Vote or Die/Keep it Simple, Stupid/Would You Like a Cup of Tea With That?/Screw it All

Syria supports Lebanon, even though some parties allege President Bashar Al-Assad oversaw the assassination in 2005 of Lebanon's then Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Lebanon supports Syria, due in no small part to Syria's withdrawal of troops from Lebanon in 2005. Syrian troops had been there to help Lebanon in the fight against Israeli occupation of the south -- which is Hezbollah territory -- but Israel withdrew in 2000, leaving Syria with no real reason for maintaining military presence, which they did for 5 years anyway. The withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon occurred in response to the Cedar Revolution, which was sparked by Hariri's assassination, which I believe I may already have mentioned at the top of this paragraph as having been orchestrated, allegedly, by Syria.

Ok?

Iran is down with Syria and Lebanon. Actually, no, Iran is not technically down with Lebanon. Who Iran is down with is Hezbollah, which is a Shi'ite political party and paramilitary organisation operating out of southern Lebanon. Now, Shi'ite is a sect of Islam -- the second biggest after Sunni -- and is divided into many different branches, including the Twelvers, Ismailis, Zaidiyya, and Ghulat, which branches are themselves further subdivided. Hezbollah supports the Palestinian cause and draws most of its support from Syria and Iran, even though Syria is predominantly Sunni, which Hezbollah is not. In Lebanon and Syria and Iran, Hezbollah is formally referred to as 'The Resistance.' This is even the case in Lebanon, whose Prime Minister, Saad Hariri's (son of assassinated former Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, whose assassination I believe I may have mentioned at the top of the previous paragraph, no?), political party, the Movement of the Future, is Sunni Muslim.

Ok?

Now, Lebanon's political system works like this: each religion is given a set number of seats in parliament, with the President by decree a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of Parliament a Shi'ite Muslim. Half the members of Parliament must be Christian, the other half Muslim. However, these stipulations of balance were enacted in 1943, reflecting now-archaic demographics. Presently in Lebanon, Muslims outnumber Christians. But the problem is that Christian M.P.s have made a practice out of blocking any kind of redrafting of parliamentary representations, for fear of a Muslim majority. And whatever that entails.

Hmm.

We return to Iran. Iran is predominantly Shi'ite, unlike Syria. Along with North Korea, George Bush Jnr. in 2002 anointed these countries the 'axis of evil.' North Korea supports Syria in the fight against Israeli imperialism, and helps Syria build fancy museums commemorating wars 'won' against Israel. In these museums, there are massive paintings (by North Korean hand) of President Bashar Al-Assad holding hands aloft with Kim Jong-il, victoriously. In streets throughout Syria, it's not unusual to come across big, brilliant, propagandistic murals of former President Hafez Al-Assad, current President Bashar Al-Assad (Hafez's son), and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad side-by-side, their massive regal heads beaming down Allah-like over businessmen, bedouins, and burqua-clad women, who beg. All this in spite of their respective countries' official state religions being different sects of Islam, Sunni and Shi'ite -- which sects have come to a head in the past in the form of major political violence. The Iraq-Iran war of 1980-1988, for one. That's 8 years of all-out war, ladies and gentlemen.

Israel? Uh, everyone dislikes Israel. Vehemently.

The Middle East! (And I haven't even set foot in Israel and the Palestinian Territories yet!) To the people who say there is a 'solution': you, my friends, must be naive and/or stupid. How about this, re. the Middle East: all there is is diplomacy, small acts of human-to-human kindness, the mitigation of apocalyptic damage, and emotionally-retarded people in positions of stupendous power. The place is a political and humanitarian nightmare. In 5 weeks I wake up from it. Which is good.

