dreams were all unfulfilled. I hope he isn’t being lied to about his visa. He’s obviously suffered for it, as well as making others suffer. America deserves this guy.

He’s still on the book he wants to write, and the writer who will help him: “whoever I get, they must be a war supporter, because that is 50 percent of the book – it is about the heroism of the troops in the field. The soldiers – not officers, but privates, corporals, sergeants, who risk their lives every day.” Fair enough, I suppose. Though I often wish we could come up with a better way of glorifying people than sending them to die.

Ahlen wahsahlan.

But then, the other day, I was talking to a guy – his name and rank I won’t mention, but he was a fairly well-placed official. I wish I could recall his worlds perfectly, but here, alas, my memory fails.

He said something about how most of the countries in the Arab world are trapped by fear, anger and mistrust. In Arabic, he went on, there is a saying, there must be one madman in every family – or perhaps it was the other way around. In any case, there must be someone who will stand alone, who will take risks and oppose the will of the multitude.

Someone must encourage the Arab countries to engage diplomatically with each other, with the world, with the international community. Someone must remind them that we all share one world. That the Prophet told us we should respect the earth, and the other people on it, as much as ourselves. That, he said, was Jordan’s role – or at least, the role he hoped it could have. To be the sane voice in a screaming crowd.

“There has to be a door, through which peace can enter,” he said.

And that, I suppose, is where I will leave you, faithless readers – for a little while, at least: a killer on one side and a visionary on the other.

Ahlen wahsahlan.

- Nicholas Seeley, 8/2/2005

Amman, Jordan - 5/26/05: Art, Part III - "This Really Happened, I Swear"

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

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Nick sent this Despatch last week and it got lost in the holiday weekend shuffle. Apologies.]

I was in Blue Fig Café today, which is Jordan’s answer to the Art Bar. It’s a bit trendy for my taste, stuffed with overdressed Abdounis, but it has the overwhelming virtue of being one of the few public places that really goes to the effort to display and promote Jordanian art. They have a couple branches around the city that give space to local painters, potters and photographers, and have shows featuring local bands, and as things go, they at least make some effort to get the word out there. One problem I hear about again and again is that a lot of shows just slide under the radar because no one is promoting them, but that’s an issue for another day.

Anyway, I was having lunch with Hamad, a Jordanian visual artist, and between the sliced carrot salad and the black bean pizza I launched into one of my usual tirades about why so many Amman art galleries and cultural centers devote all their space and time to Iraqi and Syrian art, (mostly the fomer) while good local artists go without shoes.

In fact, the one gallery I know of (other than the Fig) that is actually devoted to Jordanian art isn’t open to the public, only to buyers. Fortunately, I know the owner, so I’ve been able to peek in occasionally at the treasures hidden inside.

Anyway, I’m in mid-rant and Hamad (not his real name) leans in and say, “you have to understand, Nick, artists here are shy.”

“Shy,” I shout with my usual wit and aplomb, “what the fuck is that supposed to mean? Artists can’t be SHY! They must be warriors for truth, running through the streets with paintbrushes in hand and blood running down their faces!” (Okay, I made up that last part – but I wish I’d said it, don’t you?)

So Hamad says, “you don’t get it. People here, they are very critical. If you do something, they don’t look at it, they just ask ‘Why would you do that.’ If there is something, they do not talk about the good things, they just look and say, ‘this is wrong, this is wrong, this is bad, why did you do this.’ They are very negative. So, why would an artist show his work, when this is all he will get from people?”

“Really?” I asked in wonderment, sitting back and sipping my Hi-caf mocha soy-latte explosion.

“Absolutely. Most artists here,” he continued sagely, “make art for their family and friends only, not for strangers. They won’t appreciate it anyway.”

Which just goes to show that the universe sometimes answers questions you didn’t know you were asking.

Of course, surly people with nothing to do but put down other’s work isn’t the only reason artists could have to be shy here. The ineluctable secret police are another – some of you may remember the earlier dispatch that described how Amman’s nascent garage-metal movement was put down because of accusations of Satanism. I know quite a few folks who sat in jail over that one.

So artists do have to be careful of what they say or do, which may be another factor in the silent spring effect. I also get the impression, though I can’t prove it, that the things that will get you in trouble here are kind of unpredictable, because of the balancing act between the different factions of society – it’s not as simple as, “don’t insult the rulers. Another bunch of folks reputedly got thrown in jail for wearing goth costumes in a bar.

And one thing I neglected to mention in that list of art projects I sent was the tattoo artists. Actually, I didn’t mention them because I don’t actually know them – you see, they keep disappearing. I’ve been trying for a month now to get some new ink; and twice friends who have gotten work done have offered to hook me up with their artists.

The first one we called just stopped answering his phone, and vanished. The second guy we tried lived with a roommate, who told my friend tersely over the phone that the guy had gotten thrown in jail a few days earlier. Hmmm. Couldn’t tell you if there was a tattoo connection to the disappearances, but it’s a slightly unnerving coincidence.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to go hide all my ripped-up jeans, and buy some long-sleeved shirts…

- Nicholas Seeley, 5/26/05

Amman, Jordan - 5/17/2005: Art Can Hurt You, Part II

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

To continue with the art-in-Jordan theme, here are a few of the art projects my friends are involved in. (names, when I use them, are changed to protect the innocent.)

There are five filmmakers in my close acquaintance, interestingly representing different approaches to the art. One has Hollywood connections, and is trying to produce a Jordanian-and-American made feature film here, for a western market. The idea is to make something huge that uses Jordan as both a location and a subject, and will catapult this country’s filmmakers into the international spotlight. Getting it made is, of course, a long shot, as with any Hollywood feature, but if it works, it could score big. Another filmmaker makes features and TV series for the local stations. He’s burned out and bitter about the nepotism and cronyism that he says prevents talented people (not just him) from making shows that would get the Jordanian public watching local TV again (they don’t).

The other three are making small, art-scene films for the festival circuit (local and international); they’re determined to try and improve the outside world’s perception of the middle east in their own, small way, bit by bit. I think they’re good, and some have even gotten some notice.

Then there are the painters; I know two, both of whom make their living doing photography and design for magazines and using approximately one trillionth of their talent. One has had some local exhibits of her work, the other doesn’t bother, she’s trying to get back into school in Europe.

There’s a makeup artist who’s constantly shanghaiing friends into letting him turn them into glamour queens or hookers or Rocky-Horror space aliens for his portfolio. There are a couple of actors (one Jordanian-American, the other Jordanian-Jordanian) who grab every short film or voice over part they can, and lament the lack of stage opportunities in loud voices. We have a theater circle that meets every couple of weeks to hang out and read plays; usually we have about ten people there.

There’s another theater artist who works with art education programs here; talking with her is like a lesson in frustration as she describes project after project that’s been shut down because of lack of funding, interest, or hope.

Then there are the writers. I attend a writer’s salon every week or so; the size varies but at the moment there are three hard-core folks. The woman who hosts the circle is an established author who’s published stories in dozens of lit mags in the US, the UK and Canada; she writes in English because she says it’s a waste of time to write in Arabic; most of the other people there are foreigners of one stripe or another.

There’s a musician who usually has about three bands going at once. He just cut a CD, but he’s frustrated because he’s trying to get it printed and promoted locally rather than going overseas where he could probably capitalize on the exoticism of Middle-Eastern Modern Jazz to get a contract fairly easily (the band’s also really fuckin’ good.)

It looks good on paper. Why doesn’t it feel right? Maybe it’s because there’s a sense, in the US, that when you make art, someone cares. This sense may be self deception; may be the fallout of a pseudo-artistic pop culture that American artists all manage to believe they are a part of. Still, it’s there. Here, you know full well that no one gives a fuck.

One of the phrases I hear over and over in conversation is “people in this country are afraid to invest the amount of money it would take to make a film/album/play/magazine/novel/exhibit.”

Or maybe it’s because, in New York, for example, the presence of all those frustrated aspiring artists is balanced by the success stories that surround them. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, The Lion King on Broadway and The Matrix, and the Flea theater that packs every house with downtown New Yorkers, and bands from the Goo Goo Dolls to Antigone Rising to Dirty Mary give you something to aspire to, a sense that there are rewards to be won and path you must take to win them.

Or maybe it’s something else altogether. As usual, beats me. Where’s that whiskey…?

- Nicholas Seeley, 5/17/05

Amman, Jordan - 5/7/2005: Art Can Hurt You

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

One thing that living outside the US really puts a different perspective on is the functionality of culture. Art is a funny thing over here.

There’s a lot going on, and nothing, all at once -- it’s like Dickens, if he were really, really stoned. All my friends make art, but they never do shows. Then they all complain that there are no shows. Everybody has a dozen hobbies, but no one makes art. Except when someone does, then everyone hates it. I’m in a bunch of different little cultural “salons” – I even started one of them – but still, I often feel like there’s no one asking the big questions.

When I was in Cambodia, the cinemas showed a weird mixture of American, Thai and Cambodian films. I went to one of the latter, and found it absolutely unwatchable – but it had all the right elements – romance, mysticism, horror. The local audience loved it. It said something to them about life. Here, I theoretically write the art column for my magazine, but in four months there hasn’t been anything worth writing about that wasn’t done by one of the magazine’s staff members.

My friend who was in Iraq a few months ago came back wide-eyed with amazement over all the ART they have there – people making it, people selling it, people appreciating it. They’re getting blown up, but at least they appreciate Jim Jarmusch, right? Baghdad, he says, that’s a real city. Not like this place. Someone in one of those salons told me this saying: “Books are written in Egypt, printed in Lebanon, and read in Iraq.” You notice it doesn’t mention Jordan. Not surprising; I don’t think this country is old enough to be in sayings yet.

What it all adds up to is this: the sense of something sterile about the culture here. The feeling that between all the malls and big hotels and western-style-whatevers, there isn’t really any real Jordan to get down to, just falafel and despondency.

You get used to certain aspects of “cultural difference” – people have different manners, different values, laugh at different jokes. But some things still blow your mind. In so many ways, the visible differences between Jordanian and American culture are such minor things that it’s hard to get your head around the big ones – like the fact that this culture appears to place an entirely different value on acts of cultural creation than we do.

There are a lot of possible reasons for this. The culture that is valued here is almost exclusively tied to religion. The invasion of American/European culture has pushed out so much that’s indigenous. People have been without art so long, they don’t think they can do it anymore. Funding gets tied up in messy issues of political patronage.

Since I got here, one of my goals here has been to figure out what the hell is up with this place and art. I haven’t even come close to doing it, and, as such, have ended up almost completely avoiding the topic in my columns here. So, over the next couple weeks, I will treat you all to some of my own inconclusive musings about the art scene here. (You lucky people!) I also have a couple new pieces coming out, and a couple old ones I want to start putting up on my own site that deal with the art issue, and I’ll link to them as they come up.

I don’t claim to be solving or proving anything here -- in fact I find my own opinion changes from day to day – I’m just going to provide a few snapshots (or, maybe, blurry watercolors) of the culture here. Maybe one of y’all can figure it out.

- Nicholas Seeley, 5/7/05

Amman, Jordan - 4/24/05: Retrograde

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

A Mars Retrograde is what my mystic friend called it. Those weeks when everyone’s life goes to hell at once.

There are times when the work doesn’t just pile up, it blows through like a dust storm, in great spastics drifts that cover rooms in mountains of snowy white paper, then sweep away again, leaving silence. Sometimes when this happens you feel like you’re the only one beneath the wheel, other times everyone around you seems to be running from some calamity of their own. Whether this is attributable to the stars or just bad luck is anyone’s guess. But I’m warming to the idea. The word “retrograde” is what does it, really. ”Going backwards.” That’s the feeling you get, isn’t it, when life overwhelms you a little bit – the sense that you are going against the grain, challenging your destiny and making an enemy of your own future. The sense that things are not supposed to be this way.

If the astrologers are right, and the malign forces in the world are due to the influence of Mars and Saturn, wouldn’t it suggest a wonderful option for disposing of Earth’s vast nuclear stockpiles? Launch them all at those celestial rogues, in careful volleys calculated to knock the offenders out of their orbits and send them winging off into deep space, to work their malevolent mojo on some other race of sentient beings with delusions of science.

Astrology, my mystic friend swears, truly originated in the Middle East, among Arabic people. Modern astrology is a Western Perversion.

Everyone should have a mystic friend to tell them these things.

I recently read a charming dispatch from Quatar in which a sheik explained that that other horrid western perversion, oral sex, arose from the disgusting Occidental practice of removing one’s clothes while fucking. Which ties back nicely to my theory that the whole “radical Islam” thing that’s getting everyone so steamed is really just an iteration of basic biological desire in male animals to kill anyone who’s getting laid more than thay are.

Spring is finally here, and Amman has started to get hot, bit it won’t bake for another month or so. Now, it’s just sticky, warm and overcast like south Texas before a summer storm, except the rain never comes and the nights are stuffy, damp and barely cooler than the days.

I take refuge from the heat in the battered little English school where I work. You know you’re in the third word when the first thing schools advertise are their air-conditioners. They turn them up full blast as soon as the temperature gets above 50, and freeze the students to their seats like popsicles. No wonder they don’t learn anything.

Sooner or later, every ex-pat faces this moment. The local English school, purgatory for all who flee America. They’re pretty much the same, the third-world over; the tiny worn-out rooms with erasable marker stains on the wall, and slats over the windows, and a faint tracery of Arabic graffiti on the dingy white paint. They pick up teachers like strip joints pick up new girls; luring in the transitioning or temporarily lost. Itinerant students, broke journalists, stranded backpackers, all get shanghaied in to fill the school’s extravagant promise of “native English-speaking instructors.”

