On Hitchens Dying

I have this memory that still makes me cringe:

I was in class–this was journalism school–and we were talking about exemplars of cultural criticism. I’d brought John Berger to the table, along with Anthony Lane. (This was before I found out that it wasn’t cool to like Anthony Lane, even though his pieces on the Beijing Olympics made me laugh until I cried). Someone mentioned Christopher Hitchens, and before I’d gathered my thoughts, I blurted out, I hate that man. I snarled a bit, I recall, and repeated it. I just hate him. I was instantly ashamed. I’m ashamed still. Not because Hitchens wasn’t often loathsome, because he most certainly was, but because I knew what a patently twerpish thing it was for the likes of me, the author of exactly nothing, sitting in journalism school about a decade too late, to deride one of the most prolific, influential, illustrious figures in modern letters. A more calibrated reaction would have been appropriate.

But that’s how Christopher Hitchens made me, and no doubt innumerable others, feel. Approaching his columns invariably involved bracing myself against the likelihood that he’d written another installation of his endless tirade against ideas and people who deserved, at the very least, a slightly more nuanced examination. Hitchens’s erudition was a slippery beast. He claimed with unshakable certainty an encyclopedic knowledge about things that he was transparently ignorant of, his opinions based all too often on hearsay, his sordid imagination, and his well-developed sense of outrage. And then there was his reprehensible allegiance to statements he’d made that were clearly, demonstrably false in retrospect. (We know what those are.)

There’s no denying that he was a great, eminently readable writer. That’s why, despite my dread, I looked him up regularly. For sheer volume, Hitchens was unmatched. And I don’t mean that derisively, the way people scoff at Dickens’s paid-by-the-word verbiage. Hitchens’s productivity was a marvel, especially, it goes without saying, at the end. And like many an adept cultural critic, much of what he wrote was a sort of fiction, an idea distilled by smart rhetoric and clever thinking to its most elementary. In Hitchens’s case, this was a dystopic vision in which the enemies are easy to discern and the solutions straightforward. He told us who to fear and who to put our faith in. The arguments practically make themselves.

But Hitchens’s idea of enemies (Islam and, to a lesser degree, Republicans) and solutions (annihilate, annihilate) were his downfall. 9/11 did this to a lot of people; it crystallized things when it should have complicated them. It was Hitchens’s smug trust in his own certainty, the notion that he had the problems of the world all graphed and computed, that often made me despair. Like no other person writing today (and between his Vanity Fair and Slate columns, he always had a lot of noise in circulation), Hitchens got under my skin and made me worry about the future of discourse.

The funny thing is, perhaps because I read his work so regularly, followed the status of his ill health, and found his piece on dying almost unbearably poignant, I feel undeniably sad that he has died. Whatever was awaiting him on the other side, if anything, he’s in charge now.

Reacting to Violence

I realized while reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s op-ed in the Times yesterday that I’ve been having trouble pinning down my reaction to the way Qaddafi died. When you live in a commentary-saturated world where you’re subjected to (or in my case, seek out) a battery of opinions, it can can take some time to know your own thoughts, except perhaps the initial instinctive ones. And my instinct was this: I felt sympathy for the man. I tried not to, but I did.

This doesn’t, in any way, diminish the decades-long agony of Libyans. During the past several months of reading about Qaddafi’s crimes, about what Bashar al-Assad has been doing to the Syrian people, I’ve felt that given the chance I would do awful violence to those men myself. I want to live the rest of my life (not to mention what I want for my daughter) without ever hearing another news story about young boys being tortured and mutilated in Syria or Afghanistan or Somalia.  Men like Qaddafi and al-Assad and Yoweri Museveni and Omar al-Bashir and Islam Karimov and Charles Taylor, Nero-like in the extent of their barbarity and sadism, seem to belong in parables about Babylonian excess rather than the afflicted, frail world we live in. Who could do such violence to people already so beset by the daily cruelties of poverty and endless factionalism? And who can now accuse the Libyans responsible for Qaddafi’s nightmarish end of going too far?

