Avuncular American

Saints Preserve Us From "Doctor" Terry Jones

Tangier, Morocco, September 11, 2010

Yesterday, September 10, was the Aid al-Fitr, or the feast day after the Muslim month of fasting and prayer, Ramadan.  The RFI correspondent in Tangier gave a nice image of the place on this festive day, which, according to one interviewee, consisted of "eating all day." Sounds like American Thanksgiving day.

Cut to September 11 in the US, where apparently all the world's media have camped out in front of a 50-person church in Florida, waiting to see if the Bible Koran burner will carry out his act, or not, as he has said of late.  Keep us in suspense, Terry, while you've already done your damage.

You see, there's been enough coverage worldwide - especially in the Muslim world, on its special feast day - to have done more damage to the American image.  The country founded on religious freedom, unable to come to grips with the establishment of a Muslim center in downtown New York.  Tolerance for the Terry Joneses, who already burned his bridges in Germany before he thought about burning holy books, but not for the "Imans" (as he calls imams).  Maybe he was going to see Iman.

So here's the point of this post.  Should the "Reverend" Jones renege on his latest promise and in fact carry out his act, I want to put it in print that I will resent being immolated in return by a mob looking for an easy American target.  It's no secret: the American Legation in Tangier is in the middle of the medina, a labyrinth of alleys that the police rarely frequent.  We are on our own.

And I thought our days of fear-inducing September 11 memorials were over.  Where for years, it would be a chance to ramp the "fear up" campaign to further war plans.  This time, the fear is not emanating from the White House or from Cheney's bunker, but from a small church in Florida.

So Terry, stay away from those matches.  Go back to running your business-cum-"church," in the time honored tradition of American hucksters.  And let the press cover something important, like how it is that the country that has room for the Dove World Outreach Center cannot accomodate the Cordoba Faith Initiative, named after a Spanish city whose reputation under centuries of Muslim rule was as a light of religious tolerance.

As my mother used to say, a souvenir from her old Ireland, "Saints preserve us."  From this man of "religion."

Image: Morocco Board News Service

Los caminos de la memoria - Digging Up Franco's Spain

Honor thy father and mother.  José-Luis Peñafuerte does this in the most effective way possible in his documentary Los caminos de la memoria (poster, official site).  The son of Spanish exiles, this Brussels-born film maker has been on-topic since his very first documentary, Niños, about the orphans of the Spanish Civil War.

With Los caminos de la memoria, Peñafuerte probes the nature of history, which for the forty years of Franco's rule following his victory in the Civil War, he "owned."  The only official memorials are to the Falangist (fascist) dead, even now, more than three decades after Franco's death.

Quietly, scraping away at the layers of silence, Spaniards of all ages are searching for their version of the truth.  As "Z" screenwriter Jorge Semprun, another Spanish exile has said, the values of the defeated Republic - democracy and social justice - are those of the current democratic monarchy.  But officially, a kind of omerta has reigned, where political justice is forsworn in the interests of keeping the peace.

Octogenarians like Semprun, poet Marcos Ana, and others aren't normally "stars" in feature films, but they shine in this documentary.  People who look like your grandpa or maiden aunt keep a class of teenagers spellbound, and you can see the youngsters doing the mental math: she was my age when she was rounded up; he wasn't much older than me when he was tortured...

Francisco Franco was a friend of Hitler and Mussolini, but after treading a fine line to avoid direct involvement in World War II, he morphed into a Cold War anticommunist ally of the West.  His killing fields are spread like blood spattered on the map of Spain (a particularly effective shot has a researcher pinning red dots at excavation sites across the country).

This is a very topical film: crusading Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon was recently chastised for having wanted to delve too energetically into Spain's murky Civil War and Franco past.

But the guilty need not fear the victims and their families.  Most would just be happy, like the families in Morocco's Nos lieux interdits, for a decent burial for their loved ones.  And once you raze Franco's notorious Carabanchel prison in Madrid - the film shows it in all its sinister glory just before its destruction - you lose another historical marker.  Like bulldozing Auschwitz in the name of reconciliation.

Reconciliation - with whom?  Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini are long gone.  It's their modern day fan club that we need to worry about.  Los caminos de la memoria at last gives a voice to those who resisted.

