satori redefined

Hey hey hey - so I moved today from Hamra in West Beirut to Gemayze in East Beirut. I’ll try to find a good map to show where I’m living, given the Newspaper’s office and Nick’s house.

Here’s a photo gallery with the trip today across town, plus pics of my new home and my old home. Enjoy!

Today I paid for my new room for the next month, so thankfully I will no longer be sleeping on Nick’s couch…! I’ll be sharing a room in a flat owned by a hostel owner, near the Daily Star’s office Gemayze in East Beirut - It’s small, but decent, with a balcony that has a good view of the Mediterranean. As soon as I move in tomorrow I will put up some pictures. The room comes with internet and oil/gas is included, so that takes care of several problems.

So now the last thing I have to do is hack my iPhone and buy a sim card - Once that’s taken care of, as they say here, “Khallas everything will be taken care of.” Which generally means there are things that most certainly have not, and will not, be taken care of, but the important things are done.

I’ll be sharing the apartment with an intern here at the paper, successfully cutting my housing-budget in half, and he’s a nice guy. If he’s messy, I suppose I’ll have to murder him, but I think he’ll be alright.

Anyways! Life moves forward! I submitted my draft report on the future of the website today, all 20 pages of it. It took a lot of thought, but not nearly as much work as actually going through with the whole thing will take… I impressed everyone at the paper by staying at the office until midnight last night. I impressed myself because then I went to Captains Cabin for beers afterwards. I will write an entry on Captains tomorrow or the next day, as it’s the most wonderful little find, an old bar in Hamra near Nick’s apartment.

Till then…

I’m sitting here at work, crafting a document which represents the future of the Daily Star’s website, which will be submitted to several of the decisions makers here a the newspaper. I’ve just finished building a mockup for the new “Latest News” section, and I’m jamming out to Linkin Park in Beirut, Lebanon.

In Jordan I was a victim of what Middle Eastern doctors apparently like to call “travel sickeness.” Whatever it is, I’m sure I only exaserbate the problem with my habit of not eating properly or staying well hydrated whenever I travel. Whatever the case, I am now emerging from several days of sleep and feeling terrible.

I will have more to report tomorrow, but things are moving forward at the paper. I seem to have co-opted a number of the key responsibilities I had hoped for regarding the Daily Star’s website, and won approval from several important decision makers in that regard.

Though I have yet to get a phone number, find a place to live, or unpack my bags in any meaningful way, I HAVE read most of “Pity the Nation,” by Robert Fisk, which is generally regarded here as the book on the Lebanese wars of the seventies and eighties. I guess that’s something.

Hopefully tomorrow will be the beginning of momentum. Fingers crossed…

I was the second person to arrive at the Captain’s Cabin at 7:30 PM yesterday, a bar here in Hamra where I’m staying in Beirut. I had been assured by several people that this particular bar had sworn to stay open until an American President was selected, many thousands of miles away…

Doug Mills/The New York Times

And so it did. Surrounded by expats, Lebanese Americans, and Lebanese of all religious and ethnic shades, I drank profusely and watched CNN as my country seemingly came to its senses and pulled itself from the brink of self-destruction. Indeed, for my generation, this is the first time in our modern lives that we can be proud of our executive leadership, and of the voters who selected it. I was in awe as the cynicism of the Americans with me in Beirut this evening washed away. Trust me, no American is more cynical than a young American in Beirut. Here we see first hand the disaster that is American foreign policy, and many moved clear across the world to escape the America represented by the only Executive they truly knew: That of George W. Bush.

It was said on BBC World tonight that President Bush told President-Elect Obama that the election day was “awesome,” in his congratulatory call.

I have arrived safely in Beirut after a long, long, LONG, flight. If you know me well enough you know I hate to fly.

I’m staying with Nick Kimbrell in Hamra near AUB for the next few days, before I move into a place of my own. I’ll be stopping by the newspaper today but probably won’t start working until Thursday. That will give me some time to sleep off the post-election hang over. Final returns will start pouring into Lebanon late tonight, and the bars are staying open all night so that we can know what happens. I’m sure I’ll be a mess tomorrow no matter what happens.

That’s all I got for right now - I’ll take some pictures today and put them up on-line.

Much love, thanks for the prayers and wishes!