My sympathy in no way complicates the answer to this question. It is a simple matter of seeing the likely-insane Libyan dictator as having finally become just a man, the way hirsute, in-hiding Saddam Hussein became just a man when he was captured and photographed. I pitied Qaddafi for the terror he experienced, as just a man, before dying. It’s probably also a case of always feeling a little bit afraid when people celebrate a grisly death, even in the cases of men like Qaddafi and Hussein who unequivocally earned their executions.

I was 11 and felt only a vague sense of anxiety when Zia ul Haq descended to earth in a sparse shower of gristle and bone and airplane parts, though I suppose the language I use to talk about him now is a reasonable indication that I’ve shed no tears for the way he died. (Indeed, it could have, should have, been worse.) There were some in Pakistan who cried and many who rejoiced. The latter were spared, in any case, the misfortune of having to do it themselves, of bloodying their hands. Unlike the others I’ve named, Zia’s ruinous legacy had a real and irreparable impact on the country I was raised in, but I have no doubt that had he been dragged by the neck (or worse) by an enraged mob for hours before he died, I would have pitied him. Thankfully, I was spared this.  As it was, Zia t0o was spared, in a way that Qaddafi wasn’t, of being brought down low and manhandled and spat upon, of realizing that he could be made answerable to the people’s anger and desire for catharsis and revenge, that he could be outlived.

To be sure, I’m wary of and undecided about the notion that the National Transitional Council should be subject to international law for murdering Qaddafi without a trial. This was a revolution, and it saw worse atrocities than Qaddafi’s death, many times over. And if the Syrians ever manage to oust al-Assad, however they end up doing so, I’ll be hard-pressed to call them out on their excesses.  As Montefiore puts it, “It is hard to imagine that there would be anything but giblets left if [he] now fell into the hands of [his] people.”  I just hope it isn’t caught on film.

Normally, what I’ve just written would invite the usual reproach that to feel sympathy for a man like Qaddafi in his last hours is to be hopelessly lost to the naive, lily-livered, knee-jerk leftist agenda, because liberals, so the thinking goes, are enamored of some species of contrarianism that compels them to defend the indefensible just to stick it to America, somehow. But it seems that liberals and conservatives alike see Qaddafi’s end as a fitting and untroubling one. (Montefiore writes that some have found it “distasteful,” as though it were a breach of etiquette, and cites Bernard-Henri Levy as critical of the events.)  But I don’t take the general lack of outcry to mean that I’m alone in my discomfort. Honest reactions by non-Libyans, particularly when bombarded by the grisly photos and videos of Qaddafi’s brief captivity, are bound to be confused and erratic. Likewise, people who felt nothing but a nebulous sort of relieved elation when they heard or saw pictures of how the NTC meted out justice for the man who had taken so much from them for so long, registered no less a human response than feeling an acute discomfort about it or, perhaps most human of all, feeling both. The fact that Qaddafi brought it on himself doesn’t diminish the awfulness of how he died, or vice versa.

Homage to William Deresiewicz, Critic

When you like a critic too much or seem to agree with everything he or she writes, you run the risk of sounding as though you require, from a better thinker than yourself, validation that your ideas and opinions are intellectually and aesthetically sound. There’s an enduring suspicion about critics (they’re failed artists; they accord themselves a spurious sort of authority; they have no right to sway public opinion for or against a work of art; and so on) that has found its logical end in the back-talk enabled by the internet, making the job of film critics especially thankless. (Thought to be purveyors of numerical scores–stars, thumbs, tomatoes–they’re all too often accused of “taking things too seriously.”) On the whole, the critic, or the idea of the critic, doesn’t enjoy much love from the populace.  And this, I think, is a damn shame, because some of the best writing around these days is by critics.