Just like a strip joint, it’s decent money, but never really worth it. The danger lies in staying there too long.

It seems the world is full of dead ends. Little traps laid for the unwary. We try to plot our lives between these, like boats dodging the rocks on a deep and unpredictable river. Which is perhaps ironic, because it implies that, as pragmatic or scientific or jaded as we may be, we still believe, in some way, in destiny. We believe there is a way life is supposed to work out, and a million ways it isn’t. That if we stay on the path, avoiding the wolves and pitfalls, that we will somehow get somewhere, or accomplish something, if not as individuals, then at least we contribute to the progress of a nation, or a species, or science.

And when we get off the path, we’re moving backwards. Mars, retrograde.

This kind of hidden theism gives me nosebleeds. (That, or I have a brain tumor. News to follow.) I had to go back to America recently; just for a few days, to take care of some business, and for me it was like going backwards in time. I had awakened from a dream, into a world where people lived in accordance with rules I had forgotten. They had places to go, and ways to get there. Magical realism, redux.

But, of course, then I had to wonder, which world was real, and which wasn’t?

Am I at a dead end, in a city where millions are born, live their entire lives and die? Is it a risk I’m taking, when I go to another spot on a globe where people are growing up and getting jobs and getting sick and dying? One by one, the lines that moored my to the world I grew up in, the world where things are supposed to work out, are snapping.

Strange things happen to people when they stop believing in the river, and the boat, and the harbor at the end under white cliffs. I mean, really stop believing, and see that there is no harbor, no cliffs or rocks, just open water in every direction, and all the things you took for hills and valleys just ripples that appear for a second and vanish back again into the dark sea.

I lived my life in a fantasy, and now I’m struggling to wake up, like the sleeper who feels the incubus’ weight on his chest, and strains to move, but can’t.

- Nicholas Seeley, 4/24/05

Amman, Jordan - 3/28/05: Like Fishing off the Empire State Building

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

Some weeks ago I was observing an English class being taught by a friend. The word being studied was “typical.” The teacher explained that “typical” meant “the usual type” of something; for example, she said, someone might say “describe a typical Jordanian.”

One of the class looked up. “The typical Jordanian,” she says, “going to work, looks like this,” and made a face that was half scowl, half snarl, conveying unhappiness and disgust. The whole class laughed. The students were not high school kids, but members of a major Jordanian government bureau.

A few days later, I was talking with another friend, an Arab woman who has been trying to get backing for a film project in Jordan. “Jordanians complain about not having an entertainment industry,” she said, “but when you try to do something, it’s always ‘that could be difficult,’ meaning ‘No.’”

“Oliver Stone wanted to shoot part of Alexander here,” she went on – she would know – “but he needed to bring in horses from somewhere, and he went to the government, and they said ‘bringing horses here would be very difficult.’ How are they going to get anything happening if they won’t get behind anything?”

“It’s because of the attitude here,” she concluded. “You put a Syrian, a Jordanian, an Iraqi, a Saudi in a line, and ask them, is the glass half full or half empty, and all the others will say it’s half full, despite the fact that their countries are a mess. Jordan has the best deal going, but the Jordanian will be the one to say ‘half empty.’”

I can’t vouch for whether this last is true or not, but I can vouch for the fact that Jordanians, and other Arabs, will talk endlessly about how unpleasant Jordanians are. It’s as close to universal as anything I can recall seeing. It’s practically a sport. I have a half dozen more stories like this, easily.

What is it that makes Americans so proud of the disaster-on-wheels we call a country; while others, blessed with a profound lack of natural or national resources, who have managed to scratch a living from a worthless chunk of desert, nevertheless feel the need to constantly remind each other what a bunch of shmoes they are?

There are a lot of theories. Another of my friends says it’s because there’s no water here – or at least, very little, and little of it accessible. No great lakes, or beaches or forests. Nothing green for miles except the lights on the mosque minarets. When you can’t even look out at the gray mist across the water, your horizons get smaller.

Friends who have come back from Beirut lament the lack of “stuff to do” in Amman, a complaint I find factually inexplicable. There are dozens of bars and clubs here, in what is, frankly, a very small town. They range from glitzy nightclubs with names like Prana and Nai, where rich kids from powerful Ammani families hang out, to dive pubs under cheap hotels where foreigners booze themselves silly, to painted-up whorehouses off third circle where dreary eastern European women sell themselves underneath pictures of Britney Spears.

There are plenty of places to go and drink, but what’s missing, I often feel, is the sense of dialogue. Communities of people. Political parties. One problem with absolute monarchy is that it breeds apathy.

Maybe in America it’s a vicious circle – art comments on society, the government tries to ban art, the media comments on the art and then the artists turn around and make art criticizing the media and the government. And in the end, who cares, since all our art and free speech does not seem to have done much to get us a better government. In fact, if the U.S. were the only test case, I think I’d favor having all speech of any kind banned.

Here no one comments on anything. I met a girl the other day who does research for a local human-rights NGO. We were talking about how there was no art being made in Jordan. She told me she specialized in free speech issues. What use is free speech, I asked her, if no one is using it?

But why would they? What’s the point in making “Jordanian” art, after all? This is a young country. The artists here are short on capital, both intellectual and physical. They have to be very careful what they say. Is it any wonder people here feel they can’t compete with the art that’s being made in New York or London or Beirut, where things are a bit freer, patrons are a bit wealthier?

And even if you do make something, what’s the point when your nation is going to run out of water and become uninhabitable within twenty years? That’s cause for some depression, right there.

The horizons really do fit pretty tight across the shoulders for most people here. Americans can go anywhere, so few of us realize how many people in the world are virtual prisoners in their own countries. Who’s handing out visas to Palestinian Arabs these days, remind me?

“There’s nothing I can do to change anything,” one Jordanian friend told me, “so fuck it, you know? Whatever. There’s scotch, there’s weed, there’s chicks everywhere you go, so everywhere I’d just be doing the same thing anyway.”

“I want to do, like, concerts, in between the Israeli and Palestinian territories. Like, on the wall, I’d like to organize, so people, you know, on both sides could hear it. And get some great artists, and sing about peace. But what the fuck – I can’t even GO there, so how the fuck am I supposed to do that?”

Beats me, buddy. Beats me.

- Nicholas Seeley, 3/28/05

Amman, Jordan - 3/21/05: It Was Inevitable, Really

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

For those who say I swear to much, here's a little Arabic to learn and use. Today, we conjugate the verb "FUCK"

Simple Present:

I fuck = ana anayek
you fuck (male) = inte tenayek
you fuck (femal) = inti tenayeki
he fucks = hoouh yanayek
she fucks = heeuh tenayek
we fuck = ehna nanayek
you (all) fuck = into tenayekoo
they fuck = humeh yanayekoo

Simple Past:

I fucked = ana nayek't
you fucked (m) = inte nayek't
you fucked (f) = inti nayekti
he fucked = hoouh nayek

(are you beginning to get where this is going...?)

she fucked = heeuh nayek't
we fucked = ehna nayekna
you (all) fucked = into nayektoo
they fucked = humeh nayekoo

Imperative:

FUCK! = NICK!

- Nicholas "NICK!" Seeley, 3/21/05

Amman, Jordan - 3/14/05: Indifference, Our Biggest Export

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

We all live in a world of strange and inexplicable oppositions, and it’s seldom more obvious than here. My thoughts on the overwhelming licentiousness of Islamic societies could fill a column on their own – or perhaps a book.

Honesty is another thing. Jordan (and, as I understand, Arab societies in general) are by and large frighteningly honest -- at least by American standards. The culture demands hospitality to guests, and that includes tourists. Street crime here is close to nonexistent. (Street fights between guys are common, but that’s another story.)

Even when you do encounter someone who will rip you off, it seems to be because of some peculiar mental game they’ve played – like, “this person isn’t Muslim, so it’s okay if I rip them off, they don’t really count.” How different is that from all the wonderful rationalizations Americans use to avoid giving change to panhandlers? “Well, they don’t count, they probably do this for a living.”

Everyone has their rationalizations.

But even with honesty and politeness being of paramount social importance, the government here is as paranoid, incompetent and kleptocratic as any.

Maybe that’s just the nature of government.

It’s not the Royal Family, who, by and large, seem to be intelligent and activist, and have a strong social and economic agenda for the country. And yet. In a recent conversation with the editor of a local Arabic newspaper, I learned that for the past 15 years or so, the country has had a special tax, the proceeds from which were supposed to be dedicated to providing electrical power to the rural south of the country.

Problem is, the rural south has been pretty much electrified for 10 years.

This editor tried to ask the ministry in charge where the money was going. They spent weeks sending his reporters from office to office, as every minister pretended he wasn’t the one responsible for the program. No one could produce any record of how the money from the tax was being spent. Millions of dinars just vanished into thin air.

It’s like that all over. In most countries, the government officials at least have the decency to lie to reporters; here, many won’t speak with them at all, or will persistently put them off in the hope that they will go away.

Of course, the real problem isn’t that the government uses this tactic – it’s that it works. The paper never ran that tax story, because they couldn’t get the government to answer their questions. Every place I’ve worked, every reporter I’ve spoken to, they squelch stories because they’ve been stonewalled by some elected official. No one wants to offend the government by showing them up. Politeness and timidity trump the truth again.

Of course, as long at the media allow the government to choose what gets reported and what doesn’t, there’s never going to be any transparency.

Gosh, now it sounds like I’m talking about America, doesn’t it?

Of course, the media has a disadvantage of it’s own. Even if there were magazines and newspapers and TV stations digging deep into the country’s dirty laundary, someone would have to read the stories. And indifference seems big here. Jordan, after all, has civil unrest on three borders now. I would expect people to be more bothered.

Perhaps it’s numbness. Things have been blowing up around here pretty regularly for 60 years; one more bombing, or the murder of one more politician just doesn’t create the same waves of fear and outrage that a similar event would cause in the U.S.

Of course, there is a fair amount of “who REALLY killed Hariri,” going on in bars – though less than you’d think, because pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to seems convinced the Syrian government did it. Hey, law of unintended consequences. Governments kill people all the time – who can predict when a routine extrajudicial assassination is going to blow up in your face?

Perhaps, too, there’s a certain amount of “not in my backyard” thinking. Because Jordan’s monarch is strong. His secret police are vigilant. The economy is booming – so much so that the poorest people in the country are being priced out of the market as Jordan tries harder and harder to be a slice of America in the Middle East.

And perhaps that’s the most disturbing thing about the relative silence about Hariri. Because if America proves anything, it proves peoples' ability to tune out the problems of others when their bellies are full. (Yes, there are also plenty of people in America who have little time for other’s problems because they are too genuinely preoccupied with their own survival, but that’s true everywhere in the world.)

Give people a couple malls and Britney Spears videos, and suddenly their problems become completely different than their neighbor’s problems.

Give a country a little economic prosperity, a few western trappings, and suddenly they start pulling out of the fray altogether. Paying attention to the disasters looming on every side might mean having to justify their own success. Worse still, it might mean, occasionally, standing up to the United States. Can’t have that.

Well, look who sends them the movies, the fashion magazines and pop stars and Prozac and maxi pads with wings -- all the things that keep us nicely sedated at home. I wonder if we do it on purpose.

- Nicholas Seeley, 3/14/05

Amman, Jordan - 3/8/05: Howl

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

[Editor's note: Uh-oh.]

I apologize, faithless readers, for the long silence.

I’ve been sick.

I feel decidedly strange. Mostly the areas between my toes and the crown of my head. Everything looks a little off –

-think driving the interstate, and beginning to suspect you missed your turnoff a few miles back, and every sign and blade of grass becomes odd and unfamiliar as you examine it, wondering, “have I seen this blade of grass before; have I driven this road; or was it just in a dream?”

So there’s something very small that’s wrong with the world.

The spot in the corner of your eye you can’t catch.

Maybe I have been traveling too much. Or not enough. Opposites begin to seem interchangeable, that’s another symptom. To much sleep or not enough? Too many drugs, or an excess of sobriety? Working all the time, or not at all?

Perhaps, I theorize, this is a feature of the lack of routine in life. Most of the time, don’t we sleepwalk through our days, as if their greatest virtue were in their brevity? “Thank god, this day is over.” We strive to make the time go faster, and a long day is one we dread. The piano plays the tune, and we dance the same dance over and over, waking momentarily to have a fight, make a decision, impose on ourselves some artificial, roller-coaster thrill, and then go back to sleep.

Funny how the thing most of us seem to want most in our lives is for them to go by as quickly and unnoticeably as possible.

But not me, right? I will embrace the moments, I will relish eventuality, I will not slumber through this. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? To get off the rails. Out of the Zombie Lane. Even if it means waking every morning without a clue what happens next. Trying to do everything. Or nothing. Making the whole thing up again from scratch.

Maybe I have been awake too long. Analyzing every blade of grass. When you begin to anatomize each detail of the world, like Dedalus, you realize your wings are melting – or was that the other one?

Fear the heat, the headache, it addles the mind, like you’re looking out your eyes sideways,
So you find another cave. Dig in. Wait.
April comes early here, and cruel,
after you’ve hung on through the cold and loveless damp
and broken pipes and frozen sewer sludge
until finally the sun peeps through the clouds and rather than bringing warmth and joy finds you huddled and alone
wrapped in blankets on a talus of bottles in front of a glowing panel full of nothing
and you wake from nightmares of severed hands, and still want to go back to sleep,

Right now, you look crazy even to yourself.

