USNA Commissioning, 6:30 AM, Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium.

Today I found a perfect beach.

by Tim Fitzsimons

BOSTON — You may not have heard of “Climategate” or the “hockey stick controversy.” But that doesn’t mean you haven’t found yourself thinking like a climate change skeptic lately.

Perhaps you’re reading from Washington, D.C., marooned at home by a second consecutive blizzard. Or maybe you’re in Scotland, which just recorded its coldest winter in more than a century. Maybe you’re just a little too cold to feel like the world is getting warmer.

"There’s nothing like a very cold winter to convince another percentage of the American public that global warming is not happening,” said American University professor Matthew Nisbet at Harvard University this week.

Indeed, the Republican Party in Virginia seized on the mid-Atlantic “snowpocalypse” to produce an advertisement criticizing Democrats in Congress who support "cap-and-trade" policies that provide economic incentives to reduce pollution emissions.

The ad advises viewers to call their representative and “tell them how much global warming you get this weekend. Maybe they’ll come help you shovel.”

(The ad has since been pulled from YouTube, possibly because of the highly negative coverage it generated.)

But weather hasn’t been the only thing raining on the climate change parade. A long list of setbacks have fanned the flames of climate gloom since the breakout 2006 Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” energized public attention toward the issue.

As China rose earlier than expected as the world’s top CO2 emitter, followed by a worldwide economic downturn, fewer people list climate change as a top priority.

Throw in the failure of the Copenhagen talks to produce a substantial climate agreement. The percentage of people worldwide who doubt the research backing climate change continues to grow.

Why such a change in the climate of public opinion?

Click here to read the rest of the article...

The Pacific Coast Highway.

More to come soon from my drive up the Pacific Coast Highway in California!

Tufts Christmas Caroling

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 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")

***

TIME: MONDAY AUGUST 10, 2009.

PLACE: IN TRAFFIC, CORNICHE AL MAZRAA, BEIRUT
TEMPERATURE: 36º C

Corniche al Mazraa is the real heart of the city; "Avenue de Paris," the seaside corniche, is only what the city wishes it were. The Arab one cuts through Beirut's abdomen, dividing its not so bad slums from its other not so bad slums. At designated hours it stands still packed with Arab traffic, dusty and beeping and full of drivers each trying to one up each other by squeezing their Toyotas and Benzes through oil-slicked slots, jamming on the brakes, cursing their compatriots, never getting anywhere any faster than anyone else. The scalding sun does not obscure the brown cloud that hangs over the throughway; the buildings along the road look like they have stretch marks from where the winter rains washed away the soot.

Emerging from the tunnel gate and a whoosh of smoke brings you from the Parisian corniche to the Beiruti one. The scene materializes.

Coming out of the Hawa Djeij, a fifty year old woman with pink tinted glasses and a conservative Western blouse (a skirt, too - long, showing a little leg, just enough) walking with her shoulders hunched, eyes darting, crossed the road that she surely had crossed a million times before, uncomfortable still, flinching at honks and looking sad.

Smiling and waiting blissfully for an unlikely red light is Rana, who left the Bekaa when she was 22 to be an English teacher in Beirut. She is 24, attractive, and she takes off her hijab when she comes to work and puts it back on when she goes home to the Dahiyeh. She lets little nuggets of her Western-styled freedom fly during class, making broad statements about women, religion, Hassan Nasrallah, and marriage. She is irreverent and smart. The shape of her exclamations and thought processes seem to mirror the inexplicably bouncy curls in her hair. One day she casually informs her class that she will be married that evening at six o’clock. No big deal, she explains, it’s only the religious marriage—the party will be later. But they need the sheikh to sign off so they can start living together now. Rent will be cheaper, she explains.

Rana’s exact opposite is hanging out of a taxi’s swinging door. He stands with a leg in the car, one arm on the door, and one hand jabbing aggressively over the roof at someone guilty of insulting his distinguished honor. He is apoplectic with rage. Hassan is Rana’s opposite; his fat stomach stretches his sweat-stained undershirt and a cigarette dangles off his dry lip as his gravel voice shouts incredible obscenities at the other cabbie. He has an ulcer or three, several lumps of undiagnosed lung cancer, a vague case of emphysema, chronic headaches, and not a shred of piousness in his body. He swings back down into his car, jabs his hands a few more times and shouts a bit more through the open window.

