Crying Democrats and Martha Coakley
I have never been Martha Coakley's biggest fan. She is a political klutz and didn't work hard enough to win. It's hard to speak these words, but I think the Republicans (or, Scott Brown) deserved to win. My choice was always Alan Khazei, who was a political unknown and would have had to work very hard to acquaint himself with Massachusetts voters. I think he would have prevailed over Scott Brown.
If the Senate weren't so undemocratic, there would be little to despair of over last night's result. But her inability to pull one out with Massachusetts' ever-so-blue voters is pretty embarrassing.
Here are some photos I took at Coakley's "victory" rally last night. All rights reserved, since I'm still attempting to sell some of them...
The Road
The Pacific Coast Highway.
More to come soon from my drive up the Pacific Coast Highway in California!
Christmas Caroling in the Library
Some carolers just came into the library to break the monotony of my Logic study session. Fun!
Rebuilding Faith: The Iraqi Mandaeans of Worcester
Rebuilding Faith: The Iraqi Mandaeans of Worcester from Tim Fitzsimons on Vimeo.
Iraq's Mandaeans were targeted by sectarian violence following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Chased from their country, these refugees have scattered around the world in search of safety.
But the delicacy of their religion, which is closed, has presented serious challenges to its survival. A small group of Mandaeans is forming in Worcester, Massachusetts, where they hope to rebuild their community.
This is their story.
This movie was produced by Tufts University students in the Experimental College course "Producing Films for Social Change."
The filmmakers are:
Jess Bidgood
Kyle Chayka
Nora Chovanec
Tim Fitzsimons
and the fixer/translator is:
Aseel Maarij
Hey all, this is the production I have been working on for some time in my course Producing Films for Social Change at Tufts University.
It's a story I have touched on before in some work I did in Jordan. Please comment and let me know what you think.
Gold
Gold is the power of the history of the city. It has a golden age, a golden glow, and golden bodies. Gold is why people come, gold is why people return, gold is why Beirut exists. Its golden memories give the city its life. These memories are so pervasive and so convincing and so obscuring that everyone—everyone, from the youngest child to the oldest man—can recall the glory days as if they had lived them. Foreigners too recall their own glory days—the line of taxis waiting outside the Commodore, where correspondents would drink Black Label and wait for disaster to strike. The specter of Beirut’s formerly high caliber of war continues to lure journalists to this day.
They call the 1960s the "golden years," which fits. Photos from back then are sepia. The storytellers say that old Beirut imported more gold and jewels than any other foreign product. Its people tell stories of scents and sounds, carnal stories that fit our empty spaces like tailored puzzle pieces, tuned to our deepest and guiltiest wants.
We all know personally the qualities of the city’s modern gold: it’s the baking warm glow of the sandstone of the French Embassy, peeking distantly through the flowers bubbling over its walls. It is the glint of sunlight on the Mediterranean Sea and of excavated Corinthian columns. It is also the golden glow of burning phosphorous, the golden glow of whiskey, the golden glow of wealth and celebrity temporarily gracing its shores, the golden glow of stately homes and beautiful streets and distant mountains.
But its color has always just been a façade; it’s always been dirty. When the next war comes, the storytellers will look back at these years, our years, through the golden lens of optimism and see only the north side of Corniche al Mazraa, see only the 6 pm glow of the setting Mediterranean sun and hear only the soft, belly-shaking conversation of harmless men sitting on vegetable crates in Hamra’s endearingly dirty streets. They won’t remember the mountains of trash pushing into the sea, they will forget the unpleasantness south of the city. They’ll forget the bandanaed gangs of bored unemployed boys zooming around on their mopeds and causing occasional death. We’ll forget all that, too, because those too uneducated to write down bad memories will be the first to be killed or deadened, leaving this weighty task to the privileged few whose understanding of the city evolved from the commanding view from their twentieth story balcony gleaming shiny white tile from the sweat of seven Filipina maids.
Like a phosphorescent flare streaking down from heaven during an Israeli attack, Beirut glows gold. It is bedecked with gold like its women are with jewelry, like its buildings are with pockmarks, like its beaches are with trash.
So when all of what we know is gone, they will remember the golden time. They will remember themselves and how their hopes and dreams were right, and they will remember that everyone else fucked everything up because they just didn’t realize that it should have been done this way, and it will go on again and again.