And you think, back to sleep, back to sleep, but the pills don’t work anymore and the liquor is like water and the long days and nights run one into another and another, changing shape and realigning and pushing you further, stay awake, work harder, write more, push forward, eat, coffee, pick your incandescent junkie god

‘cause I am seeing the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

frightened, disowned, running lizardlike to get lost in the desert, hiding in tiny apartments wrapped in the cellophane tangles of their own insanity, or brought down by bombs or bullets or their own treacherous bodies, or just losing the battle on the streets to the computers and machines who take their places

Do you know I have a bald patch on the side of my leg? All the hair is torn away from one spot, the spot where I cross one leg over the other sitting at my desk. Why the fuck should that happen?

The strongest, smartest people I know are scrawling their life away on slips of paper to crumple up and shove down the sewer, unable to work, isolated by their own ideas or forced to suck on the dick of the next guy up the ladder for a meal served from the thigh of the guy below, while the worst run the world from glittering palaces, and the bland the incompetent the stupid get grants and fellowships to serve them, second assistant cog in the wheel rolling over

The screenwriter who won’t settle for a crappy desk job and the poet who doesn’t write anymore and the actress who isn’t going to act in anything again and the would-be politicians who can’t get on the ballot and film stars who can’t get a break and the sculptor who took pills last week cause he missed his next enlightenment going from god to heroin and back again,

and the mad sad flaccid refuse of the world of suspended invisible money; the good and the kind who’ve hidden in the damp corners of the planet, blacking their faces with mud to cover up their own ineffectuality-

But everybody has a fucking screenplay.

Do you ever wonder why they can’t finish them, all the writers? They’re the stories of our fucking lives is it any surprise there’s no resolution, if we ever finished, we’d be worms

Cowering in tunnels while the world falls into the hands of the fucked-up and idiotic, dead from the neck up sheep and killer robot brains with nothing in them, or polished into the floors of glittering condos, a generation of men and women spawned by maggots, spontaneous generation taken to a new level,

Well you said you liked the fucking poetry.

And behind them a legion of icons brought low by mediocrity;
they rubbed all the paint off ‘em before taking them to the stadium for execution,
their helping of pills or cancer or a shotgun to the face or a jump off the Staten Island Fairy
Ginsberg would have loved that one
Except he wanted it this way, if you were just hip enough to the whole
Mystical conspiracy,
You wouldn’t have to die at all,
But fuck him. Dig him up and fuck him,
we should have blood dripping from our teeth, not stars in our eyes,

When the surest proof of the absence of God is that we are allowed to continue to exist.

Because when was the last time you read something that shattered your world and was written by someone that was still alive?

You’ve seen a thousand movies and nothing that was any good; but they’re gonna put a TV camera on you and follow you through the streets, how long until we’re all on television? The end of all discrimination, just wait, and did you really think the CIA wasn’t torturing prisoners these days, and did you really think the war was gonna turn out ok and that the stuff they’re pouring in the water was gonna give you better living through chemistry or that democracy would grow like a hothouse flower in the desert sand and did you ever really believe that anything would get better when there wasn’t anything left to say about any of it and anyone who would can’t won’t too scared won’t be heard,

Fuck ‘em all, but you can’t even say it anymore, don’t move don’t laught don’t dance don’t write, stand frozen eyes on the second star to the left,

Just open your mouth and scream, you don’t need to make any noise there aren’t any words that haven’t been used all up anyway, just

howl

HowL

HOWL

- Nicholas Seeley, 3/8/05

Amman Jordan - 2/18/05: A Walk Through the City of Dead Cats

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

[Editor's Note: Today we have what Nick rightly calls "something special" - a guest despatch in the form of a photo essay, revealing why Nick titled his second-ever despatch from Jordan "The Sweet Smell of Dead Cat." For those who believe Nick is prone to exagerration... well, maybe, but clearly not about the dead cats.]

You find you get blasé about some things, living in the middle east. Fire. Electricity.

My washing machine is this ancient contraption that looks like an undersized oil drum; the sides are half rusted out, most the cord’s insulation is long gone, and irregularly replaced with electrical tape. To fill it, you have to run a hose into the side from the sink -- and when the hose seal breaks and you find yourself standing ankle deep in water in your kitchen, fiddling with the cord of a major appliance as sparks flicker mildly from the outlet, you ask yourself, “would I ever do this in the States?”

We all have these gas heaters, called soba, to get us through the winter, and every one of my friends has at some point set themselves on fire standing in front of the damned things trying to get warm. There’s theoretically a safety valve in ‘em, so that when the pilot light goes out because you’ve burned up all the oxygen in the room, the gas flow at least stops – so you don’t die twice. Of course, it doesn’t matter, because you just get a candle and keep re-lighting the thing. One freezing night last week I ran out of candles, and I had to light my toothbrush to keep the pilot light going.

Firearms going off at all hours of the night. Secret police informers. Drivers who use three lanes at once. Wild dogs. We make accommodations with these things.

There’s civil war on three borders now. A month ago, on Metran Street, I saw a kid get hit by a service. There’s death, of course, of human and animal varieties. Around the Eid al Adha, goat bits litter the streets from hundreds of sacrifices. The deranged strays that haunt your steps hide under trash cans on streets covered with shattered glass, and chew on the corpses of their deceased buddies. That’s friendship, right to the end. After all, does the death of a cat somehow mean less than that of a person, or a friend, or the former prime minister of Lebanon?

This week, our guest despatcher Charlotte Watts (email) brings you a walk through the city of dead cats.

(Click pictures for larger images)

- Nicholas Seeley, 2/12/05

Amman, Jordan - 2/12/05: The New Berlin Wall

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

He deserves better than I can manage, and possibly worse, but this one is for Arthur Miller - he gave a voice to all the stupid schmucks out there who thought their hard work was supposed to earn them something. He was the man who gave me my first clue what art was all about. Thanks, Art.

“The grammar, the proverbs, and the idioms of a language give us a clear understanding of how its mother tongue users think and feel, and they do this more completely than anything else can. The vocabulary is the sum total of all the objects, actions and ideas that affect them or that they need to know in their environment. Their literature expresses the best of what they have experienced and felt over the years.

It is for these reasons that language is an expression of the personality of the group, a means of identifying its members according to their culture. When, for example, we say "I am Italian" or "I am Yoruba", we are identifying ourselves as members of a particular cultural group using a particular language.”

- from Clifford Fyle, “National Languages and Cultural Identity.”

UNESCO Courier, 1983

The last edition of my former magazine, EYE, ran a scathing piece about Jordan’s local television stations. To put it gently, they suck. No one watches them, because they show crap no one is interested in. Everyone has satellite. Even in poor villages on the desert highways, you see satellite dishes sprouting from the smallest towns like exotic mechanical flowers.

This isn’t just a local phenomenon. It’s all over the arab world, according to the media company execs I interviewed. It’s all over the world – while I was news junkying for that article, I found a piece about the exact same phenomenon in the Maldives. Local entertainment channels are being killed by satellite. Video killed the radio star. Old story.

Now, there are a couple of possible explanations for this.

The good folks at heavily-censored Jordan TV claim that all they need is money to reinvent the station as a viable market player. But short of the discovery of new, Saudi-sized oilfields under Abdoun, it’s staggeringly unlikely that JTV will ever have enough funding to produce programming that is as beautifully shot, well produced, and carefully designed as what comes out of Paris, London, Los Angeles, or even Beirut.

So, explanation number one is funding. Others say the one card JTV has to play is localization. That means TV shows about Jordanian characters, whose problems are Jordanian problems. It means presenters who look and sound Jordanian, who viewers can identify with. It means solid local news that makes people feel connected to their community in a wider sense. It may not look as pretty as what they make in LA, but there’s no law preventing it from being better written and more relevant. (Actually, that explanation mostly comes from me and the TV channel owners in the Maldives – Arabs have too much of an inferiority complex to think that anyone cares what happens to them. Looking at recent history, they have a point.)

“Localization” was a word I heard a lot in the EYE office – right before the damn rag got sold to Dubai. Still, they were trying. And they had a reason to, because so much of Jordan’s media is very un-local.

The first factor, of course, is language.

English is not overwhelmingly common in public life here – not yet. But there are English signs on every street in Amman, and English books, magazines and newspapers are widely read. Jordan’s universities teach a number of classes in English; some of my Jordanian co-workers actually consider it their mother tongue – they speak it better than Arabic. Some of the “old-timers” in this cellblock of a country get really worried about, say, the fact that there are now businesses that don’t bother to put Arabic on their signs, or in their literature, or on the doors of suites in their big high-rises. But hey, not me – I’m an optimist.

To optimists, what all this Anglicization is, is a sign that English, despite the colonial baggage it carries, is becoming a language of international communication and commerce. Esperanto sucked the big dick of death, but English is up and coming for the title of “universal language.” Perhaps it helps that America, the big popularizer of English, was never a colonial power in quite the way the nations of old Europe were. We always maintained plausible deniability. (thanks, Ike!) Or, maybe it’s just the fact that everyone watches our movies and satellite TV stations that makes English inescapable.

As Larry E. Smith said in the early 80’s, “when any language becomes international in character, it cannot be bound to any one culture. A Thai doesn't need to sound like an American in order to use English well with a Filipino at an A.S.E.A.N. meeting. A Japanese doesn't need an appreciation of a British lifestyle in order to use English in his business dealings with a Malaysian.”

In many places, English is studied for its utility as a language of international commerce, but not widely used locally (think Japan or Korea). In others, according to scholars like India’s Braj B. Kachru, many regions now have their own “Englishes” with serve as means of communication between different local ethnicities, so that English is in a way reinscribed by situation and use into part of the local landscape.

Is either of these the case in Jordan? The question is far from trivial, because languages are dangerous things: like walls, they can be used to enclose a nation and bind it together, or to divide and fragment it. Languages are more than just modes of communication. A language is a marker, a way of defining groups and inscribing them with value. As language both defines and is defined by culture, so the “possession” of a language by a group gives that group, in the words of the Eastern-European linguist Michael Shafir, “a certain power of moral regulation.”

“The central activity of intellectuals is their use and control of language,” Shafir says. “Those who spoke or could be made to speak a particular language--a national, hence a politically legitimate language--were the usable material of the nation, its members in whose name power could be demanded.”

So there is explanation number three: learning a language can be a way of putting up a wall without looking like you are doing so.

And new Berlin walls are going up in countries around the world – Ukraine, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Chechnya are only a few of the countries in the grip of conflicts of linguistic and ethnic divisions. An iron curtain has descended across the planet, dividing those who are lucky enough to talk American from everyone else. The curtain divides the rich kids in the clubs in Abdoun who wear Prada and buy English-language magazines from the kids who have to go to public schools where students are beaten with rubber hoses. The curtain divides the businessmen in glittering offices in Swefiyyah from the Egyptian day laborers and maids who make 125 JD and send most of it back to their families in Cairo. The curtain divides me and my one language from the Veema, the Sri Lankan maid who speaks five languages, none of which can earn her a living better than scrubbing floors.

Language a way of consolidating the power to define culture. Speaking a language gives the speaker a power to exclude from the discussion those who do not speak it. And the third world is tearing itself in half over this. Those who can speak English, who can play at being “western” even are they pretend to hate the west, are indefinably better than those who can’t.

And that brings us back to the tight spot that Jordan TV is in. Because what they are competing against is not just a lack of money, it is a deeply-rooted cultural trend. It’s the persistent idea that in some abstract and indefinable way, foreign means “better.”

Sometimes, of course, there is a concrete basis for the idea that a foreign product is better – Jordan TV's old programming, according to everyone we spoke to, just failed to be entertaining. Big budgets can pay for better acting, better effects, and a lot of other things. So maybe the budget hawks are right, and if they just get enough money, they can get local TV off the ground.

But I doubt it. Deep down, we all know that no one wants to watch a TV channel in Arabic. No one wants shows that are relevant to their real lives – they want entertainment that is relevant to the people they want to be. And the people who control the money want to be American. And to everyone who thinks Arab culture has value of its own, or that there’s no such thing as a language that expresses the sum total of everyone’s thoughts and feelings – well, heck, you’re probably right, but sometimes you’re just born on the wrong side of the wall.

- Nicholas Seeley, 2/12/05

Amman, Jordan - 1/29/05: The Lurking Horror

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

In which Nick may finally, finally have lost his mind. - Ed.

I have been avoiding this day for many months, but necessity has, finally, made my fate inescapable. There was no way out; the lurking horror had to be faced.

I had spent all afternoon hunting for one elusive computer component, and I didn’t have time to go back for reinforcements. If anyone cares, which I rather doubt, it’s interesting to note that s-video cables come in two different species, the 4-pin and the 7-pin, which, while phenotypically similar, differ wildly in their habits and habitats. While the 4-pin is as common as field mice, the 7- is a rare and difficult breed, apparently not known in captivity in all of Jordan. The little electronics markets on my street didn’t carry either kind, neither did the computer shop in Shmaisani (inexpertly named FUN DIRECTORY). I even tried the Radio Shack and PC World out in garden street – both had the 4-pin, but not the 7-.

The guy at Radio Shack told me that it was completely impossible to find 7-pin connectors in the middle east, presumably because the 7-pin arrangement is somehow offensive to God. At PC World, however, the proprietor gave me a clue where I might find the elusive component I sought… but to go there would mean facing that omnipresent, lurking horror.

So this afternoon I went to the Mall.

