In the parking lot at the mall

I’m sitting in my truck at the mall waiting for my daughter and her friends to get out of a movie.  It’s a backwater mall in a minor city at the edge of the United States.  The mall consists of pale yellow concrete block rectangles set up as wings around a central corridor.  It is an older structure that has been minimally maintained, but as the only mall for hundreds of miles around it is still very popular wit h the teenagers.  Inside are the collection of chain stores that can be found in just aboutany city in the US, along with an equal number of local businesses.  And the whole thing is chock full of merchandise, mostly of questionable quality but astonishingly cheap, thanks to the globalization of labor and capitol.

Yesterday I was taking down a length of barbed wire fence at the edge of a bamboo thicket when I noticed some moss covered boulders half hidden by the bamboo. I hadn’t noticed them before although they’re just a hundred feet or so from my house, where the pasture turns to forested hillside.   They were beautiful in that Zen rock garden way.  It was clear that there was a relationship between the rocks and the bamboo thicket that allowed for such verdant mosses to grow, a kind of intimacy between the three. The quiet beauty of those moss-covered rocks stay with me. 

The scent of a joint being smoked trails through the truck window.  It’s what people do after work, young people anyway, and it’s becoming more socially acceptable every day, whether medical or recreational.  Something loosens up, there is a return to a less high-strung way of life as the young people get stoned in their cars.  Is that a good or bad thing?

I think of the “bellicose” young 17th century Dutchman, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, who, in the service of the Dutch East India Company  wiped out the native people of the nutmeg-producing islands of Banda with a cruelty that the IS would have admired. He shaped the world for centuries to come with his “successes.” But was that a good thing?  I could talk about colonialism and capitalism but I won’t because we know all about it.  But we still worship the kind of success that transforms the world, most of the time for the worse in the long run. 

The Cheeseburger Parasites and the Pine Tree Investor: Reading the Middle East

When my daughter’s father was sent to Iraq with the National Guard I got books out of the library about the history of Iraq.  It wasn’t hard to see that we were in for difficulties there and so it has been.  Our invasion of Iraq has been a disaster compounded of problems of our own making and conflicts whose origins date back centuries, even millenia, all tangled together.  

Yesterday the New York Times published a long article about the Middle East, “Fractured Lands,” that documents the life stories of six ordinary people through the wars and upheavals of the last two decades. I also picked up My Journey into the Heart of Terror by the iconoclastic German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer that describes the ten days he was permitted to spend in Islamic State-controlled areas of Iraq.

Two details in these narratives stick in my mind today: one of the persons profiled in the NYT article is a young man from Libya, an air force cadet at the time of Libyan uprising, who, by good luck, good instincts and the support of his family manages to survive, despite being used as  pawn by the pro-government forces.  Trying to remake a normal life now, his passion is for planting pine trees.  

The other detail is from My Journey , a moment in which the IS officials and fighters who are “handling” the German journalists stop off for a cheeseburger, fries, and Pepsi in IS controlled Mosul.  (Funny that, even jihadis love cheeseburgers.)

Two little anchors of mundanity underlying the violent melodramas of the Middle East. Life goes on in even the most ferociously war-torn of places. The IS fighters are just like cheeseburger consumers everywhere - beneficiaries of a long chain of transactions and structures that allow for a cheeseburger to be produced on demand.  Intact in Mosul and its surroundings, it would seem, are beef and dairy cattle, wheat and corn and potato fields, slaughterhouse and cheese-making factory, mill and bakery and Pepsi plant, or at the very least a food distribution network robust enough to bring in from more distant places all of the items necessary to assemble those seemingly simple but actually quite complex edible artifacts.

There is an important difference between the two, however.  The Libyan man planting pine trees is actively trying to bring his world back to life, in however small a way.  That is a courageous act - an act of investment in the very best sense of that word.   And  simple-minded as it might seem, those are the kinds of investments that must be made over and over again, courageously and persistently,  not just in the Middle East but everywhere, if we are to pull that region and civilization out of the vicious cycles that we are all currently enacting.  

PS: check out something cool in (the former) Syria: Rojava

fragment of a practice

“What we do is very simple: we listen, we stay and we listen, sense what is in this moment.  That is all.  And yet what it opens up is not so simple because it cannot be comprehended with the mind alone, at least the mind that has to do with words and symbols; what we do leads back to color and light and birdsong, to our bodies just as they are, to the places beyond words.  Where small surprising things begin to happen...”