Around the World Spring 04

Hi all. For a few years I’ve written “Around Town” notes about local stuff, mostly in LA but now in Denver. I’ll come back to thoughts on the Front Range next time out.

This time around I wanted to touch on some of my international experiences, my thoughts on writing poetry, and some personal takes on current national and international politics.

World Thumbs

My work with Servant Partners takes me to a lot of places around the world.

I thought you might enjoy some quick thumbnail sketches of a few of the more unusual experiences I’ve had recently on the road.

Mumbai, India

While browsing through a shop in Mumbai I saw a large sign posted on the wall behind the cash register. The content of the sign was more than a little familiar. It read:

Our Motto

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption to our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business. He is the heart of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.” Mahatma Gandhi


I was unaware before visiting that shop that Gandhi had been such a versatile figure. It’s remarkable that a religious giant who helped free India from British imperial rule was also, apparently, a sloganeer with a genius for moving the merchandise.

The quote on the wall might have been only the tip of the iceberg. Other little known sayings of Gandhi posted around India might include “A penny saved is a penny earned,” “The business of India is business,” and “Creating value for our stockholders is the bottom line.”

Actually, I loved the sign and what it may say about Mumbai and about India. The fact that some little known American middle manager wrote the quote only makes the fact that it was hanging in an Indian business even more impressive.

When you’re trying to bring about major changes in the way things are done and trying to introduce valuable ideas from “outsiders,” who isn’t tempted to ascribe “the revolution” to an authority figure that is beyond reproach? The true believers in any society need comfort that the changes occurring are really what the “founding fathers” or important religious figures intended.

Bringing about serious change may mean adopting a kind of eclectic philosophy which isn’t very logical or consistent. Significant and truly valuable change is often nothing more than unintended consequences. Sometimes it’s a matter of throwing together “best practices” from different fields of human interest and different cultures into something that makes intuitive sense and which works. And it never hurts to have a Jesus or a Gandhi on board to help convince those who are unsure.

That’s an approach to change familiar to both Indians and Americans.

And it defines Mumbai (a.k.a. Bombay), a place that gives new meaning to the term “boom town.” Mumbai is the center of the economic revolution that is beginning to transform India.

Mumbai is deeply Indian, but it’s also full of raw entrepreneurial and acquisitive energy in the midst of a country which for many thousands of years believed religiously in the irrelevance of the material world.

Like the U.S., it’s a crazy cacophony of philosophies and convictions. The city is high speed creation and destruction every day.

And the people of Mumbai seem to believe it will work. There are 20 million of them with more arriving every day. Most of them live in the largest network of urban slums in the world.

The slum dwellers are trying to forge a creative synthesis out of many traditional Indian cultures and various versions of global market capitalism.

Who needs fiction or fantasy when real life around the world is so fascinating?

Khartoum, Sudan

During a trip to East Africa this winter I was detained by security forces in Sudan and then sent packing from the country.

I was in Sudan to visit a tribal Christian leader who is leading a church planting/justice ministry in the slums of Khartoum, which is the capitol of the country. About 5 million people live in that great city.

Sudan is a radical Islamic police state. Over the past 25 years the country has been torn apart by a civil war that has killed over 2 million Sudanese. The jihadi regime in the north of the country seeks to impose sharia law and Islamic practice on the whole country. The southern part of the country is controlled by animistic and Christian African tribes and guerilla armies.

The northern government, based in Khartoum, wants to control the immense oil wealth that lays beneath the ground in the south. The southerners, not surprisingly, would like that black gold and “Texas T” for themselves. The result has been a vicious conflict between north and south. As you might expect from the circumstances, Sudan is one of the poorest nations in the world.

What I just laid out is the simple and official version of what’s what in Sudan.

After 25 years of mayhem, what’s really happening on the ground is far more complex and disturbing. As is so often the case in protracted civil wars, violence and greed become ends in their own right, so both sides in the conflict end up ravaging and abusing the local civilian population.