Amman’s one mall, on Mecca street on the outskirts of town, is a shining example of how architecture imitiates life: it’s a building built by somebody who really, really felt like they had something to prove. Five stories tall, a cyclopean mass sheathed in marble and guarded by jackbooted security agents, Mecca mall far outdoes the average American suburban consumer mall, and probably comes close in size to some of the giants like Tysons or Carousel. (And is it any coincidence that it’s called Mecca and shaped like a big cube? I think not. Come and worship.)

I shouldn’t have gone alone – unsure as I was how I would react to being surrounded by that much imitation-America. Would I be overtaken by nostalgia for the simple pleasures of Cinn-A-Bon and Sharper Image? Or would the sight of all those logos drive me into a fury of unimaginable violence, culminating in a full-fledged invasion of Banana Republic?

But the reality was more horrifying than I could have imagined. From the moment I walked through the 3-lane automated sliding glass doors, I was seized by an unattributable feeling of uneasiness, comparable only to awakening from an extended binge of psychedelics and coca-cola; there was a persistent sense of something wrong with the world itself. I felt like a cinephile watching a John Carpenter film, hearing the creepy music swell behind the hero, knowing disaster was immanent, but simultaneously unable to accept the reality of the impending calamity.

Dear God, but the place looked exactly like an American mall: huge glass-walled shops, sunglass kiosks, piped-in music and the smell of movie theater popcorn. For a moment the sense of being back in Northern Virginia was so disorienting that it crowded out all other thoughts, but my sensation of vertigo was quickly replaced by a growing uneasiness and horror. Where was I? What was going on?

It was, I knew, too late to flee the assault on my senses and my sanity. I had no choice but to press on and attempt to uncover whatever otherworldly force was making me feel so strange.

There was the music – Dear God, the music! Even after months of exposure, I cannot get used to the sound of Arabic pop. I try to be understanding of cultural differences, yet how can one not retain a certain suspicion towards a culture that describes the sound of small animals being tortured to death as music? And here it was, that unearthly caterwauling, piping out of the speaker system into the sea of shoestores and cell-phone kiosks.

The next thing I noticed was the disturbing preponderance of stores specializing in babies and children’s clothing. How strange. There was, too, a noticeable lack of the corporate pseudo-art and bathtub-sized islands of vegetation that grace most new U.S. malls. Whoever built Mecca Mall made no attempt to camouflage his creation as an 1800’s town square or a rainforest grove. Why would he? The Mall’s attraction, after all, is its Mall-ness. People are happy that there is now a Mall here. Its builders were not trying to disguise the bright fluorescent lights, the slick floors and antiseptic walls: they reveled in them. Perhaps this was the cause of my unease.

There were other strange perversions of retail – one shop, for example, appeared to specialize in the twin fields of expensive-looking glass and ceramic artifacts and war-themed children’s toys. There was no food court, but there were five or six different coffee bars in sick imitation of Parisian sidewalk cafes, with rows of tables set outside their windows, so customers could sip their coffee and watch… the Mall.

Stranger still, there were people at the tables, sipping coffee and looking up at the fluorescent sky. Gangs of teenaged kids perched at tables and leaned against stair railings.

And then I noticed: they didn’t have bags. I looked around the crowded hallway. No one had shopping bags.

Dear God in Heaven, I thought, they’re hanging out! At the Mall! In high school my friends and I never hung out at the mall. Actual teenagers do not hang out at malls. Only in movies and WB sitcoms do people hang out at malls.

And then I realized, like a sleeper throwing off the veil at last, that Mecca Mall was not like a movie, it was a movie. A fantasy version of a mall, created by some strange alien race who understand malls only through movies and television.

I stared at the smiling faces around me with a new suspicion. What planet were these creatures from? And what sinister design would compel them to construct such a daring and unconcealed imitation of humanity?

In the face of that unspeakable horror, I had no choice. I ran, clinging to my last shreds of sanity as a drowning man clutches at a shred of driftwood: even in this clever charade of a mall, they must have exit signs!

I escaped, thank God, with my mind intact, though without a 7-pin s-video cable. But a new terror is growing inside me, more horrifying even than the faceless horror I glimpsed there in the mall. For I cannot, in my own mind, be sure if leaving the Mall-world has allowed me to return to my own familiar reality, to the Yankees and chemical warfare and genocide, or if I haven’t, in fact, remained, unknowing, in that eerie movie-world of unthinkable alien designs.

I must keep my eyes open; there will be clues. Are the EXIT signs the right color? Did Shakespeare write 36 plays, or was it thirty-nine? Is Charlton Heston still president? I have to remain alert, to monitor the changes I see. What subtle and unnameable horrors may exist in this nightmare world into which I have stumbled?

- Nicholas Seeley, 1/13/05

Amman, Jordan - 1/13/05: Lost Highway

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

This is a small country. I mean very. It is a little funny to realize that Jordan is really sort of a three-road town.

Outside Amman, there are maybe five or six towns of any size or development, but for the most part, it’s trackless waste, interrupted by occasional clusters of cinderblock huts with satellite dishes.

The king’s highway runs from Irbid and Jerash in the north, through Amman, and then all the way south through Petra, the port city of Aqaba, and then to the Saudi border. Parallel to that, the Dead Sea highway runs along the Israeli border, making pretty much the same stops. The only difference is it passes near the Dead Sea and through the Jordan valley before it reaches Amman. Another highway runs west from the capital along the country’s panhandle towards Iraq.

And that’s it, really. That’s all there is to Jordan. Away from those roads it’s dry-as-dirt mountains and trackless sand dunes and not much else. It’s a country pieced together out of all the bits no one else could be bothered to annex.

The King’s Highway at least looks sort of like a Nevada interstate, cutting through flat desert with occasional truck stops or tiny towns beside it. Most of it is nearly featureless – a straight, flat black line through endless orange desert, and stumbling hills of baked clay and scrub brush. In the south, as you approach Wadi Rum, the character of the land begins to change, and the sand flats give birth to chains of sullen red mesas that rise up out of the sand like the broken columns of some vast, eldritch temple or mead hall.

I only wrote that sentence because I really wanted to use the world "eldritch."

Jordan is a little bit Lovecraftian, come to think about it: there's something odd about that desert. It's hard to believe that geology was created by wind and water alone. It looks like something made it.

Still further south, the constitution of the earth changes again, and the mesas are replaced with huge hills of orange rock, torn and eroded dappled with scree, and surprisingly reminiscent of the photos of another world sent back by Spirit and Viking. As you approach Aqaba, more and more of the landscape is replaced by phosphorus quarries. It's funny, because it's still broken hillsides and big piles of rock, but it's shocking how different a cliff face shaped by dynamite looks from one shaped by weather.

The hills continue nearly to the sea itself, and the road to the Saudi border runs for several miles between the white beach and the red stone. Dotted on the one side with mines and trucks, and on the other with unfinished resorts and developments, it is one of the ugliest stretches of road I have ever seen, and with the least justification for being so.

Aqaba itself is a strange sort of disaster-in-the-making. The guidebooks all talk it up as a big tourist trap – beautiful red sea beaches, diving and snorkeling drawing crowds of scantily clad western tourists to one of Jordan’s more conservative southern cities. The reality is much stranger.

When I was there, half the city was under construction. Hideous, glistening new hotels and resorts line the shoreline, and more are going up every minute. And they are all completely deserted. There was no one at all in the lobby of the hotel where I stayed. So is the bar. The E! entertainment channel screams from the television sets for the entertainment of no one. The first morning I was there, the perfect time for bathing before the heat gets unbearable, I woke and find there’s not a soul to be seen on the overdeveloped Red Sea beaches. It’s like a nuclear holocaust theme park; at any minute I expect Ava Gardner to show up and vomit on me.

The city itself seems fairly normal – a small, conservative town on the Saudi border. The souks and bakeries are bustling, the inevitable smells of raw meat and rotting fruit and saffron and cinnamon hang over the market. It’s only the resort town that’s cursed: a giant spirit house, built by the superstitious and offered up for the appeasement of a crowd of phantom tourists.

Jordan has a problem with capitalism. They've got it, but they don't really get it. One of the group of people I was in Aqaba with was involved in the reconstruction of one of those waterfront clubs – built on the longest single stretch of private beach in town, it cost a half a million JD (close to a million dollars) to build, and is indescribably hideous, but I'll try: a mess of ugly concrete and cheap plank-and paint structures obliterating the beach, surrounded by brown dirt where the palm trees and bushes have been razed to make way for volleyball courts that were never built. Apparently the investors built the place, and first hired a bunch of high-priced Lebanese club owners to run it, but there were no customers, so it got sold to someone else, who’s trying to get it open without throwing any more money into what is already an expensive mistake.

“The whole problem,” one of the developers lamented to me, “is that they’re counting on a clientele that doesn’t exist.” Who comes to Aqaba when the bustling Israeli resort town of Elat is right across the tip of the Red Sea? Hungarians on package tours for $180 a head. These aren’t premium hotel, nightclub, $10 drink people, he sighed, they’re cheeseburger people.

It's a lot like my (former) magazine: businesses start up, then close down overnight. Lots of them. Nearly everyone who's heard that it closed has said something along the lines of "that happens a lot here." Folks think entrepreneurship and development are great ideas, but they often don't put much thought into what it is they're developing.

But coming back up the Dead Sea highway brings home again the fact that most of the country isn't developed at all. There aren’t even truck stops. In a 350 kilometer drive, there are perhaps two little 10-house villages, and five military checkpoints. For most of the way, the road just drives straight across the baked plain. On the right are the beautiful rugged orange hills of the Jordanian desert. On the right, white mountains and an empty plain dotted with guard towers and gun emplacements pointed east at the border. It is a beautiful drive.

It reminds one how harsh this part of the world really is, how thankless and unforgiving. From the hills of Wadi Rum, you can look out over seemingly endless expanses of red rock and mountain, a desert which in itself is just a small tributary of the ocean of sand that covers the Arabian peninsula. It goes on and on, and nothing in sight grows or flourishes. Even the sea here is empty, unsustaining.

The landscape begs you to ask “who made this,” and why, and the easy answer is the one everyone says and never thinks about. It's holy land: it wasn't made for men.

And then, past the Dead Sea, past Sodom and Gomorrah, the road dips into the Jordan valley, and you find yourself driving between lush fields where ripe crops of grain wait for harvest, and tomatoes, melons, and grapes swell on vines that are greener than anything you ever thought you’d see again. The hills are dotted with olive and lemon trees, and tall palms sway on the banks of the river.

After all that desert, this is the garden to end all gardens. Or maybe it's the other way around, come to think of it. People have been killing each other for this garden about long as there have been people, and before there were people, some apes probably bashed each other's heads in for the fruit on those vines.

Don't eat it. It wasn't made for you.

- Nicholas Seeley, 1/13/05

Amman, Jordan - 1/3/05: Set the Twilight Reeling

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

I’ve been meaning to update this column more-or-less weekly, but I’ve been falling down of late. Since I got back from Dahab, I’ve had actual work to do, and it’s been cutting into my ranting time. Yeah, I can hear all those tiny violins sobbing now. In any case, that may be remedied for the moment, since the magazine I work(ed) for was just sold to a bunch of marketers in Dubai, who are going to provide their own content, leaving me, for the moment, with a lot of time on my hands.

One of the topics that’s been much discussed among my friends is how life here differs from life in other places – the U.S., Cambodia, Tajikistan, Baghdad, New York. Part of it is the ongoing game ex-pats play of figuring out who has the most developing world “street cred,” a difficult calculation that requires the weighing of factors like “number of countries visited,” “worst plumbing or transportation nightmares endured,” “exotic diseases survived,” and of course, degree of physical danger experienced – and lived through; Rule #1 of the ex-pat game is you can’t play if you’re dead.

It’s posturing, of course, but there’s also a level on which this game has some serious implications. What, I can ask myself, do I do here every day that is different from what I did in New York?

I get up, I go to work. Sorry, went.

I’m writing about the same things I wrote about in school: the situation of the handicapped, the government’s position on irrelevant arts issues, the lack of development in the entertainment sector, the latest play or movie. Most days, I go to the gym. It’s about like gyms everywhere – the same equipment, the same magazine cutouts of steroid-inflated bodybuilders on the walls. The only difference is I can’t ogle girls on treadmills, ‘cause it’s not co-ed. I cook dinner, mostly, and I’m still vegan, so I eat about the same crap here that I’d eat anywhere else in the world.

It’s hard to find black beans here, and easy to find chickpeas; in Cambodia it was the other way around, but really, that’s about it.

In the evening, I go to rehearsal for the play I’m working on; it’s generally held in someone’s living room. The side conversations are about Islamic fundamentalism and Jordanian politics instead of Evangelical Christian fundamentalism and American politics, but a rehearsal is a rehearsal.

Once a week or so I go out to a grimy bar and drink watery beer. Here I drink crap because it’s all they have; in New York I drank it because it was all I could afford, but what’s the diff? Here I don’t see my friends because they are thousands of miles away, there I didn’t see them because I was too embarrassed to admit I didn’t have a dollar in my pocket. There, I bought nothing because I was poor, here I buy nothing ‘cause there’s nothing to buy. Here, I don’t read because you can’t get books. In America, I didn’t read cause I was generally too fucked up on rubbing alcohol to distinguish one letter from another.

The biggest difference may be that I shower in the afternoons here, because getting hot water is too much of a chore to do at 8 am. For me, Amman might as well be New York.

Most of my ex-pat friends agree: assuming you’re not being shot at and don’t have to shit in a ditch, every city is pretty much like every other city. Amman is more like New York than Amman is like Baghdad.

