Procrastinet

Rise of the Moralistas

Another guest post on the aftermath of the election. This one is the view from Boston by David Valdes Greenwood:

Rise of the Moralistas

On election day, while standing for three hours in the cold of Goffstown, New Hampshire, trying to get out the vote for Kerry, I bought a Bush supporter a cup of coffee.

No, actually, I bought an old lady a cup of coffee. At least 70, she reminded me of my late grandmother, a once-formidable woman who eventually shrank into a tiny bundle of wattles and wet eyes. Exhaustion lined the face peeking out from a purple scarf, and the woman's mittened hands nonetheless shook with cold. When she put down her Bush-Cheney sign to try to rub some warmth back into her hands, I couldn't bear it any longer -- I ran across the street and asked her how she liked her coffee. Startled and pleased, she asked for no sugar but lots of milk. And she praised God that I was such a blessing to her.

Therein likes my experience of this election. I really believed that my party, the Democrats, were trying to do the right thing: voting to protect the world as much as protect ourselves. I believed that in electing Kerry we could show that America is not simply aggressive and reactionary and willfully ignorant of human life. And I believed, as I volunteered in three states, that one person makes the difference anywhere that one person is.

What the old lady believed is that all things come from God. I wasn't a good human, doing my part; I was a blessing -- a gift from the same God who was in control of the election. And whatever you think of that notion, there is no denying how motivational it was for millions of Americans to believe that God called them to the polls, to claim their country in a battle upon which rests their afterlife every bit as much as their current life.

When the contest is between notions of the human and the divine -- at this time in our culture, at least -- we lose. The newspapers are reporting that "moral values" was ranked the number one issue in the election. And not lefty, humanist morals, thank you. As local, state, and national outcomes made clear, we're talking Moral Majority morals--deep Amish morals--morals that a priest would feel at home endorsing in the 1950s. This election was the pinnacle of a retrograde revolution that's been building for twenty years, and its partisans -- let's call them the moralistas -- are feeling pretty confident.

What we on the left have to learn is that simply abhorring the moralista mindset is not enough to overcome its power in the polling place. As righteous as we may feel, we will get nowhere moaning that it hardly seems moral to kill thousands of Iraqis to liberate them. The moralistas have an answer: didn't God destroy Sodom in that same neck of the woods, just to make a statement? And if it's good enough for God... (end of argument). There's a version of that answer for just about every claim we make about the alleged morals of those who returned George Bush to office; we only waste our time trying to convince a moralista that he or she is not moral.

I see no easy way to change this tide. But we cannot, as some are already suggesting, suddenly start nominating -- or, ourselves, becoming -- soft moralista knock-offs just to appease. We still have to champion the best of humanity in concrete and uncompromised progressive ideals: the morality of peace, the ethics of choice, the responsibility we have to focus on this world (and not just some celestial one to come).

We may well remain the political minority for a while -- just as the moralistas were for the first thirty years of my lifetime. And, if we take anything from them, it is how their past experience holds a lesson for our future: they did not rise to their power in this election by changing the values they held all along; for years, they put their heads down, dug in their heels, and fought for their values. And now, so must we.

- David Valdes Greenwood, Boston, MA - 11/4/03

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Nicholas Seeley, 10/24/04

"GoBo - An American Tragedy in Two Acts"

From the fertile brain of Ross Maxwell comes "The story of GoBo, the first Robotic-American to run for president, his dizzying heights, his tragic end."

Act I

Act II

Enjoy.

Amman, Jordan - 10/20/04

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

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

It’s actually a lot like L.A.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Nicholas Seeley, 10/20/04

Introducing: Nicholas Seeley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing: Procrastinet Despatches!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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