Killing Joke, 4/27/13, Empty Bottle, Chicago

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I’m old enough to remember, unfortunately, that sad little marketing campaign that dubbed The Clash “the only band that matters.” In a testament to the one-born-every-minute phenomenon, some actually incorporated it into their belief systems. Amazing, really.

So how’s that working out 36 years on from the halcyon days of ’77? Not so well, I don’t think. Joe Strummer’s dead; Paul Simonon and Mick Jones don’t seem able to muster a worthwhile idea between them – I tried, I really did, to like Carbon/Silicon (…wha…?) and Havana 3AM, to no avail – and Topper Headon…can only assume that the less said, the better. And despite the sheer brilliance of most of their output (there are exceptions: “Rock The Casbah” might as well be a KKK campfire song by contemporary standards), they aren’t exactly a daily staple of many people’s musical diet anymore. “Career Opportunities” may be more relevant than ever, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that people care. ”Mattering” has turned out not to matter much at all.

But then there are their old Notting Hill neighbors and aesthetic antitheses, Killing Joke. Definitely, a pale horse of a different color. Thirty-five years on from their debut, they’re still at it, and they’ve still got it. Who’d've thunk? Sure, they’re touring to flog a voluminous box set of singles – usually the mark of a band surely past its sell-by date, and made more suspect by virtue of the fact that this isn’t the first such greatest hitsish offering. But they also just kicked out the massive, monumentally cool MMXII, as hard-hitting an album as almost anything else in their ouevre. This, preceded by the equally blunt and beautiful Absolute Dissent, the pretty-damn-good Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell, and the career-defining 2003 Killing Joke. And then there’s the live show.

What a show it is. Still is. Or, still is again. Because I can remember some thoroughly tepid late 80s – mid 90s appearances at which, even through the prism of ardent fandom, still looked like a band that was fractured, tired, and seemingly rudderless onstage – an impression that wasn’t helped by the likes of Brighter Than A Thousand Suns. The mixture of mania and merciless drive that had made “Requiem,” “Wardance,” and “Follow The Leader” had seemed to have been reduced to formula; even the sinister smoothness that underpinned “Love Like Blood” seemed to have devolved into plain poptone. Killing Joke, it had seemed, were destined to follow a path laid down by countless bands before them: A blinding flash of initial greatness, slowly suffocated beneath a tide of curdled repetition, indecision, compromise.

To be fair, it just wasn’t their era. The bland early Clinton/Blair years, with their general triviality and hollowness and overarching tedium, weren’t fertile ground for four would-be apocolyptic horsemen. In some ways, KJ seemed like a band out of their element and out of their time. To show their finest form, they needed sterner stuff to push against, and slowly the culture began to oblige; The magnificent Pandemonium release, with its still-breathtaking title track and companion piece “Millennium,” began a sharp qualitative ascent that leveled off – but didn’t sink – with Democracy. And then began the barbarous Bush era, met with the clarion call of  the second eponymous Killing Joke CD, and an unbroken chain of excellence that continues to this day.

Which brings us to the Empty Bottle on April 27. Not the most auspicatory venue: Just another divey rock and roll bar with a tiny stage, reasonably ok sound, and crappy sightlines. No room for the dramatic lighting, huge banners, or grand gestures. Killing Joke’s second set of the evening, unbelievably enough. And they killed it. Killed it with more energy than most bands of half their ages (or younger); killed it with the finesse that only seasoned veterans would have the skill for. It was a cavalcade of classics culled from every KJ era: “Turn To Red,” from their debut EP, dusted off just nicely, as did staples such as “Requiem” and “Eighties.” For almost an hour and a half, a nonstop sturm-und-drang skitter across four decades and however many albums. “The Great Cull,” and ”Asteroid,” in particular, stood out as especially deadly, but really there wasn’t a hint of a dull moment. This was a band in top form. Would’ve been nice to have had a cut or two off of Democracy, and the latest outing, MMXII, went sorely neglected – No “Fema Camp”! – but as they say, you can’t have everything, and Killing Joke surely offered up almost everything short of that.

