I've been teaching (and learning) in the Arab world for the past 35 years. During most of those years, I made annual summer holiday pilgrimages back to the sites of my European and American roots. With each passing year it seemed the distance between my perceptions of the world and those of my ancestral roots grew further apart. Despite that, I kept in touch with family and friends.
Ways of keeping in touch included the usual exchanging of news,
humour, photographs or articles. With my interest in the Middle
East, my articles have regularly focused on the problems here
that I felt my friends and family should know about. Of course,
the frequency and intensity of those mailings, including my own
articles, increased when I saw crimes and injustices committed
under the guise of some self-righteous media hype, like murdering
Palestinians to make Israel safe or massacring Iraqis to satisfy
the urges of Washington Zionists.
Recently, an email from a friend complained of "political
overload" and asked that I write something personal (as if
the stuff I'd been sending, including my own articles, wasn't
personal). At almost the same time, I received another message
from a friend suggesting that I "lighten up". It seems
I'd been inundating my friends with too much politics and not
enough humour!
In my response to the complaint about political overload, I wrote:
"I wish that the political overload didn't feel so necessary. After spending half a lifetime focusing on making parts of the world a bit more literate and being a goodwill ambassador for my country, I'm in the unenviable position of watching my country being destroyed by frauds. Many of the people I have loved and who have loved me over the years have transferred that love to America. If I just sat silently hoping that all would blow over, I couldn't live with myself.
"For years I've been telling my friends and students in the Arab world that my country's failures, particularly in its unquestioned support for Israel's occupation and decimation of Palestinians, were the fault of politicians yielding to powerful lobbies and media hype. I've assured them that the American public was simply preoccupied, uneducated in world affairs and would treat Arabs as decent human beings.
"Now the arch Zionists and ultra right wing evangelists have brought my whole house of American cards down around me with the help of - guess who? The American public! You and your friends and mine still in America are letting me and the country down. How? you might ask. Collectively, you're letting America run concentration camps like Guantanamo. You're letting our president and his entire administration get away with lying and cheating America and the world with not so much as a word of complaint.
"A large majority of you support Bush and the neocons
[neo-conservatives] and their misdeeds. You allow the administration
the right to be so arrogant that they can tell the whole world
and the UN to fuck off. You allow them to arrogantly rubbish the
Kyoto accords on the environment. You allow them to continue to
spend millions of taxpayers' money on armaments for Israel and
then let them get away with comparing a few suicide bombers (without
a hope in the world) to Israel's massive armoury, including nuclear
weapons, and the mass murderer Sharon. You even allow Israel to
get away with murdering American sailors on the Liberty without
question or challenge.
"You let a monstrous military might kill thousands of Iraqis
for oil. This doesn't count the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
children you allowed to die under US sanctions. You don't challenge
the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] crap that was peddled to
you. You let Ashcroft and his motley crowd arrest and detain Arabs
just for being Arabs. You let Rumsfeld tell off the world and
threaten everyone who doesn't cow-tow to the American line, destroying
friendly alliances. You let the US, almost single handedly, denigrate
and nearly demolish the UN. You proudly claim exemption from criminal
trials by the International Criminal Court, allowing America to
commit crimes that hundreds of Hitler's henchmen had to pay for.
You let Zionists like Perle and Wolfowitz run American foreign
policy.
"Though you allowed the media and the Congress to almost destroy Clinton over an affair with Monica Lewinsky, you now let Bush remain in office despite the fact that he wasn't elected to it, despite the fact that he's lied about Iraq, despite his ineffectiveness in destroying al-Qaeda and failure to capture either bin Laden or Saddam, despite his running the country into incredible debt, despite his serving his oil cronies' interests over anyone else and despite his tax relief for the wealthy.
"I'm surrounded by people who know these truths that I
speak of. Many Americans know them too but refuse to admit to
them. Arabs, Asians, Europeans, Africans and Latin Americans can
no longer trust you and me and ordinary Americans who swear by
a democracy that has become anything but a democracy, who speak
of liberty when they mean control, and who refuse to exercise
any significant role as citizens of a democracy.
"I don't know, my friend, I guess the political overload
comes from an ageing fool's attempt to go out doing his little
bit for his country and for those who are now suffering from his
country. I've just been trying to share some of the education
I've been getting in politics with others who I've felt were intelligent
enough to appreciate it and who might pass it on to others. In
the final analysis, I guess I've been hoping that we'd all wake
up and, instead of smelling the roses, clean up some of the shit!"
*Paul Balles is a retired American
university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the
Middle East for 34 years. For more information, see
http://www.writerfreelance.com
and http://www.pballes.com.