Of course, to an Ammani, the situation is completely different. A group of us brought up this topic in front of one of our friends, a local musician, and his head spun around and exploded. To him, there can be no comparison between New York and Amman. It’s about being able to have access to obscure Robert Johnson albums, about being able to say the morning news is at least interesting, if not accurate, about being able to find new books on the bookstore shelves every month. It’s about standardized business practices, bankruptcy courts, limited liability corporations and regular taxation procedures. It’s about having clubs to gig at, and reviewers who will cover his shows.

Of course, he’s never been to New York, either.

Doubtless, he has his own illusions – most of my Jordanian friends think it’s easier to get a job in the U.S. than here. I rather doubt it. Think about it: anyone with any skills whatsoever will find they are more in demand here than they are there. If you’re relatively hard-working and competent at anything other than digging ditches, you can be top-of-the-food-chain in Amman. New York? Fuckin’ forget it. Of course, if you do manage to land a good job in the U.S., it will pay you comparatively more, but your chances of getting it are lower: America only rewards the top 5 percent.

You can go back and forth with this discussion for hours: Everyone I know here is moving up. Everyone I know back home is radically underemployed. America rewards entrepreneurship more, but America also feels closed; every market is saturated. Credit here is hard to get, but look how much good easy credit has done for most Americans. And so on. The two things that seem undeniable are that the successful in America get bigger rewards than the successful here, and education on nearly all levels is superior in America (one could definitely argue about some of our inner cities, but I think America still wins).

Can you have good education without fierce competitiveness? I don’t know. There are interesting questions here for anyone who wants to study them. I don’t, much.

On the topic of day-to-day activities, I should tell you, I don’t research these columns, they are my observations, and only that. There’s a specific reason for this: A lot of what I write is unpleasant, and I don’t want to incur the usual type of mutual dependency a journalist has with his sources. I don’t advertise to people here that I write these despatches, so I don’t do “interviews,” as it seems rather immoral to interview people without telling them I am doing so, or showing them the results. I don’t even ask leading questions. I just describe what I see happening around me, unprompted. I don’t use real names. Part of that is to protect people’s privacy, part of it is to protect them literally, since the mukhabarat here is not to be trifled with. Often I will change details, if I think they could be used to link what is said by people in my columns with the people I know. I never change what is said, or what I see – though often I will describe how I felt about things, which should, of course, be taken for what it is.

I know one guy who swears Baghdad is more like New York than Amman. “Sure, there’s a chance you’ll get blown up,” he says, “but at least it’s a real city! If you don’t happen to die, there’s other stuff you can do. What can you do in Amman? Pay a JD for a taxi to go to a mall.” I guess put that way, oblivion sounds attractive.

He has his priorities, I have mine. I like peace, even if it is boring.

If there were a point this discussion of daily lives, it would be this: we spend most of our lives trying to ignore most of the stuff that we do every day. Getting up, going to work, eating breakfast. If you think about your life - not in the broad watercolor strokes, but in terms of what you do every day – you find there are questions worth asking. Of the things you do each day, which are important to you, and which just fill the time? What are the real essentials of your life? How many things could you do without, and never notice you missed?

What could you do with the next day of your life that’s different from what you did today? Would making a change really change as much as you think? Sometimes you can go a thousand miles and find exactly what you left; at others, a tiny choice can change the color of the sky.

If you’re different every day, how is it that you recognize yourself?

Happy New Year, everyone. Do something different.

- Nicholas Seeley, 1/3/05

Amman, Jordan - 12/19/04: In Praise of Prejudice

[EDITOR'S NOTE - THIS ENTRY WAS TEMPORARILY CORRUPTED BY COMMENT SPAM. IT WILL BE RESTORED SOON.]

And as I was thinking about all the stupid, bigoted, willfully-blind assholes we put up with every day -- the people who voted for Bush, the people who think sex is a crime, or should be, or that some race is really better than another, or that their religion is the only truth, or that you can somehow make peace if you just kill enough people -- and the thought I was thinking was this:

Here, I tolerate them because I have to. But you, dear readers, don’t.

Let me repeat that: YOU DON’T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THEIR SHIT. And you probably shouldn’t.

So, here’s my bit of advice, for any of you who are like me, and wake up every day asking, “what the fuck am I gonna do today that does any good for anyone?” Here’s one simple thing you can do: tell them to fuck off.

That co-worker of yours, who talks about how we should just nuke the middle east, and solve the whole terrorism problem once and for all? Those relatives in FLA who vote Republican, cause they just think America should belong to decent people, not those queers? The friend who won’t give up on the idea that the Jews control the media? STOP TALKING TO THEM. If they ask, tell them why: it’s because they are morally repugnant. Their politics are brutal, the people they vote for are monsters, the things they believe in are not a “point of view,” they are not just “a different but valid perspective” – they are WRONG.

Yeah, I’m saying there’s absolute truth; or if not, there’s absolute untruth. We may not know every detail of how the myriad varieties of life on earth developed, but they were not created in seven days. And someone else’s view of who they want to fuck, and who they want to marry, may not agree with mine, but they are not an infidel or an abomination.

And the people who think they are not your friends. Or at least, they’re not mine – cause I know that if they are allowed to keep thinking it’s okay to build concentration camps, sooner or later they’re gonna come knocking at my door.

You may have to work with these people, you may have to live near them, and disappointing as it is, you have to allow them to keep living their nasty, brutish lives, because to put them out of our misery would make you just as bad as they are. But you don’t have to be nice them, and you don’t have to allow them to go on thinking it’s okay to be a bunch of self-righteous, bigoted, violent, hate-mongers.

If you know these people, do not speak to them. If have a business, do not serve them. If you married one of them, file for divorce – your grounds are intolerable cruelty to the human race. If they’re your family, change your name. Show the bigots they don’t have a monopoly on social pressure.

How’s that for intolerance? I’m not talking about being intolerant of a race, or a creed, or anything someone is born with, I’m talking about ideas. That guy at work who thinks we should re-intern the Japanese? He’s got a choice, and he should know better. But probably, everyone around him who knows better is sitting back and being liberal and tolerant and acknowledging his right to his point of view.

Well, it’s time to look in the mirror and face the fact that we are all at war. Cold war, culture war, call it what you will, but don’t call me a faggot and then expect me to be decent to you ever again.

And the next person you meet who has all the education, money and opportunities necessary to know better, but who out of venom, cowardice or a need for self-justification chooses to embrace a frankly sub-human ideology of hatred and prejudice?

Tell them they’re not worth shitting on. To their face.

If they choose not to behave like human beings, don’t treat them like human beings.

- Nicholas Seeley, 12/19/04

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

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

Amman, Jordan - 11/24/04: WMD Found

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

[Editor's Note: In honor of Thanksgiving, here's something for which we should all be thankful - none of us are currently nursing Nick's hangover.]

WMD Found!

That’s right, I know where they are.

It all started with this trip to Dahab. Never fucking go to Dahab. It’s like something out of a low-budget horror movie, it’s a bad seafood nightmare, the place they send you when you’ve sniffed way too much glue… the horror, the horror.

But I digress. Egypt may be a throne in the pantheon of Hell, but it has one recommendation as a vacation spot: it’s even cheaper than Tijuana, and with fewer underage hookers. Even the beer in Egypt is cheap. The beer is also crap. After several days of drinking the straight-from-the-red-sea pisswater the orphaned children bottle and sell you in Dahab, some friends and I decided to pool our money and buy a jug of the real hard stuff – usually it comes with labels that say things like “Johnny Waller Black Table,” but it’ll get you drunk.

We got ourselves a liter bottle of Rum for 40 lira, in this bar that was shaped like a boat, and proceeded to open it, sprawled on farshas in the back room of aforesaid bar. Actually, it was “Rhum,” according to the label, which featured a picture of a delirously smiling (and oddly mustachioed) Aunt Jemima – maybe she’d been drinking the stuff. And it was fucking purple. Never fucking drink any liquor that’s fucking purple.

40 Egyptian lira, by the way, is equivalent to, oh – sixty-five cents, U.S.

Now I must digress again. Previous to this night, the foulest drinking experience I had ever had had been in college, when a group of us returned to our castle at 2 am, and scrounged up all the liquor we could find for an impromptu game of asshole. Someone, I don’t know who, pulled out of the back of their closet a large jug of yellowish fluid: it was the color and texture of lamp oil, but it had what appeared to be a dessicated hot pepper floating in it. No one could recall what it was, or where it came from -- perhaps abandoned by a previous inhabitant. It was covered with dust, and when opened, smelled like WD-40.

Of course we drank it anyway. To this day, I am not convinced it wasn’t, in fact, lamp oil. I only had a few shots before deciding that I wanted to live to a ripe old age, and passing it along. My friend Abe finished most of the jug, and wound up naked on the floor in a fetal position.

Which brings us back to the Rhum. Tentatively, I poured a few sips of sticky purple stuff into a glass, and tasted it. Take this from where it’s coming when I say, I’ve never tasted anything like it. Mix cough medicine with antifreeze and lighter fluid and you’re getting close. And it was fucking purple.

Of course, we drank it anyway.

It's fortunate I was sitting, because after the first shot, I keeled over sideways. Most of my major motor functions went haywire, and I think my stomach and my liver got into a fistfight over who would have to deal with the stuff. I couldn’t move for a good five minutes.

Needless to say, after an experience like that, the first thing I needed was a drink.

After the second shot, the walls were wobbling, and my friends were talking in that slowed down, you’ve-sprinkled-too-much-ritalin-on-your-special-K voice. Needless to say… this went on for a while. At one point, I believe I actually went blind briefly. I don’t know what the fuck was in that bottle, but I’m certain it wasn’t alcohol – more likely, it originated in some underground lab in Iraq.

Yes, that’s right. You can call off the war, folks, I’ve found the weapons of mass destruction, they’re being bottled and sold as liquor in Egypt! Oh, come on, can you really say you’re surprised?

So as I lay me down to sleep tonight, I can rest easy knowing I’ve done my bit to keep the world safe from terrorism and glue-sniffing Dahab bootleggers and those little yellow insects that crawl all over your eyeballs. But mostly the terrorists… God knows what that purple shit would do if it were loosed on the world.

- Nicholas Seeley, 11/24/04

Amman, Jordan - 11/18/04: Bread

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

I passed the last evening of Ramadan on a ferry crossing the Red Sea to the Sinai.  Some friends and I were traveling to the Egyptian beach-party town of Dahab for the Eid al-Fitr, the feast that follows the end of the holy month.  The overland passage was closed, or as-good-as, since it would require crossing the Palestinian territories, so the alternative was a three hour bus trip to the south of Jordan, and a boat ride across to Egypt.

Two boats make the crossing; the “fast boat” is a slick and fairly expensive commuter service, the “slow boat” is a cargo freighter that also happens to take passengers.  Our bus arrived too late for the fast boat, and so, with some trepidation, we bought tickets for the freighter.

None of us had taken it before, and we didn’t quite know what to expect.  I’ve ridden  on enough cargo-and-passenger ferries in other countries to know that they are seldom particularly comfortable or fun, but nothing prepared me for the boat to Egypt.

The boarding dock was crowded with Egyptian migrant workers, waiting for jobs, or perhaps coming off of them.  Some squatted on the hot pavement, while others shouted at each other, or at the dock workers, or else sat in silence, squeezing themselves into the tiny corners of shade etched out by the noonday sun.

Stepping aboard the boat felt like stepping onto a plague ship.  Every inch of the oil-slicked black deck was covered with sprawled human figures.  Barefoot old women sat slumped on blankets against the rails and crowded into the narrow walkways like so many bundles of rags, while men with yellow nails and tired faces tried to sleep, or brushed the swarming flies from their faces with dirty fingers.

Crowds of eyes followed us as we picked our way over the bodies; vacant, disinterested eyes, bleary with exhaustion or sickness.  I thought about the lines from The Fever in which the speaker describes riding in a taxi through horrible slums; and the beatific and horrible gaze of eyes emptied by hunger and hopelessness.  I felt like I was going to vomit.

We found a space on the top level, against the side of a large engine shaft belching gasoline fumes across the deck.  It was perhaps a little cleaner, a shade less crowded, but the vacant stares were the same.  Across from us, and ancient woman with tattooed hands sat cradling her scabbed and swollen feet.  We spoke little.  No one mentioned the eyes around us.  Perhaps we mentioned the heat, or the flies, or the seemingly endless expanse of the four-hour ferry ride ahead.  I did my best to bury myself in my book.

On the whole, steaming deck, no one moved.  The only activity on the deck was a barber a few meters down, who sat with his tools spread out before him on a blanket.  I found myself staring at him as he changed the blade in his razor between clients.  He would take a full three or four minutes to lather each new face, first with the brush, then with his fingers, brushing the shaving cream to a thick foam.  He shaved with short, deft strokes, effortlessly paring away days of stubble and dirt, even as the ferry churned its way out into the sea.  He looked like a hell of a barber.  One of our group tried to convince me to get him to shave my head, but I couldn’t stand the thought of the attention it would gather – those vacant eyes all turned on me.

“I’m a little scared of what’s going to happen when the call to prayer sounds,” a friend said to me, as evening drew near.  “This whole boat’s going to light up like a Christmas tree.”  I looked around, suddenly worried – when the call to prayer signaled the end to the day’s fast, it was a mathematical certainty that everyone on the boat was going to immediately light a cigarette.  I shuddered, sniffing again at the gasoline fumes billowing out of the grate behind me.

“If it hasn’t blown up every other day of the year, it probably won’t today,” I said, with remarkably little confidence.