And before long there really isn’t a “both sides.” Soon the conflict spreads and petty warlords and adventurers take advantage of what’s happening. If there was once a “just cause” behind the civil war, eventually that cause is lost in a bull market of killing and profit taking by many groups. Think Guatemala in the 70’s and 80’s times ten.

Sudan was the original home of Al Queda before that movement headed for Afghanistan to fight the Russians. More recently, the evangelical church in the U.S. became interested in Sudan in order to help the southern Sudanese Christians resist the Islamic influence of the northern government. And after 9/11 the U.S. State Department put intense pressure on the technical rulers of the country to demonstrate their willingness to participate in the “war on terror.” So the murderous regime in Khartoum has recently made some efforts to make nice.

They allowed Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s uncomplicated heir, to do an evangelistic crusade in a soccer stadium in Khartoum.

And they’ve allowed American evangelicals to ship relief supplies to communities in the south of the country. Most of those supplies end up in the hands of warlords and local thugs, but the effort is well intended and therefore important and commendable. It also makes for effective evangelical fundraising back home.

The self–professed jihadi government in Sudan decided, in an astute political move, that they no longer support Al Queda.

It’s all very heartwarming. Neo-imperial designs, just like the Cold War strategies before them, create strange bedfellows.

Sudan was recently awarded a seat on the U.N. human rights commission with acquiescence from the west because of their recent conversion to the “war against terror.”
In the meantime the systematic killing and violence in the country continue. In the past year the government of Sudan has devastated Durfar province in the western part of the country, killing tens of thousands and displacing about a million people in the latest version of their creative and multi-pronged ethnic cleansing campaign.

If there was ever a nation that could use a military/humanitarian intervention by a wide consensus of countries, Sudan is that place. Sudan is Rwanda at half-speed but extended over two and a half decades. Unfortunately, there’s no political capital in it and it would take years of long-term, sacrificial nation building, so it’s unlikely it will happen anytime soon.

The story of my time in Sudan is more involved, but the short version is that I spent the night with a group of about 8 Sudanese security agents. They initially threatened me, though they did it in a fairly clumsy way due to their poor grasp of English and to their noticeable lack of commitment to the war against the “American crusaders.”

In spite of the fact that they turned out to be the Barney Fifes of Sudanese security agents, it was still scary for a while since I wasn’t sure what they had in mind and nobody was telling me much of anything at the outset. And unlike Barney, they definitely had more than one bullet each.

**for those of you who live outside the U.S. and who are unfamiliar with some of the details of our pop culture, in a very popular U.S. television show Barney Fife was a bumbling and silly police deputy in a rural small town. He was so untrustworthy that the town’s sheriff gave him only one bullet which he carried in his shirt pocket.

But overall, the experience was so goofy that it’s hard to remember it as particularly dangerous.

They all wore more traditional Sudanese menswear, which looks a little bit like a desert version of 1950’s American men’s pajamas. They accessorized the look with worn out sandals, and in a few cases, snugly fitting knit skull caps. It would be hard to imagine a less threatening outfit, unless you consider taking a nap scary.

And they joked around with each other, and eventually me, in a way that reminded me of messing around in a men’s locker room with a bunch of guys. All we needed was a couple of wet towels to snap each other on the butt and it would have been just like high school back at home.

I’m sure part of the whole atmosphere was due to it being the middle of the night. Finding everything funny and acting like an idiot when you’re exhausted late at night is apparently a universal experience, even among erstwhile Islamic state thugs.

They also had a 26” television and a VCR set up in the room along with lots of American movies from some bootleg version of Blockbuster.

These guys loved Arnold Schwarzenegger flicks. We watched “Predator” and two parts of the “Terminator” series during the long hours of the security graveyard shift.

The movies were in the original English with Arabic subtitles. Arnold’s movies—like his governing role in California—seem to appeal more to the primitive brain than to parts of the brain that have evolved over the past few million years, so they definitely have a more universal visual and emotional appeal.

Two of my captor/companions spoke a little bit of broken English. The Muslims I’ve met around the world are very hospitable and kind people, so I think the two of them felt an urgency to make me feel at home after they’d finished with the obligatory threats and the corporate sales pitch.