One of my favorites is William Deresiewicz. I’ve mentioned Deresiewicz on this blog before. The first time I read something by him, it was a passage on Jhumpa Lahiri. I was in the grip of a renewed frustration about just how bizarrely overrated she is, having decided to give her another shot and read Unaccustomed Earth only to give up, twenty interminable pages (and countless eye-rolls) in. I tend to go a little crazy when I read something that seems self-evidently, objectively bad (like perennial book club favorite The Kite-Runner or the heavily mythologized Confederacy of Dunces) and discover that, on the contrary, my reaction appears to be an anomaly. I begin to doubt myself.  Nothing Lahiri writes is bad; there’s simply nothing in it to merit the critical darlinghood she enjoys. Yet I am, apparently, the only person on earth who finds her fiction somehow both dull and infuriating. Or so I thought, until I discovered Deresiewicz in the pages of The Nation, where, in an article about Zadie Smith, he dispatched Lahiri (in an aside, no less!) with ease and confidence and what I’ve come to recognize as characteristic seriousness, and I no longer had to carry the burden alone.

I’ve since read everything Deresiewicz has published online. His latest book, A Jane Austen Education, isn’t yet available here in Beirut, or I would be reading it. I wait patiently for his weekly blog posts, tiny economical reflections without even a whiff of hyperbole or cattiness, delivered to my Monday morning reading queue like a literary hors d’oeuvre. Lahiri was only the first of several points of convergence that I have found between my discomfort (some of which I’ve recorded here in the past) at troubling inconsistencies–in works of literature, in public discourse–and Deresiewicz’s singular ability to articulate and demystify them. The shrewd and excessive (mis)use of the term “hero” in America. The dismantling and mutation of English departments in the hopes of competing in the marketplace of college majors. The bludgeoning of the best qualities of true human connection at the hands of Facebook. In short, Deresiewicz writes about the things that I think about.

What makes Deresiewicz different, what makes him the sort of critic (had we but world enough and time) that I would like to be, is his unshakeable, remarkably uncheesy earnestness. Perhaps because I’ve been accused of “piousness” in my writing in the past (a criticism that feels more slanderous than constructive), I’ve developed the tendency to use irony even where there is, or should be, none.  After all, few insults sting worse than being told that you lack a sense of humor. But a writer as gifted as Deresiewicz (and by gifted I mean seeming to possess an off-hand mastery of the English language which empowers him to express exactly what he means using the minutest calibrations of tone and connotation), can treat his ideas as morally consequential. He needn’t worry about plugging the holes in his insights with grinning snark because there are no holes. None that I can see, anyway.

It’s in his review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King that I found the best way to describe Deresiewicz’s general ethos:

[Wallace's] great ideological foe, inveighed against in fiction and nonfiction alike, was the contemporary pose of weary cynicism, the hip anhedonia that denies the existence of feeling and need by treating inner emptiness as cool… This, indeed, is the persona he presented in his essays, eyes big and wet with childlike candor—willing to feel, to believe, to be naïve, to take a chance, to acknowledge his confusions, to be real. It was precisely that vulnerability that made him so beloved, the reason he was seen as a generational Moses who could lead us from the wilderness of postmodern irony.

Deresiewicz would probably disagree, and of course there’s a danger in comparing any mere mortal to David Foster Wallace.  The comparison will always necessarily fall apart. But I can’t help but think that Deresiewicz’s ability to describe this particular quality of DFW’s so beautifully is owing, at least in part, to his own rejection of cynicism, and his willingness to bring out in his readers his counterpart: stripped of defensive edges, unembarrassed by their humanness. This is dangerously high praise, I know, but I stand by it.

Read his essays, and you’ll see.  Start with this one.

I leave you with a few nuggets from his 2009 piece on Facebook (linked above), entitled “Faux Friendship.”

The new group friendship, already vitiated itself, is cannibalizing our individual friendships as the boundaries between the two blur. The most disturbing thing about Facebook is the extent to which people are willing—are eager—to conduct their private lives in public. “hola cutie-pie! i’m in town on wednesday. lunch?” “Julie, I’m so glad we’re back in touch. xoxox.” “Sorry for not calling, am going through a tough time right now.” Have these people forgotten how to use e-mail, or do they actually prefer to stage the emotional equivalent of a public grope?

