PERFECT SYMMETRY

I had another episode of my (relapsing) Che Guevara syndrome. 

I wonder why I care in the first place. I am not really religious, so I guess I am not faking it like all of those religious nuts. To them, caring about the unfortunate is nothing but an obligation, a means to an ends -just one of the many paths to eternal bliss. It is not really sincere if you come to think about it. Wanting to help people for the sole purpose of feeling better about your self is selfish. This satisfaction is the bastard child of the unholy union of religion and morality.

Anyhow … back to the original point. I really do not understand how I got to develop all of this compassion, if you wanna call it that. Like I said, it does not have anything to do with religion. It must to be something more innate… an instinct maybe. I guess this instinct is what inspired socialists before, and does to this day.

If this is an instinct, then it must have a biological depth. There must have been an environmental element that led to its emergence. But how does helping the poor/weak/misfits help survival. Nature would say fuck the weak … fuck the poor … fuck the misfits. It’s the survival of the fittest after all.

Maybe it’s not an instinct … I take it back …Maybe we just want a purpose … “Fighting for the POOR” sounds fulfilling. Maybe Che and Lenin were being sucked into the same vortex of moral obligation as the average god-lover. Maybe it was all in self-interest after all. Capitalism works in mysterious ways.

Che once wrote: 

“There, in the final moments of people whose farthest horizon is always tomorrow, one sees the tragedy that enfolds the lives of the proletariat throughout the whole world; in those dying eyes there is a submissive apology and also, frequently, a desperate plea for consolation that is lost in the void, just as their body will soon be lost in the magnitude of misery surrounding us. How long this order of thing based on an absurd sense of caste will continue is not within my means to answer, but it is time that those who govern dedicate less time to propagandizing the compassion of their regimes and more money, much more money, sponsoring works of social utility”

I was watching one of the Iraqi dish channels earlier today (there are like a thousand of them!! each with a different political or social agenda … that says a lot about their unity). It was a game show. The bottom line was … the funniest team wins. In one of the challenges, they asked each team to nominate somebody to tell a funny poem. One of the poems left me rather perplexed.

The poet started it off by talking about the lack of security in Iraq these days … that there were bombing everywhere … he sets up the scene … he is in a bus in Baghdad … an old woman with a big bag sits next to him … he notices that she is rather huge and old … he does not feel good about her … she keeps checking that big bag of hers, and adjusting things in it. He starts thinking that she is a suicide bomber… He goes on and on talking about death and how certain it is. Everybody around him looked as somber as they can get. It was dead serious.

He went on …

So there he was facing certain death … he decides to do something …he grabs the bag and runs out of the bus! She chases him down the road … He finds out later that she was only rolling cigarettes.

Now the end might not be that funny (or funny at all). But the fact that Iraqis are able to see humor in their extremely grim situation is astonishing. I guess the same kind of resilience exists here…but never to this level!

Friday sermons are something that I don’t want to experience again.

The art of orating in Arabic involves a lot of ‘junk’ sentences that serve no purpose at all, other than giving the orator time to come up with something else to say. Preachers that give the Friday sermons talk very slowly, and raise their voices unexpectedly for dramatic effect. The content itself is boring. After 1400 years of Friday sermons, preachers are running out of things to say. As a result, preachers start repeating things that have already been said by others. The result is a very artificial and awkward speech about God and faith.

And when a preacher decides to make his sermon interesting, he adds some politics to it. This abomination goes so far as racism and anti-Semitism. People sit down and absorb all of this bullshit thinking they are undisputed facts. What they refuse to realize is that the preacher’s knowledge of politics is not any better than theirs. But he is standing on a podium while they are sitting on the floor. He is closer to God … He must know what he is talking about.