One of them kept repeating “America good country. George Boosh idiot.” I laughed out loud every time he said it, which seemed to amuse all the guys sitting around me, though I know most of them were responding only to my laughter since they had no idea what their English speaking co-worker was saying.

At about 7 am, a Kenya Airlines administrator came into the detention room and broke up the pajama party. She told me I was going to be deported back to Nairobi, which was my original point of departure before flying to Sudan.

About an hour later the security guys put me into a security vehicle and drove me to my plane at the airport. When I got back on the plane they finally gave me my passport and I was on my way back to Kenya. Of course, I got stuck with the bill for the flight to Nairobi.

Cairo, Egypt

I eventually got to Cairo, which was my intended destination after Khartoum. While I was there I had a chance to visit the mosque that’s the intellectual center of Islam and is the oldest university in the world. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to visit.

One of our Servant Partners missos lives in Cairo, and he and I ended up hanging out with a bunch of his 20-something Muslim friends after we had prayed in the great mosque.

These guys were living in the slum which surrounds the mosque and were studying at the Islamic university there. Two were Egyptians, but the other two were radical Islamists from Pakistan who grew up in England.

All four of them spoke good English, so I had a chance to talk with these guys about just about everything that’s in the news now.

They challenged me with very direct questions about Americans and Christians during our conversation. They contributed astute and moving insights on the one hand and scary ignorance and misinformation on the other.

They were definitely fully enlisted in a struggle against the west.

Some of their commitment to the battle seemed to be rooted in religious blindness and ignorance.

But they also struck me as very bright and passionate young men with a commitment to the best of their faith and to a desire to change things for the better, as misguided as some of their ideas and convictions might have been. And they were lively and warm, which always covers a multitude of sins.

We ended up having dinner and then smoking sheesha together. One of the most enduring of Arabic and Islamic customs is a group of men sitting together in a café and smoking sweet tobacco through a large water pipe. It’s a way to bond socially and to talk about everything. So that’s what we did.

I told them I never smoke and that the one time I tried in high school I fell on the ground in a coughing fit. My only real experience with bongs (the more familiar name for a water pipe) was in college when one of my roommates and his friends smoked pot in a collection of oddly colored bongs while we all played backgammon for cash. Since I was the only one not smoking, and therefore the only sober player in the game, I made a nice sum on a weekly basis.

Smoking sheesha turned out to be very pleasant. They all got a kick out of my tentative first puffs. After watching them do it for a while I finally got the hang of it. By the end of the time I was even blowing smoke, with some measure of style in my own inexperienced estimation, out of my nose.

I felt sad when we said goodbye to these young men. I pray they won’t give themselves to hatred and violence. I hope I have a chance to see them again in future trips to Cairo in better circumstances.

The Moon in June

A few years back I was writing poetry seriously for publication and for friends too, and folks ask me from time to time why I stopped. That short burst of creative activity lasted about 4 years and then ended 3 years ago.

I wrote regularly in my twenties as well, so that more recent period was a return to poetry for me.

Probably the simplest answer for why I stopped writing poetry is that hardly anyone reads poetry anymore. I’d guess more people belong to the “”Amish Women’s Mud-Wrestling League” than subscribe to your average poetry rag. Perhaps that’s an example of poetic license and overstatement :^), but maybe not by much. In the end I decided that writing poetry was atavistic.

I’ve often been struck by the stone carvers who worked so hard to sculpt the gargoyles that sit on top of medieval cathedrals. No one ever really saw their work, but they were motivated by the thought that God looked down on their efforts and approved. It was the artisan’s equivalent of the idea that character is what you do when no one but God can see.

Well, I’ve discovered that I would’ve never cut it as a cathedral stonemason, at least in terms of writing poetry.

I had the good fortune and blessing to be published a number of times during my more recent poetry writing jag. The publications were a mix of respectable secular and Christian outlets with reasonable—by poetry standards—readership.