And the whole theatrical quality of the business, the sense that my friends are doing their best to impersonate themselves, only makes it worse. The person I read about, I cannot help feeling, is not quite the person I know.

The absurd idea, bruited about in the media, that a MySpace profile or “25 Random Things About Me” can tell us more about someone than even a good friend might be aware of is based on desiccated notions about what knowing another person means: First, that intimacy is confessional—an idea both peculiarly American and peculiarly young, perhaps because both types of people tend to travel among strangers, and so believe in the instant disgorging of the self as the quickest route to familiarity. Second, that identity is reducible to information: the name of your cat, your favorite Beatle, the stupid thing you did in seventh grade. Third, that it is reducible, in particular, to the kind of information that social-networking Web sites are most interested in eliciting, consumer preferences.

Relativity

Recently I was speaking to a newly arrived American who admitted she was finding her new life in Beirut a bit nerve-wracking.  She was nervous all the time, she said, and recounted an anecdote about sitting in the back seat of a taxi and becoming paralyzed with fear when she saw a man in the adjacent taxi make a move to pull something out of his breast pocket.  That’s it, she thought, he’s about to blow us all up.  It turned out to be a cell-phone, a device somewhat more likely to be stored in a breast pocket than a bomb.  She laughed at how silly it was in retrospect.

Of course, I began to assure her that there was nothing to worry about, that Beirut is very safe (certainly safer than the infamous U.S. city she moved here from), and that she needn’t be on the lookout for shifty characters whenever she’s out.  She paused and smiled apologetically, then said, But you’re from Pakistan, aren’t you?  I overheard you telling someone that you grew up there. So…  She didn’t need to finish; a person from Pakistan, she was suggesting, must surely have entirely different standards of what constitutes a violent society.

These days, saying you’re from Pakistan has an effect not unlike attaching a really big rebel flag to the back of your truck.  As far as the people in the car behind you are concerned, it’s totally inconsequential that your Mensa friends always beg you at parties to recite Chanson de Roland in its entirety; you’ve indelibly branded yourself.

Sharing that you’re Pakistani has a similarly galvanizing effect. Whether I have any credibility on a given topic depends upon which cliche about Pakistan happens to be most relevant to the conversation, and which stereotypes the person I’m conversing with is most wedded to.  I would probably be the last word if we were talking about misogyny, shariah, spicy food, Salman Rushdie, or the monsoon season.  But if the conversation veered toward, for instance, what it means for a society to be liberal, I’d have my work cut out for me.

Example: I like to engage people in sharing impressions of Beirut, people from non-Eastern countries and, like me, new to this part of the world.  It came as a complete surprise to me when I moved here last year how liberal this city is, and I’m curious whether other people’s expectations have also turned out to be totally off the mark.  Beirut is liberal in easy-to-spot ways: bare flesh both above and below the equator, open interaction and physical proximity between the sexes, a flourishing and ostentatious nightlife, alcohol everywhere, and enough bungled face-lifts and boob-jobs to make the carcasses on The Bold and the Beautiful look like a high-school gymnastics team.

So far, only people who have been living on compounds in Jeddah find Beirut surprisingly open.  Most everyone else, inured to the sight of wrinkled, over-tanned cleavage, looks at me politely askance.  And one person has asked me what women wear in Pakistan–knowing full well that there are no women in Pakistan.  At least not in those formulaic and familiar news clips, in which several angry shouting men jostle to be in front of the camera, bug-eyed, as if trying to see through to the other side.  (When, I ask myself, will they become blase about cameras in their midst?)

No wonder I think Beirut is liberal.  On the liberalism continuum, I reside somewhere between turbaned, be-shawled men carrying kalashnikovs, and jirgas.  Beirut, liberal?  Pshaw.  In Scandinavian countries, the work week is 12 hours, men get five years of paternity leave, and people can go to work in the nude if they want to.