And what’s weird: They actually looked like they were having fun. Everyone other than Geordie, anyway. Not generally the spirit that KJ typically exude, but damn nice to see: A band operating at the peak of its powers, realizing it, and actually enjoying it.

So, here we are in the age of marathon bombings, indefinite detention, drone strikes, colony collapse disorder, economic deprivation, and media-induced soul death: This is Killing Joke’s era. The Reagan/Thatcher years and the Bush II epoch evidently were just the warm-up: The rage, the anxiety that fuel Coleman & Co.’s creative furnaces are being stoked at full bore, and great nights like this one are the payoff.

Your “jOBS” Sucks.

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Of course. It was inevitable. “jOBS.” The movie. Coming this April to an overpriced cinema megaplex near you.

The biopic of the man whose mega-corporation made the cool computers and the cool little music players and the oh so cool phones that you feel duty-bound to upgrade every year or so at $500 or so a pop for the privilege of being on ATT’s magnificent cell network. And the iPad, the swell portable Reality Disengagement Mechanism that entertains even as you disappear ever further into your own little magical digital bubble of self-involvement.

The biopic of the simply lovely human being who spent years denying the existence of his own kid even as he built a zillion-dollar global empire on the backs of dollar-a-day Chinese laborers lost in the Ballardesque hell that is Foxconn who, when not breathing in plastic and heavy metals leachates, were busy flinging themselves to their deaths from the rooftops. The extraordinarily talented but monumentally narcissistic prat who, when not poaching other peoples’ ideas for fun and profit (See: Xerox PARC) was busy driving his own employees to nearly the same level of desperation through constant pressure and abuse.

Yeah, I love Apple’s products. I’m typing this on a Macbook Pro, the latest in a line of approximately 12 Macs I’ve owned since 1990 or so (and a venerable Macintosh IIci before that). But talented or not, I don’t love its founder – at least not the famous one. Jobs ran Steve “Other Steve” Wozniak, Apple’s now-nearly-forgotten cofounder, out on a rail; there is, after all, only room on the dais for one deity, and the guy in the black turtleneck was it.

Steve Jobs was good at what he did. But he wasn’t such a great guy. In fact, he seems to have been rather a prick. And I’m kind of tired of pricks: There’s plenty of them popping up everywhere in everyday life. No need to add another in the cinema.

Particularly not when Ashton (please, make him go away) Kutcher is involved.

I don’t have to see it to know. So far as I’m concerned, “jOBS” blows.

Well worth reading…

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My friend Maureen Herman has written a tremendously courageous post about depression, and the rocky path through it. I know from personal experience that while most people think they know what depression is, not so many actually really get it. The first couple paragraphs alone are well worth the price of admission…highly recommended.

Here.

treaze

Next stop, 2013.

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Wow. I managed to get through the entirety of 2012 without posting a single word on this blog until now, the very last day of the year. Talk about admirable restraint.

What can I say: I’ve been busy, and not all that much I’ve been busy with has been worthy of being shared with the wider world – the important stuff was personal, and the rest was pretty boring. And particularly where “blogging” (god, how I still hate that term) goes, it helps to have a point – and damned if I had the energy to rustle up one.

Well, maybe now, roughly 22 hours before 2012 recedes back into the slime, I’ve managed to come up with a point, or at least an approximation of one: The most tedious subject one could manage – the new year.

It’s about to begin, so they say: The annual ritual of stupid party hats and drunks on the road and bad television specials and ill-conceived resolutions, all supposedly marking the beginning of yet another circumnavigation of the same tired sun. Generally speaking, I’m not impressed. But I am not altogether without hope.

I don’t suppose many are sorry to see the back of 2012. It was lousy on a number of levels, perhaps most notably by virtue of the omnipresence of Mitt Romney in all media (there, you’d almost forgotten he’d ever existed, and I was nasty enough to remind you). There were drone strikes, an unrelenting assault on the lower and middle classes, a piss-poor economy, a collapsing environment, and boatloads of human misery in every direction you could turn. And then it all wound up with the slaughter of kids in an elementary school. Even by American standards, this was one psychotic, monumentally fucked up year, and it’s pretty much a given that 2013 will bring a lot more of the same.