Citizen's Arrest!

Today I longed for the America of Mayberry NC, that imaginary Sixties town where even as dumb a citizen as Gomer Pyle could shout "Citizen's Arrest!" at law breakers and hope that justice would be served.  Even though the Andy Griffith Show is long over, apparently the notion of citizens reporting traffic violations continues in Rockville, Maryland, a Washington D.C. suburb where we once lived.   There, citizens - hopefully public-spirited and not mean-spirited - can W.R.I.T.E. (Witness Report in Traffic Enforcement) their local police, filling out an online form, which covers everything from excessive speed to reckless driving.

Reckless driving - I guess that's what you might call my encounter this morning while walking back home from the bakery.  On a busy two-lane Brussels street, I chose my crossing point judiciously.  A "zebra" crossing, where, in Belgium, the simple placement of a foot from sidewalk to pavement is supposed to result in traffic coming to a halt to let the pedestrian cross.  In this case, it was even better: a city bus had stopped to pick up passengers immediately before the crosswalk.  I needn't even look left - the bus was in that lane - and the car in the other lane was slowing down.

But skeptic that I am, I did look left, and lo and behold, a big black 4 X 4 with two testosterone-laden young men out to prove that they can pass a stopped bus - a violation - and run down (almost) a pedestrian in a crosswalk - another violation - is bearing down on me.   Luckily, they weren't willfully homicidal, and they did stop at the sight of a bespectacled fifty-something holding up his hands in what - a Gomer Pyle gesture?  I noted down the license plate, the place, the time, and proceeded to walk home.

Now, I realize that I am in the land of 7 parliaments, 3 geographic "regions" overlaid with 3 linguistic "communities," with 10 provinces and their governors and 589 communes with their bourgmestres, and that English common law and its notion of "citizen's arrest" carries no weight.  But I wasn't prepared for the answer to my phone call to the local police station.

"No, monsieur, only a policeman can report an infraction of the traffic code."  Oh, I see.  What if I had been run over?  How about the bus and tram drivers, who daily witness multiple "incivilities" that run the gamut from blocking their route to running red lights?  "No, only police can note violations."  As the lady said, just shoot me.

Napoleon and his Code did rule Belgium before it became Belgium, but even in France, the authorities appear to encourage local initiatives for road safety.  Not here: my police station call desk person wasn't even interested in knowing about a major intersection where just posting a cop would result in daily or hourly or minute-ly red light-running tickets.

Aren't they even interested in a little revenue generation?

Race, Africa, and Terreblanche

Eugene Terreblanche, "whose very name highlighted the white supremacist's roots," according to the BBC obituary, was murdered this Easter weekend in South Africa.  As Nick Broomfield, who once made a documentary on the Afrikaner insurgent (His Big White Self), told the BBC, Terreblanche was "an unpleasant piece of work."

This is definitely a case of reap what you sow, what goes around comes around, and live by the sword, die by the sword.  The impending end of apartheid saw his AWB unleash terrorist bombings that might have gone the way of the OAS scorched earth campaign in the last days of French Algeria, and later Terreblanche beat a farm worker so badly that the man suffered brain damage and is paralyzed.  For this and other crimes, Terreblanche did prison time in the new South Africa.

What has South Africans of all colors worried is that Terreblanche's death will call attention to the spate of murders of white farmers in rural South Africa, and comes only days after the Supreme Court had to ban the song "Shoot the Boer."  Not good publicity on the eve of the World Cup.

Terreblanche's name and his apartheid cause are synonymous with racism in Africa, but of course whites do not have a monopoly on racism.  Just ask Zimbabwean farmers.  One of the keys to South Africa's continued success has been its relatively peaceful transition from white minority rule, thanks to the inspired leadership of Nelson Mandela.  Nevertheless, some 3,000 white farmers have been killed since apartheid's fall.

In East Africa, tourists can buy Mzungu t-shirts, and charity worker Mzungu Mike explains that the Swahili word means "white person, presumed rich."  It's mostly in good fun - most Kenyans and Ugandans see the presumed rich mzungus as potential contributors to their own livelihood.