Breaking up is hard to do

media.thinq.co.uk

There’s nothing new about hating Facebook.  The insatiable juggernaut has been bemoaned and ridiculed since its inception.  It’s easy to hate. Even its most prolific denizens, those excess-seratonin types who are genuinely pleased to be in touch with every living person they have ever met, who manage to accumulate 1500 capital-f Friends, have their disenchanted days.

I, however, really should not have a Facebook account.  Neurosis makes for interesting status updates, but I must be neurotic in all the wrong ways.  I’ve known that Facebook and I weren’t a good fit since about two weeks after I signed up for it in 2008, yet somehow, I’m finding it harder to quit (I dream of a grand exit, like dynamiting a mine I’ve been trapped in after clawing my way out) than I ever could have imagined, now that I’m four years in.  It would be like returning a pet to the pound, albeit a pet that you’ve hated since the day you brought it home.

I’m reluctant to enumerate the idiosyncratic behaviors on Facebook that I find disturbing because, after all, I plan to “share” this blog post and I don’t want to tread on anyone’s personal style.  But it does bother me, for example, that I have Friends with whom I’ve never had a single exchange.  Not a word.  What purpose does our being part of the same network serve?  There’s a similar discomfort when my list of Friends shrinks mysteriously by one every couple of months, and because I have more than 10 Friends, I can’t figure out who decided to jettison me.   I don’t actually mind being unFriended; it’s knowing that it was probably someone with whom I never had a real-life connection in the first place that’s irritating.  The absurdity of the whole thing is like watching a dog chasing its tail.

Mostly Facebook enrages me because of how much time I’ve spent contemplating quitting it over the years and the amount of space it takes up in the world as a part of people’s lives and conversations, the way it’s become a sort of language in itself.  It’s just not worthy, either as an idea or in practice, of so large a share of humanity’s psychic activity.  I enjoyed the movie, but it bothers me that there is a Facebook movie.  Then there’s Facebook’s unholy spawn, its ironic imitators and exploiters, all lucrative, from humor site Failbook to an “Adult Dating” website whose name you can probably guess.  There’s even an I Hate Facebook page on Facebook.  It’s supposed to be amusing, I guess, but mostly it says to me that Facebook is making the rules and is getting close to cornering the market on how we connect with each other.  There is simply too much of Facebook, and its ubiquity is precisely why, despite how much I complain about it, I cling to my Facebook existence with white-knuckled desperation.

Facebook can be a good thing, even indispensable.  In spite of the rumors/pseudo-scientific claims (largely debunked by now, it seems, but somehow still credible) that Facebook makes people depressed, it’s an incredibly useful tool in the hands of some of the 800 million people who use it.  There is, for example, its rather significant role, along with Twitter, in helping to overthrow dictatorships this past year, resulting in a grouping of words, not mere idle chatter, that I never thought I’d see: Mark-Zuckerberg-Nobel-Peace-Prize.

(About this I will only say that if Mark Zuckerberg even gets nominated for that bizarrely erratic prize before Abdul Sattar Edhi, Qazi’s going to kick some ass.  Doesn’t matter whose.)

I myself worry that no one would ever read my writing, at this stage at least, if I couldn’t promptly link it to my status.  It can be great for a career if you’re a writer or a musician or a grassroots organizer.  It’s also come in very handy since I moved to a new country and had a baby.  I have family and friends in faraway places who genuinely want to feel closer to us; Facebook enables this.  And at least posting photographs of my daughter doesn’t feel quite as fatuous as when, having somehow wrangled an improbably golden picture of myself, one among literally billions of abysmal snapshots, I think immediately of rushing it to my profile so I can sit and wait for the nice comments to start rolling in.