After another hour, dusk was gathering, and a couple of us rose and walked to the railing to watch the red ember of the sun settle behind the mountains of the Sinai desert.  We found ourselves looking down instead, at the sea of bodies on the deck below. One of our friends in Amman likes to refer to Egypt as a mother with too many children, who can’t feed all of them.  There is poverty in Jordan, too, but it’s not the same.

The sun was beautiful as it sank into its cradle of rust-colored stone.

And that was when I smelled something.  The odor, fait and tantalizing, of roasting vegetables.  And in a moment that seems to last an hour, I realize how many things I just got wrong: The deck below us has come alive with figures sitting up on their blankets, chatting, laughing, eagerly fingering bottles of water and packs of cigarettes.  The shapeless bundles have unrolled into piles of food.  From nowhere, the old Bedouin women are producing boxes of figs and dates, rounds of cheese, bags heavy with thick bread; men push past each other in the tight passages carrying plates piled with fresh vegetables, beans, hommous, and foule.  Down the deck, people are cooking over tiny fires, while below us mothers divide up portions for their gathered familes, and children tear at the bread, anxious for the droning sound of the call to iftar.  And I finally, finally get it, that people around me are poor; but they are not hopeless, helpless, or lost in an abyss of poverty and despair.  They just haven’t eaten in twenty-two hours, because it’s fucking Ramadan!

“Hey there!” a man called up from the deck below, “where are you from?” 

“We’re Americans,” I said, fearing the worst, but feeling trapped.

“Very good,” he shouted back.  “Welcome to our country!  Welcome to Egypt!  I wish you pleasure!”

“Oh God,” muttered one of our party, who has lived a long time in the Arab world, “run!”

“What, are they gonna stone us now?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “but if we keep talking to them, they’re going to invite us to dinner with them, and they can’t afford it.”

Smiling back a greeting, we turned away from the railing, and retreated to where our friends sat by the engine, gratefully swigging water as the call finally sounded.  But it was too late: there was the barber, leaning over us with a smile, holding out a huge tub of dates, passing it around and gesturing for us each to take some, then smiling and passing it around again. 

We had packed food for the trip, but it had spoiled, stowed in the hot luggage compartment of our bus, and we had nothing to offer in return.  But now, suddenly, we were the ones being looked at pityingly by the feasting Egyptians, who offered us olives and water and sugared dates.  One of the old women handed us an entire wheel of cheese.

And then the barber was back, with his friends, smiling as he presented us with a bag stuffed with thick, crusty bread, which he shoved into our hands with a smile.

He didn’t speak a word of English, but repeated over and over the phrase Ahlan wa salaan – Arabic for welcome.

We thanked him as best we could, and then, gathered on the freighter’s grease-stained iron deck, we shared our dinner.

The more I study humanity, the more I come to loathe it, and think the best course would be to wipe us all off the planet, and make way for the up-and-coming race of intelligent cockroaches.  There have been perhaps a dozen times in my life when I have been left stunned by how good people can be, not out of guilt, or duty, or devotion to a cause, and not because their wealth is so abundant they can afford to be, but simply because it is the correct way to be.  This was one of those days.

- Nicholas Seeley, 11/18/04

Synchronicity

Scanning BoingBoing just now, I saw a post that starts with this sentence:

Kevin sez: No freedom and high freedom don't produce terrorists, but intermediate freedom does;

Which is almost precisely the phenomenon that Nick describes in today's Despatch, regarding the relative security of Jordan vs. Syria.

One step closer to groupmind.

Amman, Jordan - 11/11/04: Secrets and Lies

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

People like to talk about Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism as if they are totally different phenomena, that have nothing in common. Perhaps this last election is teaching us otherwise.

In Jordan, the Royal Family often has to walk a fine line to maintain control of their fractious population. The factions within Jordan - Palestinians and Hashemites, American ex-pats and Islamists - and the difficult neighbors - Israel, Syria, Iraq - all think they have a stake in how Jordan is run. If any of these groups get out of control, the good government and relative economic prosperity that Jordanians enjoy could collapse.

Here's the kicker – in Jordan, political "parties" per se are illegal, so the only groups (other than the Royal Family itself) that are organized to engage in issue-based political action are the religious ones. That means an even more disproportionate slice of political pie is going to the hard-core islamists – or, as some Jordanian Muslims who-shall-remain-nameless call them, the "weirdy beardies."

Powerful as King Abdullah is, he can't really afford to offend the wierdies -- or, more specifically, he cannot give them reason to protest the influence of the West on Jordan, or ammunition against western culture. That means strict censorship on the part of the government.

Which is why the whole idea of "Satanism," which was kind of a 70's phase in the US, is still such a big deal here. People get in trouble for practicing devil worship, and the reason is, "Satanism" is an easy excuse the fundamentalists can latch onto to turn people against all things western. There are certain bands whose music you can't play on the radio, because some imam might connect them with the devil. It's all about reputation, a DJ friend told me – you can't play Metallica, or Ozzy, or Megadeth, because the wierdies know those names are associated with "Satan." On the other hand, you can play all the Robert Johnson you want... go fig.

Which brings us to the topic of secret police. Every country around here has one, which makes you wonder why they bother calling them secret.

Several years back, Amman apparently had a tiny, but interesting heavy metal scene – people were starting bands in their garages, imitating Metallica, and gigging around Amman. Then, overnight, the mukhabarat swooped in and shut them down: they rounded everyone up, questioned them, questioned their friends, threw a bunch of people in jail, and pretty much scared the shit out of everyone.

I recently met an Australian Journo on bus who had just come back from working in Syria, and he started complaining to me about the lack of art and culture in Amman, as compared to Damascus.

It makes sense, when you think about it. Abdullah walks a tightrope every day. Assad has no such problem. Syria still runs on the Stalinist model the Soviets set them up with in the 50's, and the one rule is, no one fucks with Assad.

This Aussi told me about a foreigner he knew who had just arrived in Syria. The man was approached on the street by a stranger who asked what he thought of the Syrian government.

"I have no opinion," the foreigner said. Immediately he was whisked away and made to disappear for days while he was interrogated by the secret police. Before he was released an official came to him with this instruction:

"The next time someone asks you what you think of the government, you'll damn well have an opinion, and a good one!"

The thing about Jordan's mukhabarat, is that they are monolithic, modern, and incredibly effective. The kingdom has a single security agency – probably the same one King Hussein inherited from his grandfather. All information is centralized: they know where everyone is, all the time. If they want to squash a scene, or crush a party, they can do it overnight.

One other friend once explained to me why there is no terrorism in Jordan: "If you're sitting in your house, alone, with the curtains closed, and you even think about it – you'll hear a knock on your door."

That whole "freedom vs. security" tradeoff idea gets interesting when it really works. On the one hand, it seems like everyone I know here has been tossed in jail and interrogated at some point. On the other hand, they haven't been blown up yet. There really is less freedom – but you also really are getting a degree of security in the tradeoff.

In Syria, on the other hand, the security apparatus is all post-Soviet, set up by paranoid KGB triple agents. There are a dozen agencies, with different sources and functions, and the left hand seldom knows what the right hand is doing.

So, ironically, Syrians have more freedom to speak than Jordanians in some ways; and less in others. Jordan crushes any speech it deems might offend one of it's powerful interests, which means almost everything. Syria has one rule, and you know it already: Don't fuck with Assad. But, in Syria, you can get away with a lot, as long as you don't catch the eye of the wrong agent. In Jordan, you can get away with exactly what they let you get away with.

The Aussi and I both got off the bus near the big sports stadium, where I was going to a rehearsal.

"I swore I would never live anywhere near the sports stadium in any third-world city," he muttered. "When shit goes down, that's the first place they round you up and take." It's one of those developing-world truisms; there's a fine line between murder and football.

The Aussi waved his arms around at all the big Sports City apartments where the middle-class foreigners live. "They don't get it," he says, "Just because they have Kentucky Fried Chicken, they think they're in New York. This is the Middle East, people."

So it is.

- Nicholas Seeley, 11/11/04

Amman, Jordan - 11/5/04: The New Zionism

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

[Editor's Note: Nick's rage has cooled somewhat since last we heard from him, from apoplectic to merely seething. This post is his retort to my earlier reply, and came with a note: "You wanna build something? Build this."

Oh, and for anyone selling political correctness? Nick ain't buying. You've been warned.]

For several years now, the libertarian Cato Institute has been incubating this really wild idea. The concept is to pick a sparsely-populated state and re-settle there en masse. Libertarians from all over America have been signing themselves up with the institute as potential “settlers” – the idea is that with enough numbers, the libertarians can overwhelm the state’s legislature and institute on a small scale their agenda of minimal taxation, near-total deregulation of business, decriminalization of drugs, sex and other forms of private conduct, and independence of local institutions from federal or state control.

Okay, there’s a certain creepiness to the idea (what will happen to all the “Native Wyoming-ans, after all?) but in some ways it’s not half bad. And not just for libertarians.

I say this because the post-election polls are coming out, and the pollsters are highlighting the “issues” they believe decided the election for Bush – if there really were any issues here beyond Americans’ radical self-justifying nihilism.

The CNN pollsters pick out two. Voters who said that their primary concerns in this election were the war in Iraq voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. Voters concerned with the U.S. economy -- usually seen as the key issue in presidential contests – also voted for Kerry, with about a 70/30 split. So who the fuck voted for Bush? What motivated the 51 percent of the country that elected this guy?

Something like 90 percent of people who cited their primary concern in this election as “moral values” voted for Bush.

“Moral Values?” What moral values are they talking about here? It’s certainly not honesty. Temperance also seems doubtful, under the circumstances.

But we know what they’re talking about, don’t we? It was summed up in a letter to CNN this morning, which read “Thank God Americans voted for George Bush, because the average American shouldn’t have to explain to their child why little Billy has two Daddies.”

Here’s the news flash for America’s gay and lesbian community: time to start looking for a homeland. Make no mistake folks: this election was a referendum on your right to exist, and you lost. Half the country DOESN’T WANT YOU HERE, and the other half doesn’t care enough to fight for you.

It’s not just gays, it’s Muslims and atheists, it’s scientists and intellectuals, it’s people who believe in the miracles of technology rather than “Touched by an Angel.” It’s anyone who has provoked the hatred, bigotry and envy of America’s massive evangelical Christian underbelly: the people who mobilized to elect George Bush.

Even now, politicians are uttering soothing screeds about coming together under a new president, and working to build a better future.

Don’t believe their lies. You are not a part of their better future. You are not wanted.

Despite all America’s problems with racism and discrimination, it has for a long time been the best place in the world to be a member of a minority – particularly to be queer – and the reason is that there has always been some kind of legislative framework protecting the idea that everybody gets rights. Still, the reason minorities in America have been so strident in defending their rights – leading Republicans, Christians, and Neocons to coin terms like “liberal elites,” and “homosexual agenda” – has always been a strong and pernicious suspicion that if you were not a white undereducated rural protestant, you were living in a country where a large number of people don’t believe in your right to live.

The Neocons pooh-poohed your concerns, saying they were the real party of tolerance – look how they let the black folk help out around the White House. Then they caught you by surprise with the “Defense of Marriage Amendment.” They surprised you with the restriction of stem cell research, the prohibition of sex education and family planning education, the bans on vaguely defined abortion procedures. They surprised you with “special registration” and the attacks on the rights of legal immigrants from suspect countries filled with unnecessary brown people. And they surprised us on Tuesday.

How many times are we gonna get surprised?

Now they have both houses of Congress and a blank check to pack the Supreme Court with Bush appointees, putting America’s last bastion of rationalism and enlightened leadership firmly in evangelical hands. Do you think they’re going to quit now?

They will come for us, by force or guile. They will get their Christian nation, one way or another, and we will just disappear. Soon even those urban enclaves like New York City, Seattle and San Francisco won’t be able to protect us from the gradual erosion of our right to sexual, religious and reproductive autonomy. After all, two of those states are already under Republican control.

History 101: coexistence with folks who don’t acknowledge your basic right to, y’know exist? Pretty much blows. Examples? Everything ever.

I say, we need a state of our own – for the liberals, the intellectuals, the homosexuals, the atheists, the scientists, the women who would like at least as much control over their bodies as over their cars, the people who suspect that maybe Jesus didn’t mean that bit about smashing them all with a rod of iron, the folks who would like to be able to research their incurable diseases, or at least get medication for their pain. Y’all know who you are. The 10,000 of us who aren’t assholes.

We can re-christen our new state “Sanity.” Or possibly New Canada. But we’d better make sure we’re well armed, because Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson will be calling for our destruction from the pulpits of the new, Christian America. And we’d better make sure our security force is as efficient and vicious as the Mossad, because the Ted Kaczynskis and the Eric Rudolphs and Tim McVeighs and the other home-grown American Osama ben Ladens will be coming for us.

“Wait,” you’re thinking, “This guy can’t seriously be advocating pre-emptive sectarian violence in the good ol’ USA! He’s just parodying the psychotic xenophobia that has seized America as it seizes every place where the majority begins to feel itself embattled.”

Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m not that crazy. Then again, if you’re a gay American, maybe you better take a long, hard look at your options: you can get ready to fight now, or you can just trust what the white men tell you.

That usually works out well.

- Nicholas Seeley, 11/5/04

Why I Disagree With Nick

If you haven't already, go read Nick's scathing, ranting, white hot diatribe about what the election says about America, here.

Nick makes excellent, insightful points about the dark side and the cost of American culture. His piece goes off like a shotgun and lays waste to our collective complacency.

The problem is, his nihilism is fundamentalist. It's absolute. It acknowledges no light to the dark, no yin to the yang.