In Nigeria, white people are sometimes called oyibo (these guys, among the rare white tourists who have braved Nigeria, took it as a term of affection, as in "what are these crazy oyibos doing here?").  And the Nigerian government has been smart to profit from Mugabe's Pyhrric expulsions of white farmers, offering land to many white Zimbabweans, who plan to stay in the country.

Afrikaner author Marq de Villiers, another Huguenot descendant, wrote in his 1987 book "White Tribe Dreaming" that Terreblanche was a "bittereinder of his day."  Like his bitter ender forebears who refused to buckle to British rule after their defeat in the Boer War, Terreblanche could never adapt to a country where one-man-one-vote was the law of the land.

Live by the sword...

The Expatriate Condition: Potentially Permanent

Note to readers: this is an abridged version of an article appearing in the current issue of Together Magazine, a glossy Brussels bi-monthly catering to the Anglophone expatriate community.  Sheet music cover from "The Singing War" of Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries.

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Some of us have made this expat business our life’s work.  In public service (I’m most familiar with diplomats and the military), multiple postings abroad are often the norm.  And Brussels is brimming with semi permanent expats whose professional lives revolve around the EU institutions.  But I’ve known lots of private sector people too for whom a life overseas is the culmination of a dream, and who have trouble going back.  It’s an old problem.

How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm? (After They’ve Seen Paree) put to song the dilemma facing American soldiers who’d been sent to France in the Great War, survived the trenches, then met a pretty Parisienne on a weekend pass.  Some, like Ernest Hemingway, stayed on for a while, and a similar thing happened after the Second World War.  Less dramatic, but no less of a quandary for today’s HR department: how 'ya gonna send ‘er back to Baltimore, after she’s seen Bruxelles?

This expat thing gets into your blood, and it may be hereditary.  Ever notice how many expats are children of expats?  It comes from going to school with classmates from every continent, and from growing up with a different – if not downright confused – sense of nationality.  There are strident nationalists in every grouping, but as a class expats are probably more inclined to see at least two sides to every question.

“Far away fields look green” goes the adage, which makes almost every destination potentially appealing.  Born and raised in the United States, I’ve spent most of my adult life outside my native country.  Mine is a conscious choice, a sort of “reverse migration” for someone whose parents came to the US from County Mayo, Ireland.  But I know a Frenchman, an interpreter, who chose to settle in the US because he finds it “exotic.”  And he lives in suburban Washington D.C.!

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe,” reminisced Rutger Hauer’s dying replicant in Blade Runner; “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”  You don’t have to be an alien to feel like you’ve come in from outer space.  Just be a typical expat returning home to family or old neighbors, who feign interest in your international life for a few seconds before changing the subject back to local matters.  They probably don’t share your reverie about the good life abroad.  Which is why many expats befriend other expats, who can at least relate to a life lived outside the boundaries of “home.”

Oh yes, Home.  Many of us have a clear, unequivocal notion of where that is.  Others aren’t so sure.  Where home is, when home was a certain house, who was at home… home can be, as another old saying goes, where the heart is.  Expats don’t necessarily live out of a suitcase, but they often have a more flexible idea of what “home” means.  When I consider Brussels as home, it doesn’t mean I reject my Pennsylvania upbringing, and feeling “at home” in Ireland is more an emotional link to the memory of my parents than anything territorial.

All of this is not to build up the expatriate condition as a universal solution.  After all, not everyone can or should leave the land of their birth – you might not really want your embarrassing younger brother to show the flag abroad, at least not in your presence.  I remember puzzling over some of my fellow diplomats who persisted in living abroad when their time there was spent largely in the company of their countrymen.

That can be a challenge, mind you – not just getting to know some locals, but actually befriending them.  In a place like Brussels, people have seen scores of expats come and go, and may shy from establishing friendships that risk being broken by a subsequent transfer.

And if it’s hard on the locals, it’s also hard on the itinerant foreigner.  Just listen to the BBC World Service program “From Our Own Correspondent” and you’ll hear the occasional heartfelt goodbye to a place a journalist has called home for years.  Hard as it is to say farewell to foreign places and people, it shouldn’t keep us expats from making local bonds, as the whole experience of living in another country is so much richer with the knowledge that host country friends and neighbors can provide.