Rooftop: A postcard

They're not like rooftops at home. Not gabled, nor tiled, nor lined with mucky gutters. (Hardly clean, though, either.) In a sense, they're not rooftops at all. But that's certainly what they call them: flat little concrete spaces of no more than ten square metres, situated more or less on the rooftops of building -- no matter the ilk of activity within (residential/industrial/commercial/whatever). Just always, always the rooftops. Sometimes they'll jut out to the side, like porches. Sometimes they'll take the form of little corner pockets atop the building proper. But always they look and feel and function the same: to buy time, to fall away, to relax in a way very deep. What the 'serious travellers' tend to forget is that we're all on holiday, which means let's just relax a little, people. Take a moment. Thereupon you'll find a little plastic stool (sometimes a couple, never a bunch), an ash tray, most likely some wet-but-drying clothes flung sloppily over the banister. And from up here, this is what the viewpoint permits: an elevated view of a thousands-year-old city. Not quite a bird's eye-view, not completely removed, but high enough to be unruffled by it all, to be a little bit freer, to somehow be out of it and of it at once. The horns of the madly-scrambling cars below, usually a wicked-ugly cacophony, muted to a soft, care-not drone. The pollution defeated by the high-sailing winds. Heat thoroughly neutralised. You cross your legs, look around, take a sip of your drink. Notice the Lego-land of other buildings, all stained dirty on their perimeters due to their simply being here, absorbing the hardscrabble desert elements, doing the hard necessary work of sustaining generations of Arab families -- their businesses, their livelihoods. All the satellite dishes crooked comically in the same direction, at least five to a roof, receiving their TV nourishment like plants receiving the sun. Wave to your fellow rooftop-ers, flash them a smile and hope they see it. They don't wave back, probably too distant to see you. Oh well. You at least have this rooftop to yourself. It's lonely, but in a nice way. Wait, they're everywhere. Little specks of colour against the suicidal greywash of buildings. Other people. Someone's waving at you. Wave back. Offer your arms up in a gesture meaning 'ahhhhhh,' and watch them mirror you back. On their rooftop, separate from yours. The same type of rooftop, everywhere. Looking around in the dusky glow, you realise the likely reams of them, the sheer numbers. Hundreds of rooftop-ers in your eyeline alone. Imagine how many throughout Syria. Thousands. Imagine Turkey. Tens of thousands. Imagine Lebanon, Saudi, Iraq, Qatar. Hundreds of thousands, millions. Even Israel, many thousands of Jews taking a much-needed pause from their magnificent, ordinary, Promised-Land existence. All through the Middle East, across the many different time-zones, desert-hardened people getting high and soft and legless on rooftops, everyone the same. Looking around. Taking a moment. Finding their place. Find your place. Put away your guidebook, your notepad, your thick historical novel. All that. Put it down. Sit. Here is a postcard.

What I More or Less Plan to do

- Find a pocket-size Koran, in English.
- Act bit-part in a local Syrian movie (film shoots = ubiquitous).
- Pray in a mosque, without anyone turning a head.
- Don't wear the same clothes two days running.
- Don't have a siesta two days running.
- Shower every day, without fail.
- Dress in a culturally appropriate manner (no short shorts!).
- Shoot the shit with a lady in burqua.
- Smoke mad shisha with a lady in burqua.
- Have a lady in burqua guide me to an alleyway and, for like a split-second only, lift her veil.
- Procure a burquini.
- Meet a famous Syrian popstar, any famous Syrian popstar, it doesn't even have to be a currently-famous Syrian popstar, and be invited by said popstar to drink Turkish coffee in wide open public, with everyone nearby oooh-ing and ahhh-ing in envy.
- Encounter the Syrian secret police without even knowing it.
- Talk openly and honestly about regional politics, without fear of antagonising anyone nor being thrown out of the goddamn country (although the latter might be kinda cool [to where?]).
- Say the world 'Israel' out loud in public, without being lynched or beaten or flayed by a mob.
- Learn 'I am fluent in Arabic,' in Arabic.
- Teleport girlfriend here.
- Get totally loose at a Syrian discoteque, whilst sober.
- Make a mufti laugh.
- Clean out Damascus lingerie shops, of which there are ridiculous multitudes, for benefit of unsuspecting girlfriend.
- Stop referring, even jokingly, to the Middle East as the Middle Earth.
- Bring peace to the Middle Earth.
- Continuously enjoy myself here, even if things get existentially pointless, which on occasions they have and which on they will continue to do.
- See Gorillaz play live in Damascus' 1000-year-old citadel.