Still: We’re still here. We’ve made it, at least this far. And I think – based solely on my own subjective interpretation of events, and without a shred of empirical evidence to back it up – that something has started to give. Something fundamental has started to change, and for the better.

As a culture, we’ve now devoted decades to solipsism, to narcissism: It was forty years ago that the “me decade” ostensibly started, and it’s never ended. Over that period of time, we have individually and collectively retreated ever further into our own little plasticized worlds of endless consumption, non-stop electronic entertainment, and slavish service to our corporate masters to support it all. Meanwhile, the “fulfillment,” the “happiness,” the “self-realization” that all of this was supposed to bring us has receded ever further from our grasp. Again, it’s just my hunch, but I feel that people are starting to finally figure out that the game was rigged. The evidence is spotty and anecdotal at best, but it’s there: “disappointing holiday sales figures,” a cause for sorrowful weeping in retailers’ boardrooms, just may indicate that people are starting to figure out that buying still more Chinese-made plastic crap isn’t the key to happiness. The complete collapse of MySpace and the slow but steady exodus from Facebook just might denote that some aren’t willing to settle for fake interaction anymore. And perhaps most telling, a nation of 300 million resisted the siren song of corporatist loons and rejected not only their cardboard cutout of a presidential candidate, but slapped down a good dozen of their bought-and-paid-for protofascist legislators (see: Alan West) as well.

I think, in a general sense, that people are beginning to resist being endlessly lied to, faked out, gulled, force fed, manipulated, subjected to political and economic lunacy, and traded like baseball cards. At this point, it’s only at the level of lightly-simmering unease – a vague, undirected, largely unspoken disaffection that has a long way to go before it can be articulated, let alone coalesce into any sort of shift. But I think it’s there – the seeds of what may, in a generation or so, emerge as the next significant shift in cultural consciousness. The atomization and accompanying personal powerlessness engendered by consumer culture and Randian proselytizing has failed to satisfy the herd; the herd is bored with this failure – even “Fifty Shades of Grey” didn’t manage to liven things up  - and it’s getting ready to move on.

What’s next? Who knows, but just maybe it won’t be bought at Wal-Mart. A pendulum swing away from atomization, from binge consumerism, from solipsistic worship of the hollow pseudo-self can only be progress, whatever form it takes. Here’s hoping that 2013 is the start of something different, something good: It just might be happening. We’ll see.

Occupy Wall Street: The Moving Ground Beneath Our Feet

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It’s hard to ignore the note of triumphalism exhibited by the likes of Michael Bloomberg, TV commentators and others over the recent rousting of Occupy Wall Street’s encampment at Zucotti Park, as well as at its sister camps in Oakland and elsewhere. The spoken terms are polite enough: These actions, we are told, are in the name of public safety and public order, and any compromise of first amendment rights is simply an unfortunate but temporary sacrifice for the sake of the higher good of public well-being. The subtext is something else: That’ll show ‘em.

Bloomberg, Jean Quan and rafts of pundits seem to feel that simply dismantling a few tents, making a few arrests, and coercing a near-total news blackout on the momentary suppression of the most substantive popular movement since the Civil Rights era will be enough to defang OWS and the widespread sentiments it represents. It seems unlikely that this is the case, no matter how badly Bloomberg et. al. might wish to believe otherwise.

You don’t have to be an OWS sympathizer to recognize that Bloomberg, the media, and the vast majority of politicians on both sides of the aisle simply don’t get it. The misapprehension began with the chorus of early complaints that OWS wasn’t organized, that it had no coherent list of demands, that it had no primary focus, all of which have served as ready excuses to categorically dismiss the protesters as lazy opportunistic hippies, drug addicts, or something worse. The complainers failed to recognize that far from being a weakness,  this nebulousness is the source of the movement’s strength.

What we are witnessing is a significant shift in popular attitudes and beliefs. As with shifts in the thinking of individual humans, it begins with the visceral and emotional, rather than the logical – a sense of dissatisfaction and disquiet. Seismic social events of the 1960s and 1970s – the election of Kennedy, the antiwar movement, the “I have a dream” speech, the Kent State shootings – were the culmination, rather than the initiation, of such shifts: The forces that would propel the civil rights movement, liberalized social attitudes towards sex, equality for women etc. had been slowly gathering strength for the preceding four decades. Before the messages were articulated, before changes were codified into law, the people had begun to _move_. And that’s exactly what’s happening now.