I say good fortune and blessing because getting a poem published is difficult. Writing something beyond the standard “Moon/June/High Above/So in Love” poem is tough. And even if you write something decent, there are so few outlets controlled by so few editors that you’re dealing with a real long-shot before you start clicking at the keyboard.

There is a definite satisfaction in capturing your own thoughts and perceptions in the language of poetry, but at some point it just seems crazy to expend that kind of effort with such a small potential audience.

I’m not sure I fully understand why written poetry has fallen so far out of favor, though the “experts” usually site the loss of reading skills and the lack of patience on the part of educated people who expect to be entertained immediately and who aren’t interested in the hard work that’s necessary to read poetry. It seems to me that most people look at art of all kinds as a diversion + inexpressible added value.

That’s not necessarily an entirely bad thing given the often overblown status given to art in the past couple of centuries, but it’s hard not to think that something significant may have been lost in the transition. I can only think of a single contemporary poet, the wonderful Billy Collins, who is known among a significant subset of educated folks in the U.S http://www.bigsnap.com/billy.html

The real shame of it is that a lot of excellent poetry is being written right now. It’s the artistic equivalent of a major inventory problem and a modern American recession: lots of great product and very little demand.

One of the only places where poetry still lives is in “poetry slams” where lots of poets and would-be poets gather in front of an audience and perform their poems. I’ve done poems at a number of them and attended even more, and the energy and passion of the poetry comes through much more strongly for most people when they can see it done live rather than just reading it on a page.

Most of it’s a mixed bag. But when the stuff is good a single individual can move people in an immediate way I haven’t seen very often with other kinds of art. And there is something very exciting about watching people step out with no props and no backup and do their own stuff with little sense of how the audience will respond. If you haven’t had a chance to check one out you should give it a try.

Some people believe that hip-hop music is the new poetry. Hmmm…. In response I can only quote the old New England expression; “Uh, maybe….uh, maybe not.” You have to drag out the two “Uhs,” make an elongated pause after “maybe,” and highlight the “not” to get the full feeling of this old piece of Yankee wisdom.

Not Curious George

In the “Curious George” series of children’s books, a silly monkey who is too curious and inquisitive creates big messes which are forgiven because he’s sincere and because the Man in the Yellow Hat loves him.

Now we’re in a time when an even sillier monkey who doesn’t seem to be curious or inquisitive at all, Not Curious George, creates really big messes. He may be forgiven because he’s sincere and because the People in the Red States love him.

Not Curious George doesn’t admit to making mistakes, though that monkey, along with the “fiscally conservative” Republican Congress, created one of the largest budget deficits in US history.

And Not Curious George led the country into a war in Iraq on false pretenses mostly to show the world that America is a big old guerilla who shouldn’t be messed with. Conquering Afghanistan and hunting down Al Queda wasn’t enough for Not Curious George.

What a mess Not Curious George created in Iraq! Seems his other simian friends in the administration really didn’t have a practical and tactical plan for what to do when they threw out the Man in the Black Hat.

Not Curious George ran his campaign in 2000 with a promise that he would carry out a humble foreign policy that respected other nations. But that mischievous monkey has alienated most of the world. America is hated and disrespected around the world in an unprecedented way, much of it because Not Curious George and his playmates like to beat their chests and humiliate other kids on the playground.

What makes that even more remarkable is that America enjoyed some of its greatest support ever after 9/11 and had overwhelming support for the war in Afghanistan.

Not Curious George talks a lot about being the first president who leads like the CEO of a major corporation. Maybe he’s forgotten what happens to CEO’s who severely damage their corporate “brand name” and who run massive deficits. I say let’s judge Not Curious George by his own standards.

I’ll be working hard in a national political campaign, for the first time in my life, to send Not Curious George back to Texas next fall. I hope he’ll have a chance to live once again among those who would vote for him no matter what he does, simply because he’s a Born Again Monkey and because he tries hard to seem like a Regular Chimp.

O.K. I’ve had my satirical rant.

The Bushies have done some good things. No question about it. Sometimes you need a simple and direct leader in a time of apparent crisis. I think Bush’s most effective contribution has been as a cheerleader in bolstering the country when we were shocked by 9/11. He was a male cheerleader in college and he stepped up to help folks at a time when lots of people were disheartened.