Oh, re. the latter? Already am, tomorrow night.

Allah akhbar!

At the Bus Station, Aboard the Bus

Akhbar beckons me over from a nearby table. Portly in an endearing, Humpty-Dumpty-like way, with the face of a kindly elementary teacher. His English: good, not great. He introduces himself. We figure out we're on the same bus together, a five-hour haul through desert landscapes to Deir Ez-Zur, in the middle of nowhere. He's dressed sharply, modern, counter to that baggy traditional tunic crap so popular. This he points out to me. Turns out Akhbar really likes the West, its ways and wants and women, the whole heaving system of it. How he put it: 'You have good civilisation.' He does not allow Syria into this latter category. We talk and talk and talk some more. A qualified engineer, he's jetsetting off to Germany in three months time in order to complete a Masters degree. Mum and Dad are helping foot the bill, all of it. He's learning German at the German Language Institute in Damascus. You should see his cheeks glow at the mention of living in progressive, cultured, liberated Germany. It's enough to make you cry, cry tears of I don't know what. Akhbar is a good man, if not a little Westernly pious. He uses words like 'dictatorship,' 'backwards,' and 'third-world' out loud in public, which is equal parts brave and stupid. He is a Muslim, like everyone else here. But I think he wants something else.

Muhammad's seat is behind me on the bus. He's young, inquisitive, bears the moustache-and-goatee combination so popular around these parts, so kitschy and hipster in the West. We talk a bit, mostly about his English and the learning of it, where I'm from and what it's like, in Australia. (Not this hot, for starters. Nor this openly dirty.) Halfway through the ride there's a stopover, whereupon Muhammad seconds me into the seat beside his. Interesting kid, Muhammad, twenty years old and midway through a degree in English Language. A bit different, preternatural, from a family of fourteen and very interested in Arabic literature. He's getting off a stop after me, two hours later, at Abu Kamal, a dinky township ten kilometres from the border with Iraq. We have a lot of time to burn.

So we talk. About America, Iraq. Turns out his extended family was slaughtered in the Iraq war. He used this word, in his second language: 'slaughter.' This individual, in real life, affected by the shit we view pedestrianly on the news. Why does America think it's better than the Arabs, think it knows better than them? It's not all of America, I tell him. I know, he says, I know. Maybe it comes down to motives, I say. And fear. Maybe they're scared not to have control of things. And maybe there's by-incentives, like oil. (Maybe it's really about democracy, but I don't try that one.) Why does the world think we're terrorists? Why is France banning the burqua? Why, why, why?

How, as a lay tourist, am I meant to answer any of this? Am I representing my country, my culture, myself? Also, I'm on a bus full of diehard Muslims. No mentioning of suicide bombers, even though I want to go there, just to see if he'll bite. And I don't know about France, all I know is that it doesn't quite have the ring of absolute freedom to it, does it, the banning of the burqua?

I turn the tables, put this to Muhammad: Why do Arabs think Western women are immoral, sluts? Because it's wrong, he says, to dress and act as they do. It's against the very word of the Koran, simple. But our society, the men-and-women-openly-interacting part, it really works, I say. It's not like the Hollywood movies, don't be gullible. It's free, it's fair, it hardly destroys our society like the Koran warns against. You should come see it with your own eyes, make your own mind up. He just shakes his head, searches for words, mutters something about 'point-of-view.' And what else can he or anyone else do, ultimately? Listen, share, agree to disagree. Push the point, offend, apologise.

Finally, we get to Deir Ez-Zur. Stuck on a bus for five hours of daylight, I don't get the sense I've wasted time. Akhbar is here. He will take me to the hotel, help me extend my VISA, show me around. The secret police will be wary, watching. They will summons the hotel clerk to get Akhbar's phone number 'in case something happens to foreign guest.' But Akhbar won't care, he's loyal to me, my way of life. Individually we will get into bed and try for sleep as meanwhile, somewhere in the desert dark, Muhammad will be watching the stars out the window bored, approaching his family home, ten kilometres from the border with Iraq.

