"Low
Rents of Arabia": A December Dream"Low
Rents of Arabia": A December Dream
December of 2002 and another year is about to come to an end, here in the heartland of philistine American capitalist materialism; I continue to ride herd on the State of California's billions of dollars worth of 'Pooled Money' securities at work as the wind howls in the eaves of the Treasury Building, while the most exciting thing going on at the moment is waiting to see if the first real Pacific storm of the winter will bring the rain that the Western United States needs so badly. Fortunately for my sense of adventure and in order to induce a small element of excitement in my otherwise presently drab life, I am able to commute to work on a Pinarello Cyclo-Cross bike; the risky nature of Sacramento city bike lanes, combined with the normal hazzards of sharing the roadways with automobiles makes this more than a bit 'stimulating' in the cold, foggy early hours of a winter Sacramento morning.
As winter descends upon us, I tend to reflect on the progress of my personal journey through life and (unavoidably) make comparisons with past years. Now, as always and in stark contrast to my present ineffably boring bean-counting work for the State of California, it is not unusual to call up memories of an earlier life that was as exciting, meaningful, and absolutely full of challenge and stimulation as my present life isn't. Life, of course, is a constantly fickle flow of the unexpected and ever-changing, as most of discover to our dismay sooner or later. The trick is to accept this fact of life and try not to impose unreasonable expectations on events, as they involve us personally.
(Above: "Low Rents of Arabia" hisself, prayer beads, 'Kanjhar', flip-flops, and all)
Recently, and not surprisingly for winter, I found my thoughts returning to my years spent in hot (but bone-dry) Saudi Arabia--truly a part of my life that was and is most valuable to me in terms of the broadened awareness it conferred upon me regarding the Arab people and the Middle East (Southwest Asia, as the military term has it) region. With all the absolutely insane effort currently being expended on the part of George Bush and his 'chicken-hawk' Republican cronies to involve this nation in a renewed war with Iraq, it is useful to reflect yet again on the fact that America as a whole has virtually no valid understanding of the peoples of the Middle East whatsoever. Part of this may be attributed directly to the particularly severe form of cultural myopia and cerebral myopathy that America collectively suffers from, effectively isolated on this continent (and not directly associated with the rest of the world in a geographic context), but a large part of it may be pinned indirectly on the sordid little military and intel liaisons that Israel has long cultivated with the United States. Due to America's gross ignorance of the sensitive cultural and social currents of the Middle East (as as a result of the previously alluded to geographic isolation), American intelligence and military organisations have increasingly found it convenient to reply on the Israelis for virtually all of their 'forward observation' inputs and intelligence analyses of 'all things Arab'.
It doesn't take any leap of the imagination to deduce what sort of highly partisan interpretations of Arab motives, actions, and attitudes come to us ("us" = the present Republican Administration and the American military-industrial complex) courtesy of Israel, given their "Custer's Last Stand" survival mind-set as FOB intruders in the Palestinian homeland. Nor does it take application of more than a few second-rate brain cells to understand the immense influence and power wielded by Israeli-American lobbying groups and affiliated Jewish organisations in influencing America's response to events in the Middle East. All of this, naturally, has led to American steam-roller efforts not just to downplay the Israeli atrocities committed against the Palestinians and defended as "necessary protection" against terrorists (i.e. suicide bombers), but to lump all 'those bad guys over there" (Iraqis, Palestinians, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Afghanistanis, et al!) together as nasty, sub-human monsters that all need to be uniformly dealt with in a severe manner.
Given
the lack of intelligence evidenced by most American 'citizen-consumers', it is easy to see
how the Bush administration has succeeded so well in conning the average American into
thinking that anyone who speaks Arabic, Farsi, or one of the other Middle Eastern dialects
is a terrorist. Thus, the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft cartel (et al) find it easy to
persuade America that Iraq poses a graver and substantively more immediate threat to the
western world than the Al Qaida terrorists themselves. In the rather simple, uncomplicated
average American mind (read: the 'average citizen') these dark swarthy peoples are all
alike. This conveniently fits right into the corporate American strategy of 'offensively
defending' the world's oil resources for near-exclusive use by the American economy. No
wonder then, that Bush is hell-bent for a show-down with Saddam, the one irritating and
sharply visible obstacle in the path of the American economic steam-roller that is not
hazy, vaporous, obscure, or extremely difficult to bring into focus. No wonder also that
half of America agrees with our Idiot-Elect President that Iraq is our main threat and not
Al Qaida. And what a wonderfully effusive and useful obscurant buzz-phrase "Weapons
of Mass Destruction" has proven as a handy obfuscative label to help disguise the
REAL issues implicit here.
