This picturesque village, a little over an hour's drive from Damascus, is one of the last villages on earth where Aramaic is spoken. While not a dead language per se, Aramaic is largely a liturgical tongue used by Arab Christians, although at the time of Christ it was the lingua franca of much of the Levant. The convent holds the remains of the early Christian saint Thecla, who was a contemporary of Paul.
The October War museum and memorial, commemorating Syria and Israel's 1973 conflict (known in our circles as the Yom Kippur War), is a remarkable edifice of zero-context propaganda and kitsch brilliance. As befitting its stylistic dissonance, at least in comparison to the old quarter of Damascus, the memorial is pushed out to the fringes of the city. Paid for largely by the government of North Korea, the memorial boasts a series of mural paintings that are impressive in their scope and soulless in their composition, and the stern Soviet style sculptures that surround the building are much of the same. Most curious is the array of captured Israeli weaponry, simply arranged on the front lawn of the memorial like bizarre ornaments. Granted, most of the exhibits were in Arabic only, but the short film purporting to tell the story of the 1973 war was so transparent in its ideological agenda that even I could have driven a tank through it, American or Soviet made. Traveling in Vietnam I had noticed a lot of the same thing when it came to museums. When you don't have free speech and you are brought up with only a steady diet of approved propaganda, you are presented history in a way that must be comfortably digestible and simplistic. Of course, I am not sure American school children are off any better, but at least my high school history teacher didn't skip over the Trail of Tears or the Ludlow Massacre. I have my own issues with the question of Israel and the Palestinians, and I don't support any group that believes they are entitled by history or some deity to a given chunk of land. That said, I am amazed at how the old, tired dichotomy of the Arab vs Israeli is beaten into the minds of people in this part of the world. This museum presents the creation of the state of Israel much like a sudden but natural travesty, an earthquake or flood. The political complexities that led up to 1948, not to mention the Holocaust and the flood of refugees it produced, are never acknowledged in Arab propaganda, because if they were they would take a lot of teeth out of the anti-Israel side of the dialectic. If we choose to be more honest about our own histories, it's a lot harder to judge any one else's as harshly. And hopefully it would force us to be a little more empathetic. All of us have been refugees at one time or the other, and most of us have been oppressors as well.
Damascus is a city so ancient and fabled that I almost feel as if my observations are inadequate, though they are honest. This is a place whose streets have seen thousands of years of travelers, pilgrims, invaders, holy men, merchants, scholars, and writers of every stripe. Mark Twain remarked in "Innocents Abroad" that "No recorded event has occurred in the world but Damascus was in existence to receive news of it." I'm not sure that's quite the case, but in three days of prowling the alleys of marketplaces, juice sellers, daunting mosques and serenely undisturbed churches, it did feel as if history had left much of Damascus to its own devices. The pulse of the city seemed to propel a body at once very ancient and very timeless, something that had struck me throughout my Syrian travels. Part of it was the fact that politics were a forbidden topic, and the Hafez regime has silenced not just dissent but religious activism of all kinds. Still, this governmental repression gave an ironic amount of breathing room for a fragile yet very boisterous form of cultural pluralism. On my first evening, I enjoyed a strong coffee in the shadows of the imposing Ummayad Mosque, disappearing into the throngs of Shiite pilgrims as I wound my way back to my hotel. Then as night grew later, I found refuge in a small one room tavern run by a pair of Christian brothers, chain smoking cigarettes and opening tops on long bottles of beer. The pictures of Bashar Assad and his father were everywhere to be sure, but their very ubiquity rendered them almost powerless to me, the causal traveler. Rather than a sense of Orwellian surveillance, the constant reminder of the heavy hand of the Assads engendered no more emotional response in me than would a cavalcade of suburban corporate logos, be they Starbucks or McDonald's.