The “quiet desperation,” to use Thoreau’s words, of millions of dissatisfied and disillusioned Americans has just begun to bubble to the surface. In the recent past, the individual’s first line of defense against such desperation has been detachment: Endless hours at the bar, at the mall, on Facebook, in front of the TV, at work, or otherwise disengaged from both their own feelings and from others who tended to feel precisely the same. At some point the palliatives began to lose their effect: Individually, people began to lose their ability to hold the feelings at bay – or hold themselves back. Inebriation, distraction, the consumption of mountains of products just weren’t cutting it. Something had to give. And OWS, by virtue of its adaptability and amorphousness, becomes the perfect amalgamator for that frustration, that energy.

Politically, this is probably the beginning of the long, slow, and possibly painful unraveling of Post-Reaganism. While OWS may appear dramatic, it is only the beginning of what stands to be a generations-long transformation. The “Occupy” campers, like the fading Tea Partiers before them, are symptoms, not causes, of forces that are already broadly at work at all social strata: Life as cog, life as consumer has left broad swaths of the populace insecure, unfulfilled, and more than a little bit resentful. Plainly put, people are beginning to move from being repressed and depressed to being outright pissed. And unless I miss my guess, that’s going to force plenty of changes through. A critical number of Americans are getting ready to demand something more, something different. They may not know what it is just yet, but their demand is unlikely to be satisfied by new reality TV shows or 5G smartphones. The degree to which the power structure meets that demand will determine how transformative, how weird, or how ugly things ultimately get.

The Occupy movement, whether physically manifest in public parks or not, continues unabated; its messaging will ultimately take care of itself. But OWS is only the small, visible portion of a seismic social shift. All the Bloombergs and Quans in the world cannot begin to hold it back.

It’s Never Over “Over There”

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In honor of my grandmother, the late Mary Detwiler, I’m reposting this article I originally wrote on Veteran’s/Armistice Day 2004. Some things have changed, but all too many remain the same…

In 1918, Mary Detwiler was an idealistic 18-year-old from Michigan who had heeded George M. Cohan’s clarion call for young patriots to go “over there” in the service of her country in World War I. Hastily trained as a Red Cross nurse in a Detroit hospital, she had joined the legions of men — and a few women — who left the safety of their stateside lives for the mud, blood and virulent madness of war that had engulfed Europe.

November 11, 1918 found her surrounded by seemingly limitless numbers of damaged and dying bodies, the ghastly human by-product of the world’s first mechanized war, in a hotel-turned-hospital in Etre-Etats in northern France.

Although the guns had fallen silent, the suffering and dying continued. There was no respite for the weary nurses of the Red Cross, whose ministrations would be required for weeks and months by the new armies of armless, legless, bullet-riddled, gas-poisoned, and gasoline-burned — men who would continue to suffer and die through the winter and following spring, long after the victory parades and political speeches had receded into memory.

Until her own death nearly 70 years later, Mary Detwiler could still recall their names and faces: Willy, the quadruple-amputee British boy, his body riddled with terminal gangrene, convinced to the last that his family was coming to see him; the legless German POW who whiled away his bedridden hours fashioning her a vase from a spent brass artillery shell, using a nail as a chisel. The gasps and gurgles from the voiceless mustard gas victims whose eyes, lungs and tongues had burned away, would echo through the wards at night.

Detwiler knew what sort of life the survivors would return home to. In most cases, neither the scars nor the pain would fully recede, and simple survival would have to suffice in place of full recovery. But a grateful world would thank these men for their valiant sacrifice in “the war to end all wars.” There would be “peace in our time,” guaranteed by a noble League of Nations. There would be plaques and monuments, and November 11 would be forever known as “Armistice Day” — at least until the cessation of another round of monumental brutality a generation later made the conjoining of remembrances more cost-effective, and “Veteran’s Day” took its place.