And when they don’t?  One of Facebook’s many daily cruelties is when you update your status or link to an article that you found, an unusually excellent article let’s say, and no one makes a peep.  No one acknowledges you.  Or, just as disappointing, you receive a “Like,” that little bastard thumbs up that can feel like the visual equivalent of a fake laugh.  As a friend put it, it’s like thinking you’re talking to a bunch of people and realizing that no one’s been listening to you.  Being ignored on Facebook evokes the peculiar sensation of knowing someone’s been in your room and touched your things but not knowing who.  You could argue that this isn’t fundamentally Facebook’s fault.  Maybe you’re just a dullard.  Or you have bad Friends.  But the very m.o. of Facebook–and its brilliant, diabolical power–is to encourage you to keep expanding your circle of Friends (and let’s face it, the longer the list gets, the smaller the percentage of people you have more than passing acquaintance with) so that you feel as though quitting Facebook, severing the gossamer-thin relations you have managed to cultivate, will result in you ceasing to exist.  That, and to create the marketing equivalent of fish in a barrel.

At its worst, Facebook exploits our individual and species-wide weaknesses and amplifies them.  The pugnacious among us now have access to a whole congregation of easily-offended sensibilities.  The lonely have “live” connections at their fingertips, day or night; exhibitionists, a captive audience.  For those of us who grudgingly hang on, the best option would be to keep the circle really small, as in real life, only those people with whom we can share a modicum of who we really are, instead of the scrupulously renovated version of ourselves.  The other option is to stop making such a big deal out of it, make as many Friends as possible, and keep the conversation light and impersonal.

But I’ve never been very good at that.  I should just quit it, close up shop and go back to actually having to say a few words when I get back in touch with someone I haven’t seen in twenty-five years.  Apparently it is possible to not belong to Facebook.  Like cigarettes, it’s easiest to stay away if you just never start, but unlike smoking, they haven’t definitively found any hazardous side-effects to having a Facebook account.  Yet.

Tum Ko Dekha to ye Khayal Aya

Jagjit Singh died today.  His vocals are as familiar to me as anything else that was perpetually around me as I grew up.  My father enjoyed his singing with the sort of focused sensory intensity that most people experience when they eat their favorite food, or receive a tight embrace from a loved one.  He even made me a mixed tape of Jagjit songs several years ago.  He would have been sad to hear the news.

The opening lyric translates to “when I saw you, the thought came to me/ that in the hot sun of life, you are shade.”

Stroller Diplomacy

Since our daughter, Little Big Chief, was four weeks old, I’ve taken her on a walk just about every day.  That’s approximately 150 walks.  And on each and every walk, I’ve had to answer the question, an average of three times per walk, “what happened to her face?”  So, conservatively, that’s 450 times since my baby was born that I’ve had to explain the tiny red birthmark on her cheek. After I explain, the concerned parties usually utter a sympathetic “tsk tsk” and a “haram!” and then continue to coo and make funny faces at her.

The first time I heard someone say “haram” about my baby, I understood it with the connotations it has in Pakistan, where using the term has an effect not unlike a stout German man with muttonchops and a Prussian helmet shouting “VERBOTEN!” in your face.  Here in Lebanon, it appears to have much more benign colloquial usages, including “that’s too bad.”  And the fact that anyone who gets close enough to Little Big Chief to notice her birthmark does so because they’re drawn, moth-like, to her gloriously radiating cuteness, beaming several meters in every direction, makes this less disturbing an occurrence than it may sound.

In fact, I’ll even go so far as to make a bold generalization about an entire citizenry, something I try to avoid doing (except in the privacy of my living room, of course): Lebanese love babies.  They’re completely, utterly, I would even say exorbitantly, smitten with babies.  Since LBC was born, she has been cooed at, tickled, and held by more complete strangers than I would like to admit.  I mean dozens: dozens of pedestrians, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, construction workers, building concierges, waitresses, checkout clerks, and flight attendants.  She’s had her toes kissed by a young woman who works in the discount department store where I buy baby clothes.  She’s been carried by servers and introduced to other diners, who put down their forks (or hookah pipes) to greet her.  Men, too, babble to her in gibberish and break out their best falsettos in the hopes of a smile. The first few times someone asked to hold her, I gave her up reluctantly, prepared to brave the awkwardness of unholstering the disinfecting wet-wipes if necessary.  Yes, each of these encounters includes a query about her birthmark, but it’s always secondary and quickly forgotten in the face of this 16.5 lb. individual’s buoyant and buoying charisma.

