Fanatic Heart

Had a fantastic weekend at Axel’s party in Toronto. Did a high-speed burn from Toronto to Pittsburgh to catch a plane to Atlanta. Hit a two-hour wait at the border — the line at Buffalo was four miles long. We also hit jams on 90 and 279 — a 5.5 hour drive became 8.5 hours, even when my average speed was around 85. I swerved and dodged and weaved so much I almost woke up the very hung-over fetal Boo in the back seat. We scream into PIT ten minutes before my plane leaves; I called Dave in the airport to see if he could beg the gate agent to hold tight. I booked across the airport, preprinted boarding pass in hand, cheating my way into the first-class security line and begging a ride from one of those electric bumper cars.

Of course, the flight was delayed two hours. We hit ATL at 11 pm, and then stood in line at the terribly overstressed rent-a-car place for another three hours. At least they upgraded us to a convertible for free.

Anyway, now I’m in Atlanta looking for apartments. It’s heartbreaking. They have amazing, incredible renovated lofts all over the city — at least twice the size and several hundred less than my place in Boston, usually with brand new appliances, central air, and at least one swimming pool. We’ve visited beautiful funky places with curvy walls and two-story ceilings, buildings where the spring mattress was invented and the Model-T rolled off the assembly line. Unfortunately, they’re either outside my budget, far away from school, or both. There’s something at least a little bit wrong with every place we’ve seen so far. I just need to eliminate one or two variables from the equation … if only I was still earning! Heh, but then I’d have no reason to live in Atlanta.

The convenience store is the bulwark of southern urban culture. The entire rack space beneath the counter is devoted to at least two dozen varieties of pork rinds, which you can wash down with your choice of black-targeted energy drinks (I prefer Raw Dawg over PimpJuice).

OK, now that it’s dark it’s time to drive around the neighborhood of one of our top choices, to see if it’s REALLY as bad as it looks.

American Digest: The War of Two Religions

This laughable essay captures perfectly the disease at the heart of the American Right — a schizophrenic obsession with Freedom while attacking liberty at every opportunity.

Our nationalists mythologize Freedom, putting it up on a pedestal and practically sacrificing bulls to it. The frenzy of Freedom-worship in America has reached the point where our government has declared precisely the kind of Holy War that’s described in the linked post: our enemies “hate Freedom”, “… are the enemies of Freedom”, etc. Meanwhile, that same government steadily erodes our constitutional rights with things like the Brady Bill, the Patriot Act, “free-speech zones” and the most recent outrage by the same Supreme Court justices that appointed our president. We don’t even need to start talking about the rapidly growing gap between rich and poor that’s been vigorously shoveling dirt over our dreams of upward mobility for the past 20 years.

I think people living under oppressive regimes in poor countries have a better idea of what freedom means. It means freedom from fear, freedom to improve your life and the lives of your children, freedom to say what you think, freedom to worship how you choose, and freedom to select your leaders. It’s not the mythical Freedom-worship that we’re pushing on them with a gun in one hand and a fistful of cash in the other. It’s sure as hell isn’t the current state of affairs in Iraq.

We proclaimed loudly to the Iraqis that we came as liberators. And we have indeed given them Freedom — the high-minded and completely impractical type that Americans are so good at forcing on other countries. We’ve given them freedom of the press … except for when we shut down newspapers. We’ve given them freedom from Saddam’s midnight raids … replaced by our midnight raids. We’ve given them freedom from his torture dungeons … replaced by our torture dungeons. We’ve given them economic freedom … such that the unemployment rate has skyrocketed thanks to the international contractor bonanza that’s replaced Iraq’s nanny state.

In other words, we’ve given Iraqis our capital-F Freedom: an idolatrous golden calf that kills their brothers, hires Philipinos to do their jobs and lets their starving children play in raw sewage. And because the Iraqis are not true believers, they’re left asking “Just how the hell has Freedom made us more free?”

Infidels. Let’s kill ‘em all.

Note to self: Never come back from a war zone and then immediately go to a Skinny Puppy show. I made sure I sobered up good before I came home, so that I wouldn’t wind up painting qabbalistic signs all over my office walls with a bucket of beef hearts.

Damn. Good. Show. Energetic and mesmerizing, with some of the best performance video I’ve seen. And very freakin’ dark. When I saw ohGr they were just clownish and funny. Puppy was a storm of paranoia, fear, and incredible cynicism and rage.

A lot of Bush == Hitler & US == Nazi Germany stuff, which I didn’t really interpret as the knee-jerk Bushitler crap that ANSWER likes to spout. From the context of the presentation, I believe it was an earnest point — they were claiming that violence is violence, the destruction of human life is the destruction of human life, whether it’s done under a US flag or a Nazi flag.

Bleah, a bit hung over from the party afterwards. I’ll be spending today looking into assistantships and helping Alison with any last-minute stuff she needs. She heads off for Taiwan on Tuesday for two months to work on her master’s research, so we’re a bit busy around here right now.

Here

I caught a vile intestinal bug from that tasty raw meat platter in Amman. Ugh. Almost over it now though, thanks to antibiotics.

Nothing profound about my Iraq experience has decided to burst forth from my fecund intellect, yet. My body and mind more-or-less shut down for about a week and a half. Now I need to deal with follow-on work, moving, wedding stuff, &etc. At this point, I feel better if I just don’t think about it. Given how much Americans were glued to the TV for the D-Day celebrations and then the tasteless Reagan funeral, something tells me my countrymen are with me on this one. The difference is, they’ll probably still vote for Bush regardless.

Anyway, I’ll peel that scab later. Let’s just say that as events unfold, I’m becoming less and less optimistic since I got back. The latest Coalition poll belies the 50/40/10 schpiel that I give whenever people ask me “Do the Iraqis support us?”.

My 24 hours on the plane were pleasingly uneventful. Got back to Boston two days ago. Since then, it’s pretty much been a whirl of jet lag and trying to get used to indoor plumbing again.

I’ll write something deep later. I’ve got some half-thought-out things to say about my trip, but I need to digest them for a bit. In the meantime: pictures.

This is Pepper, the Signal Hill dog. 13th Signal found him there when they moved in this past March — he’s been something of a mascot ever since. He never leaves the hill, and he really, really, really likes chicken nuggets.

The CPOF Forward Team. Standing, from left: Joe, General Garrett, Steve, Brian, and Carter. Kneeling, from left: me, Jan.

We overnighted in Amman, Jordan on the way home. This is me, enjoying the raw meat platter in a very fancy (but quite cheap) Arab restaurant. The platter consisted of: raw mutton chops, raw mutton fat, two kinds of kibbeh nayeh (ground raw mutton with bulgur and spices), ground raw mutton, and chunks of raw sheep’s liver. Smear some on bread with mint, basil, cucumber, and blue goat’s cheese, and wash it down with a glass of Mount Nebo wine. Utterly foodgasmic. I wasn’t feeling adventurous that night, and so I passed on the spine jelly and the sheep’s brains. I found it terribly ironic that I’d been pining for Arab food the entire time I was in Iraq.