Were she alive today, what sorrow and disbelief might Mary Detwiler feel as the dispassionate talking heads on the 24-hour-news channels told of the bombing of Red Cross facilities in Baghdad? Or of apartment blocks in Riyadh? Or of the downing of Chinook helicopters or the shelling of hotels? Or the all-night aerial bombardment of a town called Tikrit? All activities undertaken with as much savagery as the English, Germans, French and Americans had managed to inflict upon one another in late 1918.

And what would Mary Detwiler, or any veteran of World War I, think of a United States of America that steadfastly refused to look squarely at the flag-draped coffins returning to Andrews Air Force Base, or at its own mutilated citizen-soldiers torn to shreds by RPGs or roadside bombs, on the grounds that such observances might be bad for either morale or ratings?

What might such a veteran think of million-dollar book and movie deals for photogenic blonde privates, and fat no-bid reconstruction contracts for Halliburton? What might such a veteran think of the bleating of armchair-warrior television and radio talk show hosts, whose sole combat experience arrived courtesy of Action Comics and The History Channel?

And what might she think of an American president who, with the squandering of his own political capital firmly in mind, impatiently brushes aside any mention of the human cost of his desert war, insisting that “Mission Accomplished” was something more than a bitter joke and demanding emphasis upon the “positive” Iraq news instead?

It doesn’t seem too farfetched to imagine that the somber speeches and carefully stage-mananaged ceremonies at Arlington might seem a good deal less sincere to such a woman on this Veteran’s Day 2004.

“We won’t come back ’til it’s over, over there,” George M. Cohan wrote back in 1917. He hadn’t thought that would mean “never,” that the madness would continue decades later with only a few years’ intermission and a change of venue. But Mary Detwiler and others of her generation would know that even though military barbarism may always have free reign to roam the earth, thanks to the indifference and opportunism of the nations’ elites, simple human suffering will always come home to roost.

Herman hits a wall.

Sinking Cain: The Power of Bad PR

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Pity poor Herman Cain. The momentary Republican presidential frontrunner hasn’t had an easy few weeks: A broadly ridiculed tax plan, absurd public missteps like proposing an electric fence along the Mexican border. And now this: A Two Three Four Five separate allegations of sexual harassment, to which the candidate has responded with a tide of fury and bluster.

“No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant,” wrote Nietsche, and Herman Cain has been nothing if not indignant. The onetime (bad) pizza mogul hasn’t missed an opportunity to give voice to his umbrage, responding huffily to awkward questions posed by reporters and debate moderators, bellowing his innocence, writing grandiose and self-pitying opinion columns portraying himself as the victim of a vast left-wing conspiracy. Oh: And then there’s the new website.

In a monumental display of both bad PR and bad taste, Cain has responded to the allegations against him by launching (ahem) TheCainTruth, a site seemingly dedicated to smearing Cain’s accusers whilst providing the flimsiest of possible defenses. Cain’s Maginot Line:  A “private investigator” (paid by whom?) who proudly attests to Cain’s purity and truthfulness based upon body language and “advanced voice recognition software.” Gawrsh, I’m awful impressed; that’s some gee-whiz neato equipment you’ve got there, Mr. Scientist. All them colored lights, a-whirlin’ and a-blinkin’.

Significantly less charming: Cain’s public attack upon the character of his sole named accuser, Sharon Bialek. Ms. Bialek, if Cain is to be believed, has a history of job and money troubles; Ms. Bialek, according to Cain, hasn’t risen to the vaunted levels of professional achievement that he himself has. Therefore, evidently, she is unworthy of consideration, is probably a liar, and in the subtext, probably got what was coming to her.

These aren’t the tactics of a PR professional; these are the tactics of a defense attorney. It’s the oldest trick in the book: When they’ve got your client dead to rights, don’t offer alibis or make admissions – deflect accusations by impugning the accuser. It’s a variant on the “she was asking for it” defense, and while it might be effective in court, it’s not very likely to win many friends amongst the 51% of the electorate who happen to be female. It’s a weasel tactic. It’s crude. It reflects poorly upon the candidate. And it’s most decidedly unpresidential.