Hassan beseeches good-looking lady pedestrians for quick sex through his open window and gives uninvited squeezes to the legs of customers. Hassan smells and burps and groans and shouts and rips off foreigners and returning Lebanese who he mistakes for foreigners, who berate him viciously for considering them fools. He has never touched the handgun he keeps in his glove compartment, but lately he has been thinking about it.

Before he returns home on Fridays night he stops for a quickie at a cheap brothel staffed by Ethiopian prostitutes while his wife is at the mosque. When he gets home, he cracks open a bottle of something haram as she yells at him for gambling on horses as he drowns memories of the war years in whiskey. Hassan will drop dead at sixty as he steps out of his cab to get some manoushe for breakfast, keeling over from a heart attack brought on by years of neglect, stress, and self-hate.

I arrive at work. Get out, pay the cabbie, walk quickly, glass doors part and a wall of air conditioning erases my mind.

***

TIME: 2:37 AM, AUGUST 15, 2009.
PLACE: TAXI FROM GEMMAYZEH, BEIRUT.

TEMPERATURE: 23º C

My eyes are swimming in and out of focus, and the wind is cool on my face. My head lolls a bit in the back seat of the cab, and I catch a glimpse of the Hariri Mosque before I settle into my preferred position for times like these – lying down in the back seat, eyes staring up through the open window at the buildings above.

I see the driver occasionally looking at me through the rearview mirror under arched eyebrows, scoffing at the stereotype I am. Like my vision, the thoughts passing through my head are unfocused and smudged, like the lights flicking by the open window as we descend into the smoggy tunnel from East Beirut back to Hamra.

It’s an unparalleled place, Beirut, a place where conversations struck up lightly sauced in bars harmonize so perfectly with the sort of boring, socio-political conversations you devour...the ones that would make you a social pariah in any bar back home. You chance to run into people you know and everyone is jolly, always, breezing around in the summer heat and hum of the Lebanese night. As we come to the intersection with the airport road, we see the Phoenician and the Hariri monument (everything looks nicer at night) and then we see the Holiday Inn, the beautiful despicable relic of the terrible war—its icon—looming over the city.

Poor decision, but whatever—we’re only young once, right? And what could they really do to us, anyway? This is Lebanon, after all. Nobody cares about anything.

So we get out and sneak stealthily, miming lovers, past the Lebanese Canadian bank and the wall that separates it from its uninhabited neighbor. The security guard sees movement and comes to investigate only to find us locked at the lips, hands creeping over each other’s bodies. The guard retreats and quickly I squat, my friend steps on my back and hops over the wall onto a loud pile of cracked concrete and we tiptoe our way to the staircase on the eastern edge of the hotel.

We huff and puff and run our hands along the blackened wall, which has scratches spiraling down it as if someone had dragged the butt of their gun carelessly running from one floor to another. Occasional holes notify us of their presence with a dim shaft of light creeping up from the floor below. Mortar holes on the thirteenth and sixth floors managed to break all the way through the rebar and provide an occasional extra window.

The penultimate penultimate floor is really two, some sort of lounge. The space that probably allowed the building to wiggle in the event of an earthquake is now an actual gap. The sound of clinking concrete echoes through the cavernous room. Somewhere in the middle of the darkest, most windowless part of the floor stands a small staircase leading to the final floor. There lies the vast sunken circle that used to house the hotel’s rotating restaurant. It’s all gone now, to who knows where, windows wide and open to the city below.

From the top you can see everything. The city filled with people whose purpose seems to be to exist and uphold the grinding inequalities that define the city. Living so is their duty, their job, their prerogative as foreigners, journalists, missionaries of the truth from the wild East to the civilized West. The Palestinians whose job it is to act as a refrain for the occasional dips into humanitarian consciousness during drunken conversations. The Shia who foment loudly, yet never control anything. The Christians who clutch their mantle tightly, the Sunnis who straddle awkwardly.

The roof has no guardrails, and the drop of twenty-three or so stories is straight. The pulverized concrete in pockmarks has managed to provide succor for quite a number of rugged Mediterranean vegetation, which stand about four feet tall and whistle in the wind. The sea stretches away and up, almost, so incredibly dark next to the city. Occasional lights indicate the presence of boats, but they’re few and far between. The Mediterranean’s purpose seems to be only to absorb all of the light given off by the city.  The city glows gold through the sweaty air and so it is not very dark; Beirut never is.