There is an ugly side to human nature. It is to temper, control and reform this side that we build civic institutions, cultures, civilizations. Often, these very institutions of civilization become again perverted into blunt weapons and serve the ugly side. And around we go again.

Sometimes, in the world, it rains. You can build shelter to keep the rain off of your head. It will still rain. But you'll be mostly dry. If the shelter leaks, you patch it. If the shelter becomes unfixably rickety, you tear it down and build a new one. If you're a civilised community, you try to invite others into your shelter or help them to build one of their own.

What you don't do is thrash around in a puddle screaming because you can't keep it from raining.

Grow up. Get up out of the puddle. Pick up a hammer. Build something.

Amman, Jordan - 11/3/04

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

[Editor's note: The views expressed herein are the views of the author and do not reflect blah blah blah. I'll have a response to the election posted very soon. In it I will disagree with most of what Nick says. In the meantime, Nick brings the hurt. Read 'em and weep.]

You fuckers. You stupid, vapid, senseless, useless fuckers. You haven’t got the faintest clue what you’ve done, have you? Presently, you will go on with your well-intentioned lives, rallying and e-mailing and sending money, and rationalizing how a 51-48 split between "pure evil" and "marginally less evil" doesn't actually indicate the absolute destruction of everything you say you believe it. But you don’t even remotely get it.

Do you think this was an accident? This was not an accident. Do you think it was close? It was never close. And before you start: this didn’t happen because people were stupid and believed Bush’s lies, and it didn’t happen because Bush had more money for TV spots, and it didn’t happen because the poor 527’s just didn’t work hard enough, and it didn’t even happen because those apathetic 20-somethings just couldn’t be bothered to vote.

This election happened as it did because that is exactly how you wanted it.

You live in a country of lies, and I don’t mean just “America.” You stink of mendacity; I can smell you from here. The truth, my well meaning liberal friends who all voted for Kerry, is that you are not a stone dropped in a lake, whose ripples spread a little kindness and goodness in all directions. You are falling down a well. The ripples you make propagate a few inches through the cold darkness, and then they’re gone. You make a little noise, and then it’s like you never were.

Because the country you live in is not kind and good. The world is not kind and good. Long after all the newspapers in which you will make up stories about how Bush stole this election too have turned to dust, the history of the human race will be the story of people splitting each other’s heads open for pieces of land, or the glory of God, or just for the fun of it.

And every single one of you knows it. You pretend this is peace, but you know you’re at war. You pretend you are good, but it’s only because you have the guns and the land and the money and the oil already. And the truth is, that you were not deceived, or cheated, or disenfranchised in this election. The truth is, you like your beautiful country, with it’s scenic grandeur and subtly ironic television. You like your homes and your DVD players and your big cars and your clean, beautiful hospitals and your ability to believe death won’t touch you. And you will be perfectly happy to torture and destroy anyone who tells you there’s a price tag for all that stuff that goes way beyond the $49.99 you spent at SEARS. You’ll say how horrible “those pictures” were, and how ashamed you are, but just let someone suggest that you’re not really special, and not really different, and that there is nothing that makes you essentially better than everyone who died within the past 24-hours, and you’ll hold the pliers yourself, and play a Black-Eyed Peas song to thin the sound of the screaming.

This is the bargain we’ve made. We just keep trying to pretend that someone else made it for us. Bush isn’t the least honest President we’ve ever had; in fact he’s the most, because the fact that he’s a liar, a murder, and a fanatic is written right across his face where everybody can see it. Bush is America, and he was elected because America wants him, and everything he represents.

So here’s your homework: Go get a tattoo gun, or a branding iron, or a fucking magic marker, and cut these words into your forehead for the world:

“I will kill you to protect what I have.” Put a big happy face next to it.

Trust me, it’ll make you feel better.

You fuckers.

"If you loved me, you would all kill yourselves now."

-Warren Ellis

[UPDATE: On further reflection, Nick had something to add.]

"Trust me, it'll make you feel better."

Okay, maybe it won't. But it'll make ME feel better; and that's all that really matters. you fuckers.

- Nicholas Seeley, 11/3/04

Amman, Jordan - 11/02/04: Killing Is My Business...

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

The rain started this week.  Not rain like in Cambodia, where the sky opens for days on end; it’s more like spring in Ithaca, where the skies stay gray and ominous for week after week.  Everything gets damp and chill from the drizzling cold, and the occasional cloudbursts drench the streets and gardens and leave you shivering in your house as the winter winds blow through the window grilles.

I knew Jordanian winters were wet and chilly, if not truly cold, but I still didn’t come well enough prepared.  I overlooked the simple fact that Jordanian houses are not well insulated, and dampness is hard to evade.

With the chill comes the tension.  In coffee shops and bars, among groups of friends at parties, even getting into a taxi, you see the nervous smiles.  The coming election has everyone scared.  People will mention it and grin, as if it were a joke – “Bush or Kerry, eh?” – but no one wants to talk about it.

What do you expect?  We’re next door to Iraq.  The violence isn’t on our doorstep, exactly, but like the winter chill, it’s pervasive.

I did finally meet one guy here who supports the war.  He recognized me from my first visit, years ago.  Actually I think he recognized me because he was hitting on one of my friends, but I ended up talking to him anyway.  He opened the conversation by telling me how he was fighting with the U.S. troops in Iraq, he was just in Jordan on leave.

“I started as a translator,” he told me.  They’re called “fixers,” native speakers who translate, help the troops get around, assist with interrogations, and generally act as errand boys.  “But then,” he continued, “when they did my evaluation, and they see, I am crazy!  Now they send me in with the troops… I am active duty translator, fighting with them, attacking houses with them.”

This fellow, who we’ll call  Dave, (it’s not his real name, but then, he doesn’t go by his real name anyway, he prefers to use an Anglo pseudonym he was given by the troops who couldn’t pronounce his name in Arabic) has gotten himself a reputation around Amman for telling stories.  When I told my friends about my first conversation with him, they laughed, and said they doubted he had been in Iraq at all.  “Who would admit it, if they were,” they said. 

But Dave showed me reams of pictures of him hanging around a barracks with an assortment of clean-cut men and women in Army uniforms, carrying M-16s. In one, he is carrying a very realistic-looking heavy assault weapon.  So, while some of Dave’s comments must be taken with a grain of  salt, it’s safe to assume that he is really working with the military, and has access to heavy artillery.

And he is 100 percent behind the war.  He loves the Americans he works with, and perhaps he has good reason.  After all, he is Iraqi.

“This [war] is the noblest moment of my life,” he told me when I met him.  “Saddam killed my father and my grandfather.  This, this is my revenge.”

I make no secret of the fact that I do not believe in the justice or efficacy of this war, but I wasn’t going to argue with a rationale like that.  I just let him talk.

Dave has a ton of stories, and he loves to tell them.

“Don’t trust the media,” he told me, “They are saying, ‘oh, a fourteen year old boy was killed,’ what they don’t tell you is, that motherfucker had a AK and was shooing at soldiers.  What are they supposed to do, run?”

“What happened at Abu Ghraib,” he explained, “it is a normal thing.”  The soldiers need information, he explained, and to get it – they gotta do what they gotta do.

“This is a great thing you are doing – your soldiers are doing,” he will say.  “Also, fantastic women in the Army.  You know the best place to have sex?  In the back of a humvee.”

He described other things, too.  The carjackers and criminals his unit has caught, the raids they’ve made, the looters they’ve shot.

In Fallujah, he says, he was with a company of humvees and Abrams tanks that was on the move when some locals tried to protest the invasion by lying in the road.  “They were told to move, man, but they didn’t move.  So the driver in the tank, man, he just drove right over them.  And let me tell you, that driver, he was going about 65 miles an hour.”

I must have missed CNN that night. 

I start to hope he’s lying to me.  I hope he didn’t actually see American soldiers crush peaceful protesters under the treads of their tanks.  But truth or not, the more he tells me, the more afraid I am. 

Last time I saw him, he was scheduled to go back in a few days, and he was complaining that he might be assigned to a National Guard unit that would have him behind a desk, not carrying a gun, in the thick of it.

“Yes,” I grudgingly agreed, “a desk job could be less fun than the blowing stuff up.”

“Are you kidding?” He exclaimed.  “You’re there, you have a gun, you can point it at anybody?  It’s amazing.”

Somehow, I am not comforted. 

Is this who we are putting in the field?  People who think war and death is pretty much a cool gig?  Is this what he has learned from the American soldiers he admires so much?

After all, the people who trained Dave, the people he emulates, are our boys.  The folks who have shown him how to have fun at killing are our friends and neighbors are.  The ones we are supposed to support, and I want to, I always have believed in the nobility of men who put their lives on the line for their country, and now, frankly, all I can think is that I’m glad I don’t live in the country those boys are going to come home to. 

I asked Dave once, when he told me not to trust the media, if he thought their conclusions were wrong, as well as their facts.  I asked him if he thought the situation in Iraq was salvageable.  If he thought there would ever be peace.

“You know man, I don’t care,” he said. “Saddam is gone, that’s all I care about.  If in the future, it is still all rubble and danger and shooting, I don’t care.”

“But,” he added, perhaps seeing the look on my face, “But I think, in five years, Iraq will be a nice place.”

And still I am not comforted. 

But then,  I may never understand his personal need for vengeance, either.  In his position, might I not side with anyone who would give me the power to take my revenge?  To hurt those who had hurt me?  Might I not come to love them, the enemies of my enemy?

And when I had a gun in my hand, would I discriminate, innocent from guilty?  Would I have mercy to spare for anyone?  Or would I come to love it -- to play the part of a god, dealing out retribution to those I chose?  Would I rejoice in power and violence?  Would I brag about those I’d killed to strangers in bars?

I might.  I don’t know.

War isn’t about justice, after all.  We don’t fight wars to make peace.  We fight wars to make war.  To do vengeance.  To feel power.  To be warriors. 

Business is good.

- Nicholas Seeley, 11/2/04

Amman, Jordan - 10/30/04: Talk Dirty To Me

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

There are numerous little challenges to life here. Like finding something to friggin’ eat during Ramadan. Living in a town where everyone is fasting can be a real bitch.

Eating in public during the Muslim holy month can get you held up, ticketed, or even arrested. I hear they are unlikely to arrest foreigners, but you will certainly get hassled, and possibly fined – not to mention reaping plenty of ugly looks. The Ramadan fast is not commemorative like Lent or Passover, it is an act of conscious austerity; apparently “fasting” means abstaining from anything you put in your mouth, so you can’t smoke or chew gum in public either. (I know what some of you are thinking; but you can’t do that ever. Not to say that there aren’t plenty of folks who do in the alleys around Rainbow street. I wonder what Islam says about cocaine?)

Ramadan isn’t just a fast, though, you’re also supposed to be nicer to people. It seems a bit contradictory, since after a day of no food and no booze, I’m not particularly pleasant to be around. Still, there are unconfirmed rumors that Jordan’s already close-to-nonexistent crime rates drop during Ramadan.

This may, of course, be due to exhaustion.

At any rate, restaurants aren’t open during the day, so if you want to eat, you have to stock up and cook at home. If you’re working, you fill your pockets with crackers and candy bars to devour out of the sight of your Muslim co-workers. A Christian friend was telling me how she sneaked into a back room at work for a cup of forbidden tea. The room had a small window that faced out onto an otherwise closed-off stairway, and she watched as outside a bunch of local school kids peeled off from their classmates into this secluded nook, and produced stashes of sodas and potato chips from their backpacks. Kids are about the same everywhere, I guess.

Radio is another thing. Foreign TV and radio have always intrigued me, because of the bizarre blend of stations and cultures they present. American media is such a monolith. It’s all one language, it’s all made in two towns, by identical robot-people with identical non-opinions about identical trivia (Probably because they all went to the same journalism schools where they learned how to talk into a microphone, do their make-up and obscure pertinent facts).

Cable in Jordan includes stations from the US, Britain, Lebanon, and Quatar, which air programming from all over the region. You can tell which are the Saudi commercials because all the men wear white dishtashas, and because the subtexts are so grotesquely sexual. These guys could teach Madison Avenue something about how to make eating a candy bar look like a sex act.

Of course we also get al-Hurra, the U.S. propaganda network. The Jordanians have a nickname for it. Hurra, pronounced “Hoo-ra,” means “freedom,” (typical state department truth-in-advertising) however, the word pronounced“huhrruh,” which is extraordinarily similar, means “shit.”

You see commercials made in Beirut for American products airing during Egyptian soap operas – and Egyptian Arabic is quite different from Jordanian Arabic. In fact the profusion of different languages and regional dialects means that many of the programs on TV here are only going to be really understood by a handful of viewers.

Coming back in the car from the Jordan Valley, I caught Israeli radio stations broadcasting in Russian, playing songs from Spain and Tajikistan. Shreds of Radio Lebanon filtered down from Beirut, while Radio Jordan aired news programming in French. Other Amman stations feature Jordanian pop, whiny atonal Gulf music, and North African ballads.

Finally, after obsessive channel flipping, one staticky station came through with something that sounded like American music – a drum kit beat – rock and roll – an opening riff I recognized –

“What’s got me so jumpy? Why can’t you sit still, yeah,”

And I’m thinking, you’ve got to be kidding right?

“Like gasoline you’re gonna pump me,”

No way…

“And leave me when you get your fill, yeah…”

Fuck yeah! How about this country? You can’t say “hello” to a woman in the street, or chew gum in public, but you can play UNSKINNY BOP at six in the evening on Radio Free Amman?