Cain has responded to the allegations against him by being derisive and dismissive, by blustering and now by bullying. Nowhere has he acknowledged the seriousness of the allegations, or the seriousness of sexual harassment and intimidation as a social issue; instead, he has treated them as a trivial distraction, attempting to pivot attention and sympathies towards himself. In the short term, it sort of works: The republican base has rallied around their besieged fast-food guru, much as mobs of drunken Penn State students rallied and rioted in support of molester protector Joe Paterno.

In the long run, however, the support won’t hold. Cain has already lost one endorsement; with each public pronouncement, he does nothing to diminish the allegations against him or display presidential control of the situation. Cain comes across as stumbling, defensive, evasive, and hostile. Sure, there is still the possibility that the allegations against Cain are, somehow, absolutely false – but nothing Cain or his campaign is doing is leading towards that conclusion. Instead, they come off as trying to get away with something, trying to squeak by on technicalities (see: “I never had sexual relations with that woman…Ms. Lewinsky…”). Bad strategy, bad optics, and a bad taste left in the electorate’s mouth.

Herman Cain may not know it or want to admit it, but his campaign is finished, and whatever lingering dignity he has is being peeled away from him. It may be that there is no communications strategy that could have saved him, but the one he chose has surely damned him.

9/11 In Lebanon

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The television throbs garishly above the bar, the dark-haired newscaster earnestly intoning his silent message. The crawl below rattles off miscellaneous facts and figures in Arabic. To the right of the screen, smoke billows from two tall, distant buildings until one of them crumbles and falls; the scene then shifts to a sobbing survivor, a running fireman, a mound of rubble, a flower and a photocopied flyer fastened to a chainlink fence. It’s footage we’ve all seen before: First as scenes of horror, televised live as they unfolded; then as a call to arms, as an embodiment of a nation’s and a world’s shock and grief, as propaganda and remembrance.

Ten years later, they are wallpaper at a child’s birthday party in an outdoor restaurant in south Beirut. The ubiquitous CNN is here too, beaming the Arabic-language version of its 9/11 remembrances to a crowd of shisha smokers, card players, playing children and well-dressed matrons as they sip their coffees, eat their cake, talk among themselves. A cluster of brightly colored balloons, fastened to a potted palm, bobs and rustles in the early evening breeze. A red balloon loosens itself and drops to the marble floor, the breeze propelling it towards our table. A man picks it up and places it in the lap of a toddler sitting at a nearby table. The silent newsreader rattles on. Nobody pays much attention to the silent newscaster or his repetitive parade of gruesome images. They’ve seen it all before too.

This is South Beirut, the Shia Muslim part of town. Less fashionable, less traveled, less expensive, and less flamboyant than the cosmopolitan downtown, or the Christian neighborhoods to the near north. This particular cafe/restaurant is glistening and new-looking if stylistically a little dated. Black and aquamarine lounge chairs surround low tables, each adorned with a shiny aluminum ashtray. It’s exactly the sort of place you might expect to find in an upscale suburb in one of the warmer U.S. states: Clearly demographically targeted to would-be urban sophisticates on the younger side.

The scene being played out here is doubtless being repeated in countless other restaurants across America and around the world: People eat and drink and talk and laugh, children play with balloons and chase one another between the tables as a silent television, evidently unaware that time has passed, attempts to infuse their evenings with remembered horror. Here, though, it is especially unnecessary: On the next block, a ruined high-rise apartment block stands silent and empty, its walls pockmarked by hundreds of bullet holes, every window shattered, a grim reminder of decades of civil war. Miles to the south, mounds of rubble are all that’s left of similar apartment blocks bombed and shelled during the last significant Israeli incursion four years ago. People here don’t need media reminders of carnage and bloodshed; the Lebanese 9/11 stretched beyond a single day into decades of suffering, and there is no guarantee that it has actually ended.

South Beirut, the American media tells us, is a haven for terrorists who hate freedom, hate America. You’d be hard-pressed to get that impression by walking around: Lady Gaga blares from car stereos, people drink Coca-Cola and puff on Marlboros. The English-language McDonald’s billboard proudly announces the availability of delivery service. People sport Nike shoes and Pittsburgh Steelers jerseys, buy bags of Doritos from the convenience store on Thomas Edison street. People aren’t toting grenade launchers, waving flags, chanting slogans or marching in demonstrations; they’re just living their lives, trying to grab onto whatever fragments of middle-class western comforts they can, enjoying a respite from the procession of horrors that made “The Paris of the Middle East” a living hell for so long.