I urge everyone to see the new documentary "Countdown to Zero", which focuses on the continued danger of living in a world full of nuclear weapons. While I feel that there is little use in spending day and night worried about the possibilities of impending armageddon, it is useful to keep current geopolitical unrest (ie Iran, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea) in the context of the Nuclear Age. When one considers the list of nations that possess nuclear armaments, of which we are arguably the most prominent, a new perspective on the meaning of "rogue state" comes into focus. I don't foresee France nuking anyone in a hissyfit anytime soon, but the remaining nations on the list of the nuclear club (England, China, India, Pakistan, Russia, North Korea, and the United States) are anything but stabilizing global influences. Far from it. We are still the only nation that has used atomic weapons, and throughout the last half century the nuclear armed nations have held the rest of the world psychologically hostage with the terrible scenarios imaginable should their arsenals be employed. Something that is touched on in chilling fashion halfway through the narrative of "Countdown to Zero" is a close call that occurred in 1995. A surveillance rocket fired into the atmosphere by American and Norwegian scientists was misconstrued by Russian radar as a first strike nuclear assault. Then Russian President Boris Yeltsin was thankfully not in a bad mood and/or drunk at the time, and even though he was in immediate communication with his military advisers, Yeltsin rightfully suspected the rocket in question was not an initial bellicose maneuver on the part of the United States. The fact that a technical glitch could potentially trigger the end of the world is, I admit, darkly humorous. And as everything since "Strangelove" has proven, we might as well chuckle at the Apocalypse since we have very little control over who or what might launch it. So as I said, I am not losing any sleep over this stuff. But I am not going to ignore it either.
During World War One, there was a widespread movement in the United States to rebrand sauerkraut as "liberty cabbage", an attempt to shed German affectations from popular speech. This would of course be repeated some seven decades later in the course of the "Freedom Fry" affair. It's worth remembering, especially on 9/11, that propaganda can often begin as simply smug and arrogant, and very quickly proceed into bigotry.
My favorite group of Turkish siblings. Please tell me that the guitar player is rocking a double neck with a saz. If so, I would kill to know where to find one.
There is a new documentary on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by Spike Lee with this title, and I was curious as to the origin of this very very Southern phrase. I assumed, as do a lot of folks, that it was an archaic Southern reference in regards to flooding, perhaps one of those slogans that arose in response to the historic flooding of the Mississippi River in 1927. The phrase in fact goes back quite a ways further; back to the days when the Creek Indian nation was a primary competitor to the impending hegemony of the oncoming Anglo-American invasion of the Southeast. It is an ironic case of semantic drift, and considering the relevance it has to our newly found forgotten, it is worth recalling its very disparate origins. I am humbly reprinting the following from Knol..... If someone says, “God willing and the Creek don’t rise” they’re looking to achieve a goal. When they use this phrase, it means that they will achieve their goal as long as there are no outside forces of which they have no control preventing them from doing just that.
Origin:
The first time this phrase was known to be in print it was written by a man named Benjamin Hawkins in the late 18th century. Hawkins was a politician in the late 18th century and early 19th century as well as an Indian diplomat. This was back in the day where American Indians and the white settlers were constantly fighting for the land in the United States. While in the south, Hawkins was requested by the President of the United States to return to Washington. In his response, he was said to write, “God willing and the Creek don’t rise.” Benjamin Hawkins capitalized the work “Creek”. Therefore, it is deduced that what he was referring to was not a body of water at all, but instead was the Creek Indian tribe. The Creek Indians were also known as the Muscogee tribe which were located in the southeastern region of the United States (Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Oklahoma). Since the Creek Indians were prevalent in the area where he was located, Hawkins knew that there was a great risk of the Creek Indians attacking. This figure of speech is not only still used today, but the phrase is also in the lyrics of a 2008 song by the country music group Little Big Town. The song is called “Good Lord Willing” and the lyrics in the song say, “Good lord willing and the Creek don’t rise” instead of “God willing and the creek don’t rise”.