Leaving Portland - headed by car to New York. I fly out of JFK tomorrow evening… I arrive in Lebanon mid-day Monday EST, or around 9:30PM local time. HOPEFULLY, Nick will be at the airport to pick me up (hint hint)…

Not really interested in sounding dramatic, so instead I’ll leave you with this wonderful website, “Destination Lebanon,” where you can learn all about why Lebanon is a fantastic tourist opportunity, where the Ministry of Tourism will tell you that Lebanon is “Vibrant as Ever!”

http://www.destinationlebanon.gov.lb/eng/index.asp

So take it easy everyone, hope you’ll visit if you can, and look forward to far more interesting, and far less diatribal, posts on this humble (harhar) blog.

I know this is a story that is about 48 hours late, but I’m saddened at how quickly its left the airways, so I’m publishing it anyways.

The story amazes me. A Texan woman, campaigning for McCain in Pittsburgh, went to the police late last week, claiming that while being mugged by a 6′4” black man, he noticed that she had a ‘McCain sticker’ on her car and proceeded to carve a “B” into her face and assault her until she ‘turned into an Obama supporter.’ The media flipped out, and conservative talk radio went nuts. Both campaigns denounced the assault, and the woman, a budding celebrity in her early twenties, received calls from both Obama and McCain.

Within 24 hours, the story began to unravel. There was no footage of the woman at the ATM where she said she’d been mugged. The bruises on her face appeared self inflicted. The “B” she said had been carved into her face had two serious flaws: It appeared to have been cut with a butter knife, and was backwards, as if it’d been haphazardly cut in the mirror. Anyone facing her would have cut a “B” facing the right way. She failed a polygraph and subsequently told the police she made it all up.

So I have a serious point of contention here -

That nobody is making a bigger deal about the chosen description of the man she said assaulted her is just sick.

Am I the only person who’s noticed that, though the lying woman was rightly called a liar in the press, no one is calling her an ignorant race baiter and racist? An America where nobody makes a huge deal about her belligerent description is Sarah Palin’s America, the new Republican party’s America - An America made up of inexcusable lies that are merely ignored unless they are useful.

We have a long history in this country of racially-motivated murders that sprung from these exact sort of accusations. How many have died at the hands of the mob thanks to claims of assault by white women against black men?

Barack Obama’s stunning rise to power, and on the edge of a historic presidential championship, was supposed to herald the end of this sort of deranged racism. Indeed, conservative commentators have made it clear that they believe the case of Obama justifies the end of affirmative action.

Instead, we have this pitiful, disgusting, and illuminating story of a young Texan woman who apparently thought she could convince the world that a person sitting on top of her would carve a backwards “B” into her face - oh yeah, and he was totally black. Perhaps she should have attributed the strange occurrence to the black man’s ignorance of the English language? Maybe her Texan sensibilities encouraged her to believe that Ebonics uses backwards letters?

Or maybe this story highlights the barrel-bottom reality of American conservativism: Young Texan woman travels to the scary north to try to spread the “conservativism ideals” of the south to western Pennsylvania, and instead packs into her carpet back the very racism she sought to ferment. And maybe it also highlights the dreadful state of our educational system – Did she ever stop to think, as she looked into a mirror with a butter knife, that the image of her face staring back at her was flipped? Take a look at this picture:

Young lady, how sick are you, really? And how sick is our press? Yes, she’s a liar. Liar liar pants on fire. Lying rarely ever hurt anyone, except when it’s this sort of lie. What she is, is a hate-mongering racist liar playing with fire in a building that is burning to the ground. Why didn’t she stop to think how terrifying and destructive her lie would be in the heart land of America where the legacy of the lynch mob lives on? How much more entrenched would the Angry Black Man stereotype have been? Don’t just call her a liar, call her what she is:

A perfect representation of the expiration date sticker on the side of the party of Reagan. Conservativism is supposed to be a set of ideas – A philosophy, with firm guidelines and an important history. It is sick jerks like Karl Rove who twisted the ignorant herd of Americans with “conservative values” (who apparently now believe in lying, self aggrandizement, self mutilation, and hateful racism) into the fold of the real conservative movement, and convinced the intellectual Right to go along with it. Barry Goldwater is rolling over in his grave. As are Milton Friedman, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.

The legacy in this country when it comes to African Americans is abysmal. This race-baiting case is the worst symptom of the virus that is American racism.

That nobody is making a bigger deal about the chosen description of the man she said assaulted her is just sick.