Having gotten accustomed to this sort of treatment, which I admit made me feel a bit as though I was conveying a little Lama around Beirut in a wobbly red stroller, the five weeks we spent in New Jersey this summer were eye-opening.  It was a mite jarring at first that no one even seemed to notice when Her Littleness rolled into the mall or grocery store or bus station, big eyes aglow.  A South Asian gentleman in Toms River did tell us that her birthmark was auspicious, but I think he just wanted us to buy a hotdog from his Nathan’s stand in the food court.  Otherwise, it was for me a process of remembering that in America, by and large, we tolerate the presence of babies.  They’re charming, certainly, as long as they don’t babble too loudly or cry or shit their diapers in close proximity.  We certainly don’t go around kissing some anonymous baby’s toes, especially if there might be cops around.  And never, ever do we ask to hold someone’s infant.

In the U.S., asking a stranger if you can hold their baby seems to be a sin somewhere between venial and mortal, and at best a blunder on par with cleaning your spouse’s ears in public.  Since I didn’t concern myself with such issues before entering, inexorably, into The Baby Conversation, I owe this insight to the ladies who populate the New Mom message boards (holdovers from the Pregnancy message boards), who routinely report how predatory old bitties force them to utter passive-aggressive gems like, “That’s sooo sweet of you, but my child is just getting over the sniffles, and I wouldn’t want her to make you ill.”  I hear they even make baby t-shirts and signs for strollers that say things like, Kindly Fuck Off, You Germy Imbecile.

Had I been living in the U.S. when LBC was a newborn, I might even have bought such a sign, so paralyzed with terror was I every second of the day.  (I remember becoming furious once, absolutely berserk with rage, at a mosquito who landed on her face.  I wish I could have killed that mosquito twice.)  And it’s not just hygiene that concerns parents, but also, thanks to network news, the specter of being surrounded by creeps and misfits, all of whom wish to cuddle your baby in the service of some sinister wish-fulfillment.  Here in Beirut, however, it never even occurred to me that I could say no.  As long as the asker didn’t exhibit a wheezy, tuberculous hack or too much chest hair underneath too many undone buttons, the baby was available for up to two minutes of holding.  With me casting a large, vigilant shadow, of course.

What’s really interesting, though, is that during the entire six weeks that we spent on the East Coast this summer, not once did a single stranger ask about her birthmark.  In fact, we spent several hours with a couple of friends who met our girl for the first time, and neither of them even acknowledged the two bright red little inkspots, or the dime-sized bruise underneath the skin that accompanies them.  Finally, I mentioned it myself, which felt shabby and no doubt sounded terribly insecure, only to say that it would fade and then disappear within the next few years.  And my friends, bless them, barely registered a reaction.  As if to say, what birthmark?

I confess it is unquestionably tiresome to have to explain over and over something perceived as a flaw on my daughter’s face, a face that elicits from me more spontaneous affection and protectiveness than I knew I had in me, to people I don’t even know.  As another mother told me, it will be bittersweet when my child’s birthmark disappears, because I’ve come to know it as an indivisible part of what makes her so very beautiful.

But I’ve also grown to love whatever the cultural impulse Lebanese possess that, for instance, makes a deaf octagenarian in a three-piece linen suit and a straw fedora ask to hold my daughter while he sits under an awning in front of a cafe.  He says something in Arabic, holds out his arms, and I hand her over so that the two of them can get acquainted for a moment and watch the pedestrians go by.  The baby looks looks at him, looks at me, puts her hands on his chin or his nose or his sleeve, and after thirty seconds or so, he hands her back to me.  Then she and I continue down the sidewalk until we encounter the next person who wants an audience with her.

Reblognaissance!

