78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



Time to cancel that spa trip to Beirut
2006-07-13   3:55 p.m.

I suppose I shouldn’t joke like that; we are, after all, who we are, and may well have been planning a trip to Lebanon for all you know. That would be a good eating vacation (provided there's food); the Lebanese sure can cook. But today's entry title is a joke; there was no trip planned for Beirut. Now Damascus, on the other hand...

The scary part for me this morning, that I personalized – aside, of course, from considering pending nuclear holocaust or what all of this will do to global diplomacy – were the reports about truckloads of tourists running, convoy-ing, or flying out of the country as fast as possible. Shit is going down, and they’re in the middle of it. How scary – and how many times I’ve been afraid (or warned) that the same or similar could happen to us. Never did; lucky, lucky, lucky. But one cannot predict something as tenuous as the relations between Israel and all that surrounds it, or between a shaky agreement ending a years-old border dispute in Sub-Saharan Africa. But we go where we go, because it makes us feel alive. And don't worry, we don't miss the irony in that for a second.

And speaking of Irony, there was something twisted and abstractly disturbing about W "urging Israel not to react with impatience". And I swear to God, that was the scrolling line I read while in the dentist's office waiting for my check-up. I laughed out loud, but then shoved my face back into a magazine when the receptionist looked up, all annoyed. Hey I'm not the one who stuck a flat screen TV in the waiting room and set it to Fox News.

So what'll we do, kids? I know - watch the new Hummer commercial. You know the one, where the woman-and-her-son get cut in line for the playground slide by the other woman-and-her-son; when woman #1 complains, woman #2 tells her to shove it, and then the next scene shows woman #1 buying a Hummer and then feeling some sort of relief/revenge/sexual elation in the driver's seat. So, um, yeah! No one is going to cut her in line again!

Huh?

This? THIS is their damage control? Cause I mean...come on. Even the cover of NEWSWEEK this week promotes a story on "The Greening of America", and Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth is doing very well. So if HUMMER is public enemy no. 1 this month, these commercials are how they're doing damage control?

Don't insult me with crap that doesn't even make sense.

And speaking of crap that doesn't make sense, we're off to Africa again next week. Eep, in less than a week. There's plenty o' stuff there that doesn't make sense, but in the more accessible way of not making sense. Not in the "I know, let's bomb Lebanon!" way of not making sense.

I better go get ready.

xoxo