A few blocks away, the warm waves of the mediterranean crash onto the expansive sandy beach. People lounge beneath umbrellas, children play with remote controlled cars on the sidewalk. A little boy, perhaps three years old, frolics in the surf at the water’s edge, squealing delightedly as the waves wash around his legs. With each passing wave, his mother lifts him up by his arms, letting him kick at the foam; her heavy black burka is wet to her knees, and one imagines that she is smiling behind her veil. For now, everything is fine; no bombs are dropping, no bullets are flying, and despite the fact that there’s been an exchange of gunfire between Lebanese and Syrian soldiers at the border, this September is a day to be spent with friends and family, with 9/11 and televised terror-porn left as distant memories. Where they belong.

***

Addendum: A couple of days later, the morning of the day I was to fly home, one of the maids at the guesthouse approached me and asked me if I knew anything about how to find people in the United States. I asked her why, and she said that no one in her family had heard from her aunt in New York since 9/11/01. 

Beirut

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Beirut
“Are you looking for employees?” the young man asked. He was sitting across from us on a low couch with blue cushions next to someone I took to be his girlfriend. Two of his friends, evidently not well versed in English or not interested in talking, sat mutely opposite him on a similar blue couch.

It was the terrace of an outdoor cafe/restaurant, slightly elevated on a raised marble foundation, modeled after any of thousands of cafes just like it that you might run across in a “cosmopolitan” or pseudo-”cosmopolitan” corner of Europe, Canada, North America. Definitely western. This particular young man had helped us communicate our order to the non-English speaking waiter, and had struck up a conversation with us afterwards. “You are here on business?” “We have an office.” “What kind of employees do you need? I can work for you. I can translate for you. Drive you around.” And then the fatal words: “You know, here in Beirut you need someone you can trust.”

It had evidently not occurred to him that there is something implicitly untrustworthy about someone who’s telling you to trust them. He continued.

“You see those cigarettes there? Some people will try to charge you too much for them. They charge you five dollars, six dollars. But I know they should only cost you two.” I nodded appreciatively. “Here is my card.” He handed us a glossy business card with a bright blue logo. “What do you do there?” we asked. “I don’t work there any more. I just have this card.” We nod. “I was a pilot. I flew all over Africa, every day. Before that I flew into Baghdad.” His girlfriend and friends are looking bored, distracted. “But I don’t do that anymore. Now I am here. I want to start a business.” “What kind of business?” “Any kind of business. You know? Anyway. You call me if you need anything, OK?” He smiles. We thank him and he turns again to his friends.

It seems to be like that here. There are an awful lot of people looking for something else to do. Looking for something to do, or some way to make it, grabbing at whatever comes in front of them in the way of possible opportunity. This city, this country, these people have been through an awful lot; decades of civil war, assassinations, periodic unrest, Israeli bombings, and endless factional bickering if not all-out war tend to take their toll after a while, and the bullet holes in a lot of the older buildings show it. Now, in a period of relative calm, it seems like most of the people here just want to finally get on with it. Get on with living, with having a life worth living; somehow grabbing hold of a little bit of the perceived “good life” that had been so long denied them, even if it arrived only in the rather tawdry form of Pizza Hut, Starbucks, and KFC.

Americanisms, westernisms are everywhere. “Americana” brand cookies. “American” cafe. “Prague” restaurant (French-themed, as it happens). And half of everything else in English: “Plush” Salon; “Underground” bar. Of course there’s plenty of Arabic named/themed places as well, but it still seems odd that in a region of the world perceived to be pretty justifiably pissed at the US, there are so many people so eager to adopt aspects of the culture and style (to use terms very loosely). People here clearly aren’t in love with American politics, foreign policy, or military; they don’t seem enormously enamored of American business, apart from the ability to procure certain consumer products (and possibly get a job). But the do seem to like the idea of “the good life,” or at least a better life, and in the absence of much of the real thing, American symbolism will do.