Oh, Snap!

I just lost a very lengthy post about Simeon Stylites in the interweb ether. Dang. It was a goody, too. Shit. Tomorrow I will write about something other than the respect I have for a guy who stood on a pillar for 37 years, dispensing advice to all comers. And there were many.

St Simeon, I salute you.

Hit the Ground with a Thud

I've come to accept the fact that I'm not going to do a solid poo for three straight months. I've been here a week now, long enough to have my travel legs back a-flex and pulsing. But there is something inside my body, small and annoying and bug-like, which really seems to like it down there, which I imagine to have set up a cushy little La-Z-Boy, which has had me feeling like a tourist of toilet bowls (some squat, some sit-down, all ceramic), and which I have finally come to accept as a part of me, albeit flawed. I'm going to blame the thing in me for the slow start here, diary-wise.

It's felt like a year. It's been nine days. It's hot, dirty, noisy, crowded. My four days in Damascus were good, it's a nice, palpably ancient city with many explorable aspects (I'm not Lonely Planet). Then Homs for a night, which was typical only-white-guy-in-town fare, a shitty one-star hotel with literally horrifying toilets, which previously I would have revelled in, these toilets -- the lack of pretension, the lack of tourist luxe -- felt tough and intrepid and authentic in, but which now it turns out I just feel weak-kneed and vulnerable in. Interesting.

And now I dwell in Hama, which is pretty green for the Middle East. Quite zanily, it has water wheels: big, creaking, giant wheels embedded in the river (Rebel River, named so for its unconventional south-to-north flow, instead of the usual north-to-south get-your-flow-on around the old Mesopotamia [Go river, go!]), formerly performing an irrigation function but now merely cosmetic, wheeling around in big whomping circadian loops for onlookers. I like these wheels, their sound. Like dinosaurs passing by on some distant plain, big friendly tourist dinosaurs. They have a soothing effect.

And the soothing effect is turning out to be especially important here, I'm finding. The Middle East, what I've seen of it thus far, isn't really to my, uh, likings. I've been charmed by the impossibly old buildings, brought awestruck to my knees at the mountains abutting town. But there's something uncaring and ascetic about the place, the general landscape. Just desert life, I guess. As a died-in-the-wool Landscape Man, I thought I'd be feeling it wholesale, the whole Lawrence of Arabia thing. Nay, it turns out I'm having to work very hard to even begin to appreciate the dust in the eyes, the plain ochre palette, the rocks and rubble and million variations thereof.

Here is the beef of it: 3rd world, Islamic culture, authoritarian politics. Do you like that combination? Do you think it adds up the sum of its parts? Do you want to live here yourself, with your young family? How exactly do people live meaningful lives here? And what comes first when it comes to the foundry of culture: the chicken or the egg? Questions like these are what occupy me, full-time. This, dare I say it, is the Middle Eastern experience. And 'culture shock' I don't think quite nails it, for it's not the kind of thing that can just be ridden on out of by me, nor gussied up and repackaged by the thing itself. It's something deeper, more pervasive.

So what exactly am I getting at? I have not had a very good time thus far, but that don't matter. I am experiencing some very rich stuff, a good dose of authentic Islamic culture, of Arabic culture. There are some interesting turns of action happening soon: a stay at a bi-religious monastery in the mountains, a homestay with some Australian-Syrians in a place wonderfully off-the-map. I will write about these things, plus more. I think the open writing out of my thoughts might help positively shape my being here, because I sure am having a lot of thoughts, and not all of them favourable to the place hosting me. I don't want to be the ungrateful guest, the big imperialist ingrate. I am lucky, I am here. What you and I are about to experience is the western crescent of the Middle East as seen through the eyes of a naive Australian tourist, doing his best.

This place, it's not quite Kansas.