| Jan. 14th, 2004 @ 11:48 pm Vast and Dangerous Darkness |
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Current Mood:  depressed
Current Music: Collide - Chasing the Ghost - 02 - Wings of Steel [5:36]
There are certain things in life that are just too big for one person to grapple with successfully. Some of them are personal, some of them are global.The self-effacement of an entire sex, and, in consequence, of sexuality itself, was the most unnerving feature of Saudi life. I could go through an entire day without seeing any women, except perhaps some beggars sitting on the curb outside a princes house. Almost all public space, from the outdoor terrace at the Italian restaurant to the sidewalk tables at Starbucks, belonged to men. The restaurants had separate entrances for “families” and bachelors,” and I could hear women scurrying past, hidden by screens, as they went upstairs or to a rear room. The only places I was sure to see women were at the mall and the grocery store, and even there they seemed spookily out of place. Many of them wore black gloves, and their faces were covered entirely—not even a pair of plummy, heavy-lidded Arabian eyes apparent. Sometimes I couldn’t tell what direction they were facing. It felt to me as if the women had died, and only their shades remained. That is just a snippet from a much, much longer article written by Lawrence Wright for the New Yorker. Its not the most moving piece from it, but its striking and evocative. And, for various reasons, it goes straight to the heart of one of the biggest issues in the world today, and the rest of the article hits pretty much all the rest of them, from the free press, to trying to do a job well in an environment Hell-bent on stopping you from doing so, to hearing laxity and laziness lauded, to the idea of an entire culture infected like a virus with a meme complex that's actively toxic.
Lawrence Wright says in an interview with CNN after the article was published: HEMMER: Your piece is very in depth and quite lengthy and very involved, based on your own experience. You call it a kingdom of silence.
WRIGHT: Right.
HEMMER: Why did you pick that title?
WRIGHT: Well, the people are so subdued and muted because of their despair. And there's very little that comes out of that country. You know, it's a very closed society. It took me a year, nearly a year and a half to get into it. I finally had to take a job in order to enter the kingdom. They wouldn't let me in as a reporter.
And I find that it was a great mood of hopelessness and despair and sadness, especially among the young reporters that I was working with.
HEMMER: Hopelessness, despair, sadness, what leads to that? How does that develop?
WRIGHT: Well, for one thing, there are so few opportunities, there's so few ways for young people to express themselves. And, also, they look at the future and they don't see a good alternative. You know, they're ruled by an elderly group of men who are very much out of touch with them. And they look around at the other countries in their neighborhood, in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, you know, the kinds of changes that they've made are not the ones they want.
So they don't see any clear future for them that's appealing. I think ... I think it bothers me that the whole thing exists at all. Even allowing for journalistic license and decontextualization, this article says things that its author has written, but not tweaked. The facts accord. The material makes sense, taken as a whole, with the other things I read.
A very ugly, disturbing, depressing sense. A kind of sense I wish I was too self-absorbed or too stupid to comprehend, if I told the truth unfettered. As I told ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tryptophan, "I'm disturbed by my own disgust and immediate desire to just ... wipe it out. At the waste of human beings whose existences are being perverted and burned for ... well, religious zealots and kings. I don't like reacting."
And I don't. I hate feeling like there's something vast and dark, just outside the edges of my vision, creeping around thousands of miles away, something that makes women and children into nothing but creatures, not even human, just there to hold their spaces. Something that makes young men and women think strapping dynamite to their bodies and walking into a burning, explosive death with a martyr song on their lips is better than the bleak life of empty years ahead of them. Something that eats away at a society, a culture, until what was once the jewel of the deserts is a sewage-encrusted, insanity-breeding morass of people-skins wandering around, hollowed out by weariness, and made into things not of creativity and intellectual vigor, but shells with worms inside, looking out the lidless eyes.