(Left: "Survival cycling" in Saudi Arabia--note full coverage Swiss bike helmet!)
It is merely unfortunate that Saddam persists in his role as a defiant recalcitrant burr under Bush's saddle, since this simply helps the Bush administration keep the focus off of the Israeli-Palestinian core issue (AND the very REAL threat that the Al Qaida terrorist organisation poses--a group NOT being protected by Iraq) and on his highly personal crusade to topple the Iraqi regime ("Take that for Dad, you bad nasty Dictator!").
Meanwhile, these continuing displays of gross ignorance and deliberate deceitfulness on the part of our American administration endlessly serve to remind me of my own experiences in the Middle East, by way of contrasting how far from reality everyone in the Washington DC power elite (except for Colin Powell, for whom I have the greatest regard as an astute, intelligent, open-minded, and WISE individual) actually is on the issues facing us in that part of the world.
Interestingly, my attention was first directed to the Arabs and their culture back in secondary school. I stumbled quite by chance across an abbreviated version of T.E. Lawrence's SEVEN PILLERS OF WISDOM (titled "A Desert Revolt") in the school library, one day, and soon found the story of Lawrence's associations with the Arabs absolutely fascinating. It wasn't long before I started reading everything I could lay my hands on by or about Lawrence and quickly discovered that 'Lawrence of Arabia' was far more than a romantic colonialist 'Inglezi' eccentric. Although post-industrial England certainly was known for its superfluity of eccentric explorers, scientists, and geographers, as always there was far more to this tendency to take an extreme interest in life outside one's own area of familiarity than initially met the eye.
By the time I was a sophomore in college, the war in Vietnam was in full heat, so any leisurely thoughts or day-dreams about being an Arabist in the Lawrence manner were quickly dispelled by the immediate threat of being given an M-16 rifle and sent off to die in some foreign rice-paddy, far from home (for a cause that was as wrong then as it is today). After I got out of the Air Force, one thing led to another and before I knew it 1983 had arrived, with the first wave of California economy austerity measures impacting local government--thanks to the Jarvis-Gann initiative. Since I was at that time working for the County of Alameda's Highland General Hospital (a local county operated teaching hospital), my position as Cardiopulmonary Program Coordinator (operating the pulmonary and cardiac cath labs) was selected for surgical excision. Fortunately, at this time Saudi Arabia was offering lucrative salaries to medical professionals who would contract to work in that nation, so remembering my early fascination with T.E. Lawrence, I eagerly accepted a position in Taif (not far from where Lawrence helped to blow-up the Turks' Hijazi railway, incidentally, in the First World War)--the 'summer capitol' of Saudi Arabia. This began a series of contracts in the "Kingdom" (hence the allusion to "Low Rents of Arabia", since our housing was provided free of charge), as we called it, and ultimately led to a profoundly broad appreciation of all things Arab and the myriad astounding complexities of the cultures that inhabit the Middle Eastern region.
At
any rate, I reluctantly left the Kingdom for good in the mid-90s (my long-suffering wife
wanted a 'stay-at-home' husband, for a change), but I retained a wealth of interest in the
Arab peoples, their culture, and the social & philosophical substrates and concerns of
their part of the world. This past week, having reached the end of an excellent book on
England's (yes ENGLAND, not Germany) role in Russia's Bolshevik revolution of the early
1900s, I found myself looking absently about for an equally good book to become engrossed
in. The book I selected from my library was first published in 1989, was written by
Malcolm Brown, and is titled T.E. LAWRENCE: The Selected Letters (ISBN:
0-393-02684-1).
There are, of course, fewer more fascinating ways of getting inside another person's head to gain insight and understanding than to read posthumous collections of personal correspondence. This collection of the personal correspondence of "Lawrence of Arabia" reveals much about the complexities of Lawrence that the standard biographic works merely hint at. In the same mold as Mallory of British Everest Expedition fame, Lawrence was a brilliant intellectual maverick who pushed the limits of his areas of concern, only lightly touched upon by others in that time.
Reading through Lawrence's letters to his family, his colleagues, and particularly to George Bernard Shaw's wife (who was one of his closest and most intimate confidants), one cannot help but be impressed by the cultural richness of Lawrence's knowledge and interests. As an archaeologist, scholar, photographer, and historian of the first water, Lawrence's interest in the Arabs today provides important basic information about the peoples of this region before the full burden of oil (and all of its attendent woes) descended upon them.