So, is there a cure for the expat bug?  I’m in my sixth decade, living in an adopted country, married to a French woman, with a dozen countries I’ve called home, and the siren song of foreign fields still beckons.  Is that living the dream or postponing reality?  Not sure, but it’s in my blood.

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Around the World In International English

Before the blogosphere, there was the ionosphere.  Actually, it's still there (image: NOAA), greenhouse effect or not.   And thanks to the ionosphere, you could listen in to the world of shortwave radio.

Thanks to the Taiwanese, who seem to be the only ones making SW radios, you still can - if you want to fool around with frequencies.  There is a certain adventure in zapping around and landing up in Cairo, Moscow, or Rio de Janeiro, even if you can't understand a word they're saying.  I know you can do the same thing with live streaming on the internet, but you might miss the crackle of the radio waves.

But from the comfort of your computer, you can discover a whole world out there - in English.  You and I already know that, but how many of us stick to our favorite sites, bookmarking our way through the usual suspects?  So let me propose a tour of the world, a random journey across time zones that I'll make up as we go along.

First stop, Burma, and the Irrawaddy News Magazine.  The Irrawaddy, based in Thailand and named after Burma's main river, is written by exiled Burmese journalists.  How often do you get an objective (well, anti-regime) glimpse inside one of the world's most secretive societies?

Staying on in Asia, wander over to Pakistan - rather important to know how things are developing there, n'est-ce pas?  No better place than The Dawn, where yesterday's editorial on "Secularism vs. Islamism" described a very outspoken debate on Pakistani TV.

You'll note how random this is: our next stop is the landlocked African country of Uganda, where the Daily Monitor has an interesting story about Fort Patiko, which dates back to the time of Arab slave traders.  Ugandans speak several languages among their ethnic groups and tribes, but the national language is English.

English is widely spoken in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country, so it is not surprising that Al-Ahram has an English-language weekly, where you can read a report about "Fatah-gate," a developing scandal over corruption in Palestinian Authority circles in Ramallah.

Europe has scads of English-language media resources, so I'll cite a very unrepresentative sample of one: "A Fistful of Euros," a memorably-named blog by 15 writers.  Good stuff, and despite its name, not entirely devoted to economics.

Skipping over to Latin America, the Buenos Aires Herald is a 124 year old English-language daily, as befits a country of immigrants, a good number of whom hailed from England, Scotland, and Wales.

If all of my channel-hopping has been too demanding, you might just try WorldFocus TV's "Blogwatch," which has a changing blog roll of worldwide scribblers (including me).

American expats wanting to stay in touch with the "homeland" have a multitude of resources, and podcasts from Democracy Now and NPR are much appreciated.  But tonight, if I'm feeling a bit insomniac, I just might reach for that shortwave dial...

Expatriation: Does Distance Improve Vision?

We're still in the zone where it's acceptable to make lists of things 2009 or "best/worst of the decade," but I'll spare you yet another retrospective.  I do, however, want to comment on a couple of comments received from other bloggers, where, from very different quarters, I was included in "favorite" or "top 5" categories.

It's always flattering to get praise, and I thank my fan club.  But here's the quandary: I have been praised for my "objectivity" and "non partisanship," which are perhaps the last words that I'd have used to describe my attitude to blogging.  When I left my career as a diplomat, I reveled in being able to sock it to the Bush Administration, about which I have real trouble being objective.  And my involvement in Democrats Abroad on behalf of the Obama campaign was highly partisan.

But I'll let my fans speak for themselves.  First, Mark Golbach, who with Linda Brazill publishes "Each Little World," a very personal blog of good writing and photography on a very eclectic range of topics, based in Wisconsin:

Reading Loftus transports me outside the borders of my country, gives me back that outsider's view of things, and provides a measure of objectivity that is very hard to come by in our national press.

Now, from a world that is topically and geographically (though not philosophically) closer to mine, Yasin Akgun of The Conservative Blog,"Independent Conservative Commentary" from Great Britain:

What I particularly like about this blog is that it is written by someone who can be unashamedly non-partisan about the EU, something none of us Europeans can claim to be. It is interesting to see the views of somebody from America on the European Union, something we rarely hear about.

