OK, I try to be tolerant; as that great Irish rebel-playwright-poet-essayist-and-pederast Brendan Behan used to say before dying of pneumonia and alcohol-induce dementia, "Every cripple has his own way of walking." But, the Times leads today with stories I find creepy and sad...
Safety and secrecy come up regularly when talking to guests, who laugh and dance, but also frequently look over their shoulders. To be a gay man or lesbian with an immigrant background invites trouble here in two very different ways.
“Depending on which part of Berlin I go to, in one I get punched in the mouth because I’m a foreigner and in the other because I’m a queen,” said Fatma Souad, the event’s organizer and master of ceremonies. Ms. Souad, 43, a transgender performer born in Ankara as a boy named Ali, has put on the party for over a decade.
Ms. Souad came to Berlin in 1983 after leaving home as a teenager. She studied to be a dressmaker and played in a punk band, but discovered Middle Eastern music through a friend and began teaching herself belly dancing. Ms. Souad started Salon Oriental, her first belly dancing theater, in 1988, and threw the first Gayhane party — hane means home in Turkish — in January 1997.
What I find most troubling is that this is in Berlin. There are serious issues involved, one of which is how poorly the German National Health Service handled the poor dweebs transition from Fahd to Fatma. The creepy thing is that these people are safely out of the space where apostasy equals death, and they still identify themselves as Muslims even though such identification means that they buy into a belief system that says they are abominable and contemptible. I find that creepy in the extreme. I am no longer anything that resembles a Catholic except by culture and brainwashing. I accept that, but have some residual problem with the whole eating meat on Friday during Lent. Taboo! If I still regarded myself as a Catholic, it would bother me more, so if anything else, a double-quarter pounder with cheese the Friday after Ash Wednesday seems almost an affirmation, except...well, this. Eating meat or fish or tofu is hardly part of my self-identification or a reflection of my self-worth. One's gender and sexuality seems a helluva lot more existentially important and ontologically relevant. For these folks to bow to Mecca while expecting a lashing is to deny their own worth at an existential level far beyond what I can understand or accept.
In much the same way, I find it difficult to accept the idea that there's something OK with what's going on in Kenya. Burning a church to kill those inside is to some extent a rejection of their value to an extent that I find mysterious, and creepy. In much the same way as torching an adult day care center or a dialysis center to get those inside. It's looking as though Kenya could implode in much the way Rwanda did, although it would be more of a 360 degree slaughter.
On Tuesday, some Nairobi streets seemed to return to a sense of normalcy, with gas stations reopening and fewer soldiers in the streets, but in the slums, heavy fighting continued. In some areas, trucks filled with soldiers rumbled through a wasteland of burned cars and abandoned homes, their tires crunching over broken glass.
Gangs of young men have built roadblocks between the neighborhoods of the Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, and the Luos, the tribe of Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who narrowly lost the election.
The no man’s land between them is often a single lane of potholed asphalt, patrolled by men holding huge rocks in their hands.
I guess the rocks bother me. Stoning is again a anachronistic expression of hatred as well as identified with the punishment of the sinner, in the Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths. "Cross the street, pilgrim and you'll die by stoning..." With Tiffany and Biff as deities in my Pantheon, I guess I can see the whole disaster as one of the inevitable and unplanned ironies of life in the 21st Century. As is this gem, from the Sudan. Last I looked, we were sort of ignoring genocide in that country, so I would probably recommend against a lot of New Years partying in the place, particularly at the British embassy.
According to Western officials, Mr. Granville left a New Year’s Eve party at the British Embassy around 2:30 a.m. and headed to his home in an upscale neighborhood in central Khartoum. Shortly before he arrived, a car pulled up next to him and 17 shots were fired,ell-planned and involved two gunmen who exited their car together, with one of them shooting Mr. Granville and the other shooting the driver Sudanese officials said. Mr. Granville’s driver, a Sudanese employee of the American Embassy, was killed instantly, and he was shot in the neck and chest. He was rushed to the hospital and died several hours later. A Sudanese government official said the attack appeared w... a spokesman for the American Embassy in Khartoum, said he could not comment on the circumstances because the shooting was under investigation. A spokesman for Sudan’s Foreign Ministry said American and Sudanese law enforcement agents were working closely together to investigate.“We do not know why this happened,” said Ali Sadiq, the Sudanese government spokesman. “ All options are possible.”
No, actually, they aren't. This was a pretty well-planned and executed assassination. It's isn't so much al Queida style as it is Mafia style. Don't know if the guy was a CIA type or a Visa Issuing type. However, he's dead, his driver is dead and the concept seems odd to some. I find that creepy, as I find the bit about "an upscale neighborhood in central Khartoum. If you've visited the third world, and Sudan certainly qualifies, there are enclaves of the rich surrounded by slums, shacks and shanties. It's wise not to leave the enclaves at night, whether in Khartoum, Panama City or Juarez.
The world is a dangerous place, and it looks like it's going to stay that way for 2008...and, of course, then there's this. Let me suggest that a suicide bomber at a funeral seems a bit of overkill to me. Of course, things are infinitely better in Iraq...so long as there's a platoon of troops doing security checks.
Yeah...the whole world is full of disturbed and twisted motherfuckers that I find it difficult to believe I am connected to by species. The power of early religious brainwashing is indeed incredible. Gay Muslims (didn't they used to be Moslems?) are even more confused than gay Christians.
The Africa thing never ceases to amaze, but religion can't take the sole hit for that bad crazyness. Seems like any major dispute there ends with something like burning down a church full of people or taking the machetes to an entire village.
Not that we're really much better.. we just keep our mass slaughter high-tech and confined to foreign countries. Our domestic slaughter for the last hundred years has pretty much been individual (that's what we like) and freelance, rather than group motivated.
One thing that seems clear... most people like to fuck more than they like to kill so there is never any shortage of people for the massacres. What this all means I have no idea, but despite all the wars, genocides, famines and horrors of the 20th and now 21st centuries, there are still more people on earth than ever before. Why the hell do they want to come here? Doesn't anyone show them the news?
Posted by: Marmoset | 02 January 2008 at 08:43 AM
and just for the record... I could be dead drunk in the dark of night and I would never mistake that guy for a woman. Ai carumba!
Posted by: Marmoset | 02 January 2008 at 08:45 AM
Jeebus, I remember prowling Frankfurt in the last year of the the 20th century and I could never imagine that city, with it's heroin addicts massed like vampires over a kill on every corner cooking up, hookers, and hookas, being so intolerant. Doesn't sound like the Germany I left.
Posted by: Frederick | 02 January 2008 at 07:17 PM