I hate feeling it, because I'm not self-involved enough nor stupid enough nor masturbatory enough to think I can do anything about it, to think I ever could. In anyone else, this would light a vast political fire, drive them to great efforts, maybe raise a great statesman from the passion. In me, its just bone-deep weariness and a sort of oceanic inertia as regards to my hope for the future? Will America come through alright? Undoubtedly. It might be more or less religious, more or less verbal, but ... we live on the end of a pendulum. Every swing swings back. The 60's begat the 70's beget the 80's ... and so on. I'm not worried about us. I'm worried about the fact that our very presence gives the world the freedom to lapse, to stop struggling, to stop evolving and to stop bettering itself, lest we push a fist into their field of vision. Because of our strength, they can be weak, and their weakness is wasteful.
As I write in response to maliszew's earlier report on a Canadian newspaper comparing Bush unfavorably to Hitler:Well, yes. If we can't buy it, eat it, or fuck it, why should we Americans care?
Mind you, in pretty much most ways America is superior to Canada, not the least reason being our government hasn't completely knuckled-under to panty-waisted leftist wannabes happy to live on the moral high ground while others die in misery that they could stop, but ... hey. That's why we're here. So no one else has to trouble their pretty little heads.
Right? And I meant it, with all the subtext that provides.
The House of Saud continues to exist because we've countenanced it. We allow it to exist by not smashing their palaces flat and burning their gardens, not occupying their mosques and demolishing their "museums." And we do all these things in the same sense as Voltaire meant when he said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." The difference being that, in this case, the speaker is calling for our deaths in loud, and strident voices. (This leaves aside the fact that Voltaire would be hounded out of today's France and take shelter in the loving arms of the US.) We've allowed the House of Saud to promote jihad, Wahabiism, to oppress its people, and to create a society of despondants.
But, worse, perhaps, we've allowed the Saudi people themselves, perhaps the majority of the Arab societies, in fact, to become self-loathing, horrific creatures that do not aspire to being better people because they themselves do not believe they're capable of it. They don't take menial jobs, but don't think they're suited for anything better except princehood. They allow their Kings and Princes, Dictators and Clerics to tell them what to think with just enough grousing to make it virtuous to stop grousing. They come to the West, sip at the cup of Liberty and Truth, then take the memory of the flavour back home and don't try to make it for themselves. They see the West is both successful, and completely unlike them, and don't make the obvious connection.
After 9/11, I briefly ranted about the desire to turn the Middle East into a lovely large reflecting basin, made of fused, dark sand. Any survivors could be put to work polishing it up to use as a massive solar reflector.
I'd since moderated my feelings, inundated by reports of the "good things" the ME cultures and populations had been doing. Art, culture, literacy.
Maybe I was wrong. When we find one isolated case of Mad Cow Disease, entire herds are put to the torch. Maybe there really are certain toxic meme complexes, poisonous ideas, which are so heinous and disruptive that the only response is complete eradication, an utter expunging. Carthago delenda est. Salt the Earth and raze the temples, we won't be coming back this way again.
Maybe the Middle East, maybe Islam, has come to be that meme-equivalent of a prion. It creates an environment where madness and instability are inevitable results.
Does anyone want to actually say this? No. Even Americans are more polite than that, in the main, when it comes to public discourse. We don't engage in the wholesale calls for destruction that our enemies do when it comes to us ... we simply level disdain, and a bit of arrogance, and let our detractors keep rolling along. Maybe that, honestly, is a weakness.
No one triffles with a sleeping dragon, knowing when its roused villages die and wither and the ground is blasted for miles around. Rouse the dragon, see your home razed, your village scorched, your family dead, and your dreams ash. Maybe its the only sane response in a world where technology hurtles forward with the speed of an assault fighter.
Maybe the empty village is kinder to the hollow-eyed children. |
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tired
You know, in retrospect, maybe she was trying to hit on me and really didn't notice the tentacles until then. Which, in a way, is even funnier. Imagine hitting on 
frustrated