(click "continue reading")
Incredibly Autumnal
Some photos I took in Middlesex Fells, a large park just north of Boston in Medford. Can't remember how I got there, to be honest, but I know it was right here. Or, more specifically, right here (Google Earth needed).
Lyndon LaRouche and the soothing sound of late summer in Connecticut
Sen. Kerry eating a cheesesteak.
On Wednesday I attended an anemic healthcare reform town hall meeting with Senator John Kerry in Somerville. As always, the now-senior senator from Massachusetts was bland (he tried to spice it up with a hip cast, but the trick only went so far), and the information about the actual reform bills making their way through Congress was pretty limited.
Much more interesting were the sounds I managed to pick up at the entrance to the high school, where the cult-choir of perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche was belting patriotic tunes.
The LaRouchies were on top form as usual, and a few of the people waiting next to me in the line attempted to drown out their harmonies with little cheers, but they didn't do much to drown out the choir. Their singing distracted from their printed medium: a Hitler-mustachioed Obama, reading "I've changed."
Click here to hear the LaRouchies.
Another sound I managed to record this weekend was the Haymarket farmers' market in Boston. I had been to the market once before, years ago, and I never realized what a Boston thing it was. I'd never been somewhere in Boston where the city felt so layered and diverse. Tucked away under the old brick buildings bordering the market were countless halal butchers, and the produce was what one would get in the grocery store except much cheaper. It was something like a cross-section of a city that largely squirrels away its separate parts. I'll go back to get photos, since I didn't have my camera.
Finally, I went back to Connecticut for Labor Day, and when I emerged from my car after a long drive from Boston via Worcester, I heard the sound of a summer night - the crickets, the calm. It's the most soothing sound I have ever known, and I didn't even know I missed it.
Building in East Jerusalem
Haaretz today ran an excellent editorial denouncing the eviction of two Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem. It makes the very critical point about how the whole dispute over building in East Jerusalem is an exercise in skillful duplicity on the part of the new Israeli government, and is worth quoting at length:
A Palestinian woman confronted Israeli riot police as she was evicted from her home in the Sheik Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem on Sunday. Abir Sultan/European Pressphoto Agency.
...The sight of the evicted Palestinian families, who had lived in these houses for decades, paints Israel in the world's eyes as a country that maintains a cruel regime of occupation, oppresses the weak and strives to create political facts in the disputed city under the guise of the "rule of law."
But for all its importance, this international criticism is not what makes the eviction of these families completely unacceptable. A democratic state that strives for peace and justice simply has no right to uproot families who became refugees in 1948. They left homes in West Jerusalem behind them, and were subsequently granted modest accommodations by the Jordanian government. The claim that the houses in Sheikh Jarrah were purchased by Jews in the early 1900s is a double-edged sword that opens a political and legal Pandora's box.
No thinking person will be persuaded that Jews have a sweeping right to return to their homes in East Jerusalem as long as Israeli law not only bars Palestinians from returning to their homes in West Jerusalem, but even evicts them from the houses where they have lived for the last 60 years. The Israel Lands Administration's regulations do not even allow Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to buy land and houses in many parts of the city.
So for all of the Israeli government's complaints about American racism in demanding that Israel stop building housing complexes for Jews in occupied parts of the city, there is the trump card of Israel's own actions in its regulation of housing for Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank. (Stay tuned for my eventual critique of a memo on "talking about Israel," which is relevant to this.)
Anyone who is not totally ignorant knows that while Israeli law doesn't forbid Palestinians from inhabiting West Jerusalem (for they live there), building codes and other smokescreens create a situation where Palestinians essentially cannot buy property there, and Jews can. The situation Netanyahu described is more true in West Jerusalem than in East Jerusalem:
We cannot accept the idea that Jews will not have the right to live and purchase in all parts of Jerusalem. I can only describe to myself what would happen if someone would propose that Jews could not live in certain neighborhoods in New York, London, Paris or Rome. There would certainly be a major international outcry. Accordingly, we cannot agree to such a decree in Jerusalem.
There should be little sympathy for Netanyahu's crackpot attempts to smear critics as racist or anti-semitic, when, to quote the New York Times, "[a]s soon as the Palestinians had been forcibly removed from the houses, Jewish nationalists moved in..."