As I wrote many posts ago, Est Cookius Crumblus is a “Latin” phrase my father used to use, wryly, to mean “that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”  I can’t remember if he heard it somewhere or if it was just more of his linguistic silliness, and I wish he were here to tell me.  In any case, I’ve chosen it as the new name of this blog, to go with the new blog address (Write it down in your diary, now!  Go!), in the hopes of wrestling this thing into something once again doable and necessary, at least to me.  I’d have done it sooner, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how.  They hide it well, the WordPress string-pullers, beneath layers of chirpy suggestions and constant reinvention.  (I should add, though, that the internet in Lebanon is so intolerably slow that I rarely pursue anything online that’ll require more than two clicks.)

E.g.

Continuing with my previous post, if you tend to write about Pakistan, you have this sort of thing to deal with. The stink of rage emanating from the comments section is suffocating, although in this case it’s not aimed at the writer but at his subject.  Is it just me, or is more than one commenter essentially pushing for wreaking some sort of genocidal revenge against the entire nation?  Are Americans really and truly convinced that all Pakistanis are complicit in the work of extremists?  And how glibly they proclaim it!  I can barely stand to read these sorts of comments (so naturally, I can’t stop myself). Is there any point in trying to shed light on the situation in Pakistan if this is how people think?

If you read the comments, you might notice my own rather flaccid attempt to defuse some of the madness.  Pointless.

Everyone’s a Critic

It’s been six months since our daughter was born, and for a few days now, two lines of thought are constantly in contention in my mind: one, that I really want to start writing again, and two, that I really don’t want to start writing again.

The first is straightforward.  Life is short, I’m getting older, and I’ve only published a handful of times.  The second, however, has behind it the weight of all my neuroses, the dismal fate of everything I care about, and the reading public’s irrepressible pugnacity.

My daily news consumption is comprised of bouncing back and forth between (rather incestuously interlinked) opinion sites, navigating through an infinite snarl of articles about how to make sense of what’s happening in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan and Israel and the Arab world.  Some, many, of the articles are thoughtful and compelling and motivated by the sincere desire to add nuance to the arguments on both sides.

I used to have the good sense to stop there, to just read a bunch of articles and then let them smolder awhile as I considered whether my own thinking had changed at all.  (Often it does, a smidge.)  Recently though, maybe because my days are spent with a very agreeable infant, I started reading the comments.  Now I can’t stop.  It’s hard to find any online news outlets anymore than don’t encourage reader comments on some or all of their content, and oh, the despair I feel as I read what people will write when protected by anonymity.  I read and read and read these things people say, cruelties they would never dream of inflicting on the writer in person, and I think, how did this happen?

It’s hard not to watch in amazement as political, sexual, racial, national, religious, and class tensions erupt into profane pissing contests.  The self-righteousness!  The indignation!  The endless disputes over semantics!  And none of this even comes close to the worst of commenters’ tendencies, the ad hominem attacks.  No writer is safe.  Whether you write bad reviews of popular movies or good reviews of unpopular ones, whether you criticize President Obama’s gutlessness or lament the obstacles he faces, whether you write, from personal experience, about growing up Muslim or bring some geopolitical expertise to bear on the subject of drones, commenting readers will call you “hack” or “apologist” or “Uncle Tom” and utterly befoul your sincerity, your experience, and the incredibly hard work you did to make that byline a reality.  I’m not advocating for treating journalists and critics as though they dispense Platonic truths, but it seems to have become perfectly acceptable to respond to their work with open contempt.  One of the democratizing effects of the internet is the commenting mob’s conviction that its own hastily uploaded opinions are just as well-thought-out and researched and articulated as the ones they log on, day after day, to read.  The result is that writers must be willing to make themselves vulnerable in an unprecedented way.  (I know calling it “the mob” isn’t going to win me any friends, but things are really getting out of hand.)

Of course, not all comments devolve to such an extent, but plenty do, and I see it every day.  And a part of me, the milquetoast part perhaps, is truly, utterly terrified of the prospect of writing something that really infuriates someone.  Unfortunately, that’s the only sort of piece I want to write.  It’s not a thicker skin I need; it’s a flak jacket.