Akgun is referring to my other blog, "Errant European," where I tend to cross-post items that are primarily of interest to European readers of Blogactiv/Euractiv, a Brussels-based media portal on EU affairs.

I think what my pair of admirers may have touched on is my expatriated condition, which lends my subjectivity an aura of objectivity and/or non-partisan observation.  In Europe, I'm an American who lives here and follows events with interest, but not with the same level of partisan commitment that divides Europeans into socialist, liberal (meaning free-market), Green, or conservative camps.  As Akgun's Conservative Blog has pointed out, Europeans are often confused over American politics (so are many Americans!), and have only a vague idea of where Republicans and Democrats would fit on their wider political spectrum.

As an American expatriate looking back at my native country, I also have this interested but slightly detached view, though my partisan commitment is real.  From my earliest years, I was aware that my parents, who came to the US from Ireland, were different from my little friends' parents.  When my father first came to the States, he was amazed at his cousins' and colleagues' chauvinism over things American.  Their unwillingness to believe that things could, perhaps, sometimes be done in a better way overseas, or their conviction that if it didn't exist in the US, it simply didn't exist elsewhere.

Neil Gaiman, a British expat in Minnesota and author of Neverwhere (though the book is on London, its title is a good description of the expatriate condition), says that after years of living in the US, he "still feels alien, which is probably a very good thing for a writer to feel."

Like Gaiman, I think that the view from afar helps visual acuity.  Whether it's farsightedness (image from Wikipedia, "hyperopia"), objectivity, non-partisanship, or subjectivity of a special order, I have made it the thread that runs through this blog.  Glad that some have come to like it.

A Plethora of Feasts

To Muslims the world over, Eid Mubarak, or happy Eid al-Adha, AKA Eid al-Kabir.

If yesterday's Thanksgiving in the United States has been crassly, commercially re-branded as "Turkey Day," I don't think that Muslims have seen fit to call their biggest feast day "Sheep Day" or "The Day of the Lamb," but that's what they'll be eating in their hundreds of millions.  Here are some Moroccan recipes for today's feast.

Our first Eid al-Kabir in Tunis was memorable for the silence of the lambs - who had been bleating in our neighborhood for days, only to go silent, suddenly.  We could guess their fate - no pardoning of sacrificial lambs à la President Obama's gesture to a singular turkey on Thanksgiving eve.

But my fondest memory of the Eid is of the far off muezzin in the early morning hours, chanting in a soft, rhythmic way - guaranteed to put you in a good mood for the day, whatever your religion.

In places like Melilla, one of two Spanish enclaves on Morocco's northern Mediterranean coast, minarets and muezzins compete with church steeples and bells for your aural attention, though the combination is not cacophony but harmony, a reminder that for centuries in Andalusian Spain, the three great monotheistic religions coexisted in relative peace.  Check the website of the Fundación Tres Culturas for a reminder that Jews, Muslims, and Christians can still cooperate culturally in this unique bridge across the Mediterranean world.

Eid greetings image from MoroccoBoard.com, an expatriate news service.

Travels Through the Green Heart of Florida

Back roads in central Florida are a nice alternative to risking life and limb on the Interstate.  You can drive almost as fast, but the two opposing lanes impose a certain discipline, and there's no comparison in traffic congestion.  After a family reunion on the margins of Disney World, I headed back to the Gulf coast through the orange groves of "Frostfree" and other colorfully-named places.  Passing over Troublesome Creek, I wasn't far from Soggy Bottom.  Had the Coen brothers (of O Brother, Where Art Thou? fame) been inspired or was this an echo of the 2000 hit comedy?  In any case, a road works sign informed me that "State Prisoners at Work" were up ahead, but I detected no chain gangs.

My genial host in Sarasota marveled at my wanting to drive through what he called "cracker country," but it's all part of my "cultural learnings," as Borat would say.  At least this rather pretty swath of the state has a real economy - though apparently based on a citrus monoculture - compared to the Florida coastline, where the part of the population not earning its living from tourism sells life's necessities (and a lot of dross too) to the other part that is dependent on the "snowbirds," that quaint expression describing the Northerners (American and Canadian) who migrate south for the winter.  There were even rolling hills and lakes that didn't appear to be glorified swamps.