Well of course you can. Because Poison’s magnum opus, riotously obscene though it is, contains no actual, overt references to such taboo concepts as sex, love, dating, masturbation, pornography, holding hands, Satan, bedrooms, or communism. It’s all a metaphor -- as thinly veiled as a bride in a Mississippi trailer park – but it can get past the censors.

Now that’s freedom.

- Nicholas Seeley, 10/30/04

Amman, Jordan - 10/24/04: The Sweet Smell of Dead Cat

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

I have been writing less frequently than I had hoped, in part because internet access here is really pretty scarce. There are a few internet cafés, but they are expensive, and often problematic to use. I’ve stopped going to the one near my house, because the owner’s friends keep trying to get me to help them fence black-market goods.

What’s abundant here are dead cats. You can’t go for more than a 10-minute walk anywhere without running across one somewhere. I’m given to understand that in this part of the world, people don’t really keep animals as pets, they’re seen as nuisances. As a result, domesticated cats and dogs become street scavengers, living off garbage and each other.

The cats are ubiquitous; when I get my digital camera working I want to start chronicling them. I haven’t seen any dogs this go around, but I got chased by a pack of wild dogs in this city years ago, and have no desire for a re-peat.

There’s one corpsified kitty in particular that catches my eye, it’s on the road between the house I’m staying at and books@ café, the good-but-really-pricy internet café. Walking anywhere in Amman can be a challenge. The roads here are in pretty good shape – they’re better paved than New York City streets – but they don’t really seem to understand pedestrian traffic. The sidewalks here are often less than two feet wide, and the curbs can be eight inches high or more. So one rotting cat can effectively block off and entire side of the street to foot traffic. The one on the way to books@ was like that for days, just lying splayed on the cobbles. Eventually someone picked him up and tossed him onto a ledge on the side of the road that overlooks the city.

This morning I went down to the café for the papers, then decided to stop a moment and browse through the shelves of history and politics. I expected something like you’d see in a book shop in Cambodia, shelf after shelf of the standard edition histories of the country, guidebooks and travel narratives. Instead, the section was dominated by books with titles like “Regime Unchanged,” “Reaping the Whirlwind,” and “9/11: The Big Lie.” “The Price of Loyalty” was a big favourite. I don’t mean a few, I mean dozens and dozens of titles, lined up for two yards, dissecting every aspect of the Bush administration: its personalities, its policies, its wars. This place isn’t patronized by Bedouin, it’s a hangout for well-educated, upper-middle class Jordanians. And they hate him. They pour out bottles of ink on tons of paper over how much they hate him.

As long as Bush remains president, we have no chance of winning the hearts and minds of anyone over here. It’s just that simple. It doesn’t matter what he does anymore. It doesn’t even matter that he’s wrong. He has made himself a paper tyrant, and the rest of us will suffer the consequences.

The news from Iraq only gets words. I was speaking last night to a friend who just returned from there – the editor of a very slick English-language magazine for Muslim audiences. He described asking a soldier what the situation was like. “Did you see that movie, Black Hawk Down?” the soldier replied. “It’s like that.”

“But,” sez my friend, “I thought it was improving! Sadr just signed that cease-fire, it’s in the news.”

“They don’t listen to Sadr any more,” the soldier replied, “They’ve gone rogue.”

“It’s hell here,” another Iraqi told my friend, “and no one knows about our situation, all that’s on the news is what’s happening in Baghdad.” Just like the international news doesn’t cover the kidnappings of Egyptian and Jordanian truck drivers or Sri Lankan and Philippino migrant workers. There have been dozens.

In America, you see two views of Iraq. According to the liberal media like CNN and CBS, (both, I have it on good authority, owned by a holding company set up by the Students for a Democratic Society and Chairman Mao) the insurgency is bad and growing worse, and the US isn’t maintaining enough order for the institutions of democracy to be rebuilt. According to the fair and balanced folks at Fox and WJFK DC, (and, oddly, the White House press office – who’d imagine they’d agree so completely?) the insurgency is only in a few towns, while most of the country is stable and recovering.

Here’s one more story that my friend got from some kind of military or state department official he spoke to. This official met an Iraqi man who he found shaking and terrified. He said he was a cab driver. A man had gotten into his cab, and offered to pay him a flat fee for three hours work, something not at all unusual. The man wanted to be driven to a number of locations during the day. The cab driver agreed, and his passenger had directed him to a hotel, where they stopped. What was unusual was that the passenger never got out of the cab, he simply waited there, by the hotel. After a long while, he directed the driver to a new location, near a bridge, and they parked at one end, where they again waited for quite a long time. The fare directed the driver to another location, then another, and at each one he sat in the car doing nothing. Finally, the three hours were up, and the driver asked for his money, about 7000 Iraqi dinar. The passenger haggled him down to 6000, and the driver agreed. Then the passenger reached into his coat for money. When he opened the flap, the driver could see the packages of explosives strapped to his chest. “What are you doing?” he asked. “I was looking for a foreigner to kill,” his passenger replied. Then he paid and left.

Makes dead kitties seem darn right playful, don’t it now?

See, what we hear about Iraq, from our friends who come back over the border, is that it’s much, much worse than anything on your news in the US.

But what the fuck, we’re all liberals. We’re probably just making it up.

- Nicholas Seeley, 10/24/04

Amman, Jordan - 10/20/04

The first in a series of periodic Procrastinet Despatches from Amman, Jordan. By Nicholas Seeley.

Today was the first clear day since I arrived in Amman. There’s a place on the street where I’m staying where a vacant lot cuts a gap in the wall of buildings, and you can look out over the rooftops of low stucco buildings rolling up and down the sides of the surrounding hills, wrapped in a heavy orange fog of gasoline and dust.

It’s actually a lot like L.A.

Read the rest after the break below. I can't describe how pleased I am to have Nick on board.

Today, however, the haze had lifted, and I could see for miles: the thin lines of roads cutting patterns through the white blocks of buildings, the slender minarets of the mosques, and the shadow of the orange desert over the hills. It was pretty.

A little background. Jordan is a country a little smaller than Kentucky, bordered on the west by Israel and the much-disputed Palestinian territories, on the north by Syria, the East by Iraq, and the south by Saudi Arabia. Some three quarters of the country is uninhabitable desert. Water is shockingly scarce, and pretty much nonrenewable. Holy sites are rare, and there’s not a drop of oil.

What this means is that, despite being situated in what’s pretty much the South Bronx of world politics, Jordan is in the enviable position of not having a damn thing that anyone wants. What this means is that, despite many conflicts and insurgencies arising from its deep involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian war, Jordan’s undesirability has spared it the worst of the pain and suffering that has been the lot of the oil despotisms and cold war client states that surround it. The country has also benefited from a series of very savvy and forward thinking (inasmuch as that’s a synonym for pro-western) monarchs. The current ruler, King Abdullah, is close to the definition of an enlightened monarch, and like his father, King Hussein, has tried to pull his country kicking and screaming into the twentieth century, all the while walking a diplomatic tightrope through his rogue’s gallery of unstable, psychopathic and unsanitary neighbors. (Think about it: that metaphor’s not really as mixed as it sounds.) The country is overwhelmingly Muslim and Arab, but fundamentalism here is far from at a fever pitch, though if the American Crusaders continue their holy war, that could change. But kidnapping and terrorism are not yet on the table here, and other crime is virtually unheard of.

The first night, I ended up drinking in a café with a Jordanian deejay who would rather be any thing than be Jordanian. He travels the world, celebrates the variety of drugs he has tried, changes his image. He trashes Islam, and takes another drink. This night, he was showing off his dreadlocks, drinking whisky, telling stories about how police at Q.A. immigration would try to direct him into the “non-residents” line because of his hair and his looks.

Of course, the thing he wants he can’t have.

And there I was, at a table full of expats and aid workers, thinking “isn’t that what we all want?” To get out. Especially now, with our own country running full tilt down the roman road to empire, our government paralyzed by partisanship and growing less and less capable of governing by any means other than handing the reigns over to mega-corporations and transnational conglomerates. It’s always easier to clean someone else’s house than your own. It is easier to deal with problems that, at the end, you do not have an emotional stake in. The problems we try to solve are not our own. We hope we’re fighting the good fight, but we’re also opting out of something.

The other people I’ve encountered in a few days include Jews who pretend not to be Jews so they can do aid work here, homosexuals who play straight so they can stay alive, Palestinians trying to be Jordanians, and vice-versa, a Saudi who’s really a Palestinian who wants me to write the story of how he was exiled from his adopted country, and a dozen others who would rather wear anyone’s heartaches than their own.

I guess that means it’s no different here from any place else.

Still, there was something that happened when I got off the plane. A moment when the burden lifted, and things didn’t seem so terrible anymore. I think it was when I finally smelled this place.

Every city has it’s own scent, the olfactory evidence of everything its inhabitants have left behind. Even on sunny days New York smells like the rainwater that pools in the gutters and the hot murky steam that issues from subway grates. Phnom Penh smells of fried food and motorcycle exhaust and the odor of excrement that floats on the breeze off the Tonle Sap river. Sometimes these things are easy to define, to separate into components. Sometimes they are unidentifiable. Paris only smells like Paris.

The air of Amman is dry and full of dust, and smells of night-blooming jasmine flowers, over-ripe pomegranates, coffee and saffron. That smell came wafting in through the Arabian Nights windows of the airport, and I knew I had arrived. Not home, but somewhere, at least.

- Nicholas Seeley, 10/20/04

Introducing: Nicholas Seeley

Now, when you hear "post-Elizabethan dramaturg/text junkie" you probably don't picture a young Henry Rollins. With multiple tattoos, a mostly shaved head, bulging muscles and a bit of a rage control issue. But that's only 'cause you don't know Nick.

Here's Nick's first entry from his stay in Cambodia, a year ago:

Holy fucking shit, guys: I'm in Cambodia.

The trip was without incident. About halfway through The Lizzie McGuire Movie we flew over Kashmir, where people were shooting each other, but I'm relieved to say their deaths did not interfere with our in-flight entertainment.

Cambodian and Thai immigration were only mild headaches, compared to the shit I went through trying to get into Canada last week, and I met my editor at the airport all right.

My apartment is in a garrett overlooking the Royal Museum, where the bats live - unfortunately night falls early here, so I didn't get to see them fly. Right around the corner is the Foreign Correspondant's Club.

I'm writing from an internet cafe which seems to double as home to a family of five, and also possibly a garage.

This country seems crazy. They have internet and motorcycles, all they lack is buildings: every street looks like london in the blitz, a row of bombed out storefronts and gaping, roomless buildings from which spill a profusion of children, mechanics, plastic furniture, drunks, and electronic equipment.

The movie theatres only show Thai movies, but I just had dinner in a place that was getting Starz movie channel on its TV. A Coldplay concert was showing, it was a little slice of America abroad. Did I mention I really, really hate that fucking band?

The motos refuel from barrels by the side of the road, and they're like locusts: the only things that outnumber them are the little tan geckos that crawl over the walls of the buildings. Presumably cheaper than Raid.

I am beginning to understand why people worried about my vegetarianism; I just had some broccoli in brown sauce which contained an unusually high amount of un-announced squid. It was nevertheless excellent. And beer is 80 cents a pint.

These are my discoveries for the evening; I'm sure there will be more. I don't have to report to the office until tuesday, so tomorrow I plan to grab a passing biker, and explore...

And this week, as he prepares to leave for Jordan:

I'm in VA now, and jesus friggin christ people are crazy here. I had a long conversation last night with a stoned redneck-hippie crossbreed who was explaining to me how holding a gun on a living creature was the best high there was, and how he was going to enlist in the army so that he could get more experience killing people. Deer just don't plead for mercy realistically enough!

After quoting a local newspaper story about a 10-year-old girl's birthday party where her parents let her and her friends play Hilton Sisters for the day, complete with a stretch Ford Excursion (which they trashed), Nick closes with:

Where is an outbreak of ebola virus when you really need one?

Needless to say, I look forward to our first series of Procrastinet Despatches, and getting Nick's unique eye on the Middle East.

Safe passage to Amman, Nick, we look forward to hearing from you.

Introducing: Procrastinet Despatches!

It has long been my goal to have actual Procrastinet correspondents, to supplement the "roving reporters" (basically friends who send me links) and my own sometimes meager output.

When I heard that Nicholas Seeley, my dramaturg on 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, was heading off to work with NGO's in Amman, Jordan, I knew I'd found my guy.

In honor of what will surely be a sporadic correspondence with Nick in Jordan, I've established a new P'net category: Despatches.

Here's what The American Heritage Dictionary has to say about "dispatch":

dis-patch tr v. -patched, -patching, -patches. Also despatch. 1. To send off to a specific destination or on specific business. 2. To complete or dispose promptly of. 3. To put to death summarily. -n 1. The act of dispatching or sending off. 2. A putting to death. 3. Efficient speed or promptness; expeditious performance. 4. A written message, particularly an official communication, sent with speed. 5. A news item sent to a newspaper, as by a correspondent. [Spanish despachar or Italian dispacciare, from Old French despeechier, to set free, unshackle : des-, from Latin dis- (reversal) + (em)peechier, to hinder, from Late Latin impedicare, to entangle : Latin in- + pedica, shackle.

I'm using "Despatches" instead of "Dispatches" because it's snootier and more British Colonial sounding.

I have already requested that Nick avoid all the sub-meanings above which deal with sudden death, and informed him that his #1 assignment during his time in the mideast is to avoid being beheaded. Whatever else he wants to do, and in turn write about, is fine.