(currently playing: A:Xus, Soundtrack for Life)
My friend, Liz, was born in Saudi Arabia. Ethnically, though, she’s about as Arabian as me (i.e. about as Arabian as your average horseshoe crab). Grew up speaking Arabian as much as she spoke English.
So we had dinner tonight. Buck and Dwight (her husband) kindly accompanied us. And so, it is through these small parts of my life — dinner with one group of friends, stays with other friends in Israel — that the sureties of my life vis à vis politics, international variety, are dismantled.
To cut it short: the Arabs are not “them” and we (Westerners) are not “us.” There’s a whole swirling uncertainty about Middle Eastern politics, especially in the first half of the 20th century, that renders the “usual” across-the-board (we’re right, they’re wrong) jargon much less satisfying than before.
Digressing into any summation of the conversation would not only be silly and boring, but make us all look way more intellectual than we were being at the time. This is real gut-level politics, folks. My friends are getting shot, and her friends are getting tossed out of their houses.
Blog-level politics be damned. Hell, politics be damned. This is what it’s about: our friends are being shot at and dispossessed by one another. How do we stop them from doing all of this?
That’s what politics is. Not CBS or Dan Rather or Bush v. Kerry or which of us bloggers gets press credentials or not. Politics is people trying to live next to each other.
white pebble 