“Bush killed all those politicians because he doesn’t want peace in Lebanon.”

“Why wouldn’t Bush want peace in Lebanon?” I said.

“I don’t know!”

“Americans don’t want war in Lebanon,” I said. “It would not serve our interests or yours. Do you think Americans want chaos in Lebanon just for the heck of it?”

“We don’t hate the American people, only the government.”

“Okay,” I said. “So why then does [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah repeatedly say ‘Death to America’?” I asked these questions in the most friendly and casual tone of voice I could muster.

“He only means death to the American government.”

“Why doesn’t he make that clear then?” I said.

“He does!”

“No, he doesn’t,” I said. “He says ‘Death to America’. What would you think if George W. Bush gave speeches where he screamed ‘Death to Lebanon’? Come on, guys. Be honest with me. I want to know what you really think.”

“I want to go to America,” the leader kid said. “I love America and I want to live in America. America is rich and free. I want to be rich and free, too.”

– Michael J. Totten, The Road to Fatima Gate (2011)

I know everything I am supposed to know. The facts that shaped the biographies of the Middle East. I see all of it in one glance, how the borders were drawn, religion swept over deserts and through empires, colonialism came and went and came again. I’ve read the books and considered the arguments. I signed up for the listservs of professors and writers who argue over Islam’s perpetual promises and America’s eternal interests. Everybody lying; everybody failing a little, then failing some more. The powerful tripping along, blinded by their own mythology, led astray by their morals. I can see all of it. I am bogged down in facts. But here I stand among the mad and maybe that’s all it’s ever been. The Middle East goes crazy and we go along with it. So many of my generation have trooped here for these latest wars – the soldiers, the sailors, the UN workers, the State Department enfant terribles, Mad Max contractors with guns strapped to beefy thighs, the writers and volunteers and freelancers and adventure-hungry travelers. We chased it all down into the Middle East and came up dry, coughing on other people’s blood.

And now, in the depths of this war, I believe that nobody will ever see this, that Israel will never really look, and America will never really look, either. This is real to nobody. This would never be real to me if I were not here.

– Megan K. Stack, Every Man in this Village is a Liar (2010)

Saudi Arabia stuck to me, followed me home and shadowed me through my days, tainting the way I perceived men and women everywhere. Back home in Cairo, the cacophony of whistles and lewd coos on the streets sent me into blind rage. I slammed doors in the faces of delivery men; cursed at Egyptian soldiers in a language they didn’t speak; kept a resentful mental tally of the Western men, especially reporters, who seemed to condone, even relish, the marginalization of women in the Arab world. [..]

People asked, always: What’s it like, being a woman [in Saudi Arabia]?

You are supposed to say that you were privileged, because you had a pass to the secret world of local sisterhood, to a place where faces showed and words were honest. You are supposed to say, in an almost mystical voice, “I could write about the women“.  [..] And then, too, the truth is not really easy to admit or articulate. You can’t admit how dirty it made you feel, the thousand ways you were slighted and how flimsy your self-assurance turned out to be, how those little battles bit at you like acid. Men who refused to shake your hand; squatting on the floors with men who refused to look at your face because you brimmed with sin, not one glance in an hour-long interview; the sneering underfed soldiers who hissed and talked about your ass when you walked past.

– Megan K. Stack, Every Man in this Village is a Liar (2010)

People who live in a dictatorship will tell you the most with awkward silences, the fear that flashes on their faces, and the implausible exclamations of rote enthusiasm. It’s what they don’t say that counts. You have to consider the negative space, to trace the air that surrounds the form to get an idea of its shape, because nobody will dare to articulate the things itself. If you accumulate everything that is unmentionable, feared, stamped out, then you have an idea of just how much terror people have swallowed over the years. You begin to grade the repression on a spectrum. Egyptian politics have been languishing in a torture cell for decades, for example, but people on the street still gripe about the government and roll their eyes at the president.

Not in Libya. The people I met in Libya were locked in the basement of an asylum. Social interaction was all nervous smiles, evasive answers, and cups of tea. Nobody wanted to talk about the Leader.

– Megan K. Stack, Every Man in this Village is a Liar (2010)

Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don’t die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but actions amounts to identity. We become what we do. You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can’t leave your actions over there. You can’t build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of that poison seeps back into our soil.

– Megan K. Stack, Every Man in this Village is a Liar (2010)

David Runciman – Political Hypocrisy (2008)

Hypocrisy, or mask-wearing, comes in many shades, and not only can some of them, (such as politeness and pseudonymity), be beneficial to society, anti-hypocrisy can do more harm than good. Honest anti-hypocrites can be dangerously ignorant about the nature of the game they want to “clean up”, and dishonest anti-hypocrites represent an even deeper level of hypocrisy than the form they attack. In politics, you’re better off with a competent and well-meaning hypocrite than with someone who gives the appearance of perfect integrity. Even democracy itself is essentially the idea of humanizing power by dressing it up in masks.

Recommended: Strongly, but not for everyone.  Read it if you like Orwell’s writings on language and thought, (which are referenced in the most interesting chapter of the book). Longer summary of this book coming up.

Øystein Sørensen – Drømmen om det fullkomne samfunn (2010)

Communism, fascism, nazism and islamism are four variations over the same theme of totalitarian utopianism.

Read: 45 pages.

Recommended: Only if this similarity is somehow news to you, and not really even then. This is an introductory book, written in a bored academic style.

Joe Scalzi – Zoe’s Tale (2008)

It’s time to have the “it’s not you, it’s me” talk with Joe Scalzi. I’m sure this is as good as his previous yarns, but I can’t be bothered to read it. Farewell, let’s be friends, and we’ll always have Frankfurt etc etc.

Read: 60 pages.

Recommended: Possibly. Lots of people like it. Good for them!

En gang vil en av guttene i klassen vise Bjørneboe noe i et Donald-blad, men slike blader er strengt forbudt, og i klassens påsyn kaster læreren bladet i ovnen. Gutten føler seg krenket og ydmyket. Ofte i denne perioden uttaler Bjørneboe seg sterkt om denne nye sjangerens korrumperende makt. Det dreier seg om amerikanskhet, bestialitet og heslighet, men det verste er likevel at seriene virker passiviserende. “Vår materialistiske tid frembringer bare få gode leker,” hadde Steiner slått fast allerede ved århundrets begynnelse.

Bjørneboes synspunkter på tegneserier, radio og film er likevel ikke ualminnelige. De representerer kulturelitens distansering fra den vulgære massen, og en teknologiskeptisk reaksjon på hva de oppfatter som en misforstått demokratisering av kulturen. Kulturen er noe høyere, vanskeligere tilgjengelig og kvalitativt bedre enn den lettfordøyelige lektyren som nå blir servert folket.

– Tore Rem, Sin egen herre, En biografi om Jens Bjørneboe (2009)