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 suppo