As with other parts of rural - especially Southern - states, there are lots of churches, some part of larger denominations like the First Baptists, others of various pentecostal evangelical fundamental persuasions.  The percentage of "manufactured homes" (mobile homes to you and me) is very high, and the contrast with the faux-Spanish stuccoed condominiums and villas of urban Florida couldn't be more striking.

Borrowed CDs and NPR (for non-US readers, National Public Radio, the news, music, and culture network) provided aural diversion from the monotony of the orange groves, and no Deliverance moments were had, though I did see a few ramshackle dwellings with anti-social warnings about dogs.  Urban or rural, Florida abounds in gun shops, and American flags.  To the foreign visitor: the largest American flags fluttering in the breeze are not indicative of a government installation, but show you the way to a car dealership.  You can still buy a little plastic gizmo to attach a flag to your rear passenger window, though there are far fewer of these than after the post-9/11 patriotic fervor.

My rambles have gone on long enough.  Next: political learnings on things like the health care situation.

From Dirty Dick's Christian Spa and Good Eats

My friend Dick, happily retired in Florida's Gulf coast, does provide the Good Eats (although you might have to cook some yourself), but the Christian part is definitely tongue in cheek.  He's one of the tidiest bachelors around, so the "Dirty Dick" part is there just for color, though it does sound properly rakish and piratical.   He was a Navy man before he became a diplomat and eventually my first boss in the Foreign Service.

Those days are past, and we spend much of our time applying our honed analytical skills - sorry, but Evaluation Report language always manages to creep in... trying to get our heads around the matter of the State of the United States.  It's a lifelong task.

We were blissfully enjoying a beer and Cheap Eeetz alongside the marina when a wide screen TV on the wall announced the mass killing at Fort Hood ("the largest active duty armored post in the United States Armed Services") Texas.  When we read the caption naming the alleged shooter, we knew it boded ill for a whole host of reasons.  Yet another "senseless killing" as they say, the work of a possibly deranged individual.  A Lone Star Shooter.  But because the suspect has a name that resonates from here to the Middle East, and because his victims were soldiers in a place where they shouldn't have been under fire, he won't be "just another" mass murderer.

Nidal Malik Hasan's apparent infiltration of personal weapons onto the base has to cause concern for the hundreds of other military installations scattered across the country, and across the world.  "We will increase our security presence here in the coming days" said base commander Lieutenant General Robert Cone.  Well, of course they will, but the deed is done, and no amount of posting Humvees with 50 caliber machine guns trained at the gates will screen murderous intent in the minds of soldiers who might "go Postal."

Do you know how many private cars pass through the gates of just this one base - population 50,000 or so - daily?  Sure, they can double and triple check ID, pull some suspicious sergeants and potentially mad majors over and have them open up the trunk, but a determined killer will easily stow a few handguns and plenty of ammunition wherever he pleases.  It's what's in the mind, not what's under the hood.

Read today's Bob Herbert, himself a Vietnam era vet and consistent in his recognition of the extreme stress that upwards of a decade of wars has put on the US military.  Herbert reminds us that stress is not just a minor irritant in the context of repeated exposure to war zones.  There is not one iota of an excuse for this insane act's perpetrator, but Herbert reminds us that "we haven’t heard a lot about the scores of suicides at that same base — the highest of any U.S. military installation — since the invasion of Iraq in 2003."

This mass murder, like the many before it, unleashes the perennial battle over gun control, or rather the lack thereof, in the United States.  The same arguments for and against will be trotted out with numbing effect.  It's unfortunate that there are ultra-stressed out individuals, whether soldiers or civilians, but why oh why do we make it so easy for them to act out their impulses?  "Guns Don't Kill People; People Kill People" read the NRA bumper stickers.  Perhaps, but a potential mass murderer armed with, say, a kitchen knife he just grabbed on impulse might be a tad less lethal than one armed with an automatic weapon and endless ammo clips.

But at Dirty Dick's Christian Spa and Fine Foods, we don't indulge in pie-in-the-sky.  Just add Fort Hood to the list - Columbine, University of Texas, Virginia Tech - shake your head, and hit the remote control.  There are, apparently, other priorities.  To be continued...