I also thought he acted vigorously to go after groups like Al Queda and their despicable offspring. I wish he had been even more vigorous and focused. The war in Iraq wasted precious resources and destroyed our reputation in much of the world, but I think Bush was well-intentioned in going after the Islamic death cults.

Beyond that, I’m not clear on other truly valuable contributions. I don’t mean that comment to devalue what he has contributed, because I think those contributions are important.

Still, I think it would help the country and our relationships around the world if he retired to the ranch in Crawford. From the point of view of policies and governance, I think the present leadership of the U.S. is a failure on the whole.

Who knows if it’s realistic to believe Bush can be defeated. He just spent 60 million dollars in March and April alone attacking Kerry relentlessly.

I saw quite a few of the ads and it’s mostly spin and falsehoods, but with that kind of money and with the level of awareness many Americans seem to have, it does work.

It’s also helpful when people are religiously committed to voting for you regardless of what you do.

An idolatrous belief in the rightness of perpetual American dominance in the world (that’s the Bush administration’s clearly and publicly stated policy), dismissive arrogance to both friends and foes, and pre-emptive violence in a war that was optional are--taken together—a very recent addition to the American experience.

No one ever seems responsible in this administration. Loyalty, which I believe is the lowest of virtues, seems to be the greatest of virtues for George Bush.

Along those lines, I’ll quote parts of a commentary from this past week by Fareed Zakaria, the senior editor of Time Magazine’s International Edition. Over the past 4 or 5 years I’ve enjoyed and respected his writings, even though he’s been a staunch supporter of the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq. He’s changed him mind about the present rulers of the U.S. over the past half year based on the evidence.

After the greatest terrorist attack against America, no one was asked to resign, and the White House didn’t even want to launch a serious investigation into it. The 9/11 Commission was created after some of the victim’s families pursued it aggressively and simply didn’t give up.

After the fiasco over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, not one person was ever fired or reassigned. The only people who have been fired or cashiered in this administration are men like Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O’Neill and Larry Lindsey, who spoke inconvenient truths.

...Since 9/11, a handful of officials at the top of the Defense Department and the vice president’s office have commandeered American foreign and defense policy. In the name of fighting terror they have systematically weakened the traditional restraints that have made the U.S. respected around the world. Alliances, international institutions, norms and ethical conventions have all been deemed expensive indulgences at a time of crisis.

The basic attitude taken by Rumsfeld, Cheney and their top aides has been “We’re at war; all these niceties will have to wait.” As a result, we’ve waged pre-emptive war unilaterally, spurned international cooperation, rejected United Nations participation, humiliated allies, discounted the need for local support in Iraq and incurred massive costs in blood and treasure.

…The results are plain. On almost every issue involving post-war Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Sistani—Washington’s assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has…had the effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.

Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush’s legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I’m sure he takes full responsibility.

The majority of American evangelical Christians are supporting all of this. That’s worth a minute or two of reflection.

And besides lots of money and misguided co-religionists, Bush also has Ralph Nader in his corner. Nader threw the last election to Bush and may do so again.

The most remarkable thing is that the Democrats seem to want to self-destruct. If they had run a candidate who wasn’t a cardboard cutout in the last election they would have won fairly easily. The same thing may turn out to be true in this election too.

Kerry, at this point in the campaign, reminds me of the President Lincoln robot in the old “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” ride at Disneyland. I hope he’ll make more of a human connection in the coming months.

Many people thought President Clinton was lucky in his opponents. Maybe Bush is on the same sort of roll. I truly hope not.

Good Flicks

Go see “Touching the Void”

Two English mountaineers try to climb a peak in Peru that no one has ever summited before. They almost die trying.

I don’t know if it will still be in theatres, but I’m sure you can rent it soon. It’s a well done documentary/drama about the Greek myth of Sisyphus and the mystery of human endurance.

It has a “happy” ending. What makes it so compelling is, after watching it, you wonder whether that’s good or bad.