I find especially fascinating the manner in which Lawrence's awareness of classical history and culture enabled him to successfully steep himself in the ways of the Middle East and assume such an important role in the events of that region in the early 20th century. His was a wonderfully insightful intelligence, at the same time quite sensitive but also courageously forthright in its application. The refreshing candor of his communications to others fills many important gaps left by biographers who all too frequently mythologised him and his life, and many questions by others prompted by his experiences in the Arab world are addressed through his own reflections on the events that transpired.
In the end, Lawence met his death on a motorcycle, trying to avoid some schoolboys who came into his path as he was speeding along a country lane on 13 May 1935. Unable to stop safely, he crashed and suffered fatal head injuries. I can't help but reflect, given my own focus on aerospace life support and especially on cranial protection (helmets, etc.), that his wearing a helmet might possibly have preserved his near-genius for further years of productive and stimulating work. One cannot also reflect on what part Lawrence may have been able to play in the defense of Great Britain during the coming war, as he had been offered a substantial role in helping develop the RAF's capabilities shortly before his death. However, at the age of 46, he was taken in the prime of life and, unlike many of us who are probably destined to stain our shorts yellow in the corner of an old soldier's home somewhere, he was at least spared that gradual disintegration that advanced aging brings with it.
One further thought that emerges from all this ruminating on Lawrence and his fascination with the Arab peoples manifests itself in contrast to the absolutely devoid, starkly vacuuous intellectual and cultural awareness of American citizens. Whereas the traditions of a turn-of-the-century classical education, focused on the humanising wisdom of antiquity, fueled the early 20th Century English curiosity about the wide range of human possibilities, today in America we find that 'education' consists largely of mindless occupational preparation to take one's place behind the harness of some corporate plough (as it were), where one toils for a lifetime for no other higher purpose than to acquire as much material clutter as possible before death. As a result, intellectual stimulation in America today is about as dead as a sense of fair play in the wizened little crannies of the average corporate CEO's mind. What a tragedy for our schools, that instead of inspiring our children to think deeply and let their imaginations soar freely (within humanely productive channels)--thereby developing a broad and appreciative awareness of life's endless possibilities--we have instead reduced our standards to the absolutely lowest common denominator. Thus also, the insideous strictures of our social obsession with 'political correctness' have managed to strangle the life out of the bright and talented ones and elevated the most ignorant and incompetent to celebrity status in our culture. The process is enhanced and facilitated with insane efficiency by our economy's obsession with selling things, to the point where nothing really matters anymore in America other than marketing, selling, and consuming material goods. To say that this is an abysmally shallow and gravely disturbing national characteristic to ascribe to an individual (let alone a whole nation) is understating the tragedy by a considerable margin. But....that's what has obtained in America today. Instead of fostering cultivating intelligent reflection (which could only be regarded bycommercial interests as going against their best interests) , we (read: Corporate America) have chosen to substitute brainless reactivity and addictive consumption of mass produced goods, instead.
This,
I feel, is one of the greatest (if not the greatest) failings of our
American culture and each moment spent sharing T.E. Lawrence's intimate reflections on the
richness of the life he experienced simply brings that sad point home, over and over and
over again. Thus, as the United States continues to degenerate into an economic system
whose broad masses are enslaved to serve as nothing more than a gaping figurative hole
into which the wealthy corporate masters of the economy can stuff endless superfluous
consumables, any possibility of fostering the sort of unfettered, imaginative fascination
with life's higher possibilities in our school-age population stands about as much chance
as the Earth's atmosphere escaping the effects of global warming.
You can all thank advertising, corporations, media interests, and special corporate lobbying for all of these effects and many more. Frankly, I'd much rather be back in Saudi Arabia right now, sitting on a cool sand dune on a hot Arab night, writing poetry and gazing at that pale desert moon, than daily helping perpetuate the sort of unbelievable crap that we call 'modern life' in America. If this makes me a 'dangerous-minded radical' in the pin-headed awarenesses of some, so be it, but quite frankly I love my country and I am sick to death of what has happened to it.
Oh yes.....best wishes for a restful holiday, even though that is the last thing that typically obtains in today's hysterical American consumer feeding frenzy known as the "Christmas Season".
(Above right: Christmas in Riyadh, 1992--a contraband plastic Xmas tree that escaped confiscation by the Religious Police)
December 2002
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