Socks

I wanted to finish writing about tour – about hitching through England and France, the incredible squats in Holland, all the kind folks that took care of me – but that’ll have to wait… which probably means never. It wasn’t for lack of sweet kids along the way, though, and I owe a huge thanks to everyone who helped put together the tour. I hope I get the chance to return the favor(s) States-side soon.

For all the books and articles I’ve read, for all my solemn awareness of the conflict, Palestine was fucked up to a degree I was not prepared to handle. I’m sitting in my Dad’s apartment in New York – with disconcerting swiftness growing re-accustomed to all the small and large luxuries of being home – trying to sort through this ambiguous mix of rage, indignation, and profound sadness that barely a week in the West Bank has left me with.

There is a lot of controversy, both within activist circles and increasingly in the mass media, over whether it is appropriate to refer to Israel as an “apartheid state.” In many ways, I’m still uneasy with the cavalier way people throw it around: expropriating language, particularly terminology signifying such a specific time and place, risks obscuring the equally unique historical circumstances that are central in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (An excellent exposition of an opposing view comes courtesy Tony Kushner monologue). But if it helps people get a better visceral understanding of the intensity of the occupation, I guess I have a hard time objecting now.

I’ve never been to South Africa, though, so as an American my closest reference point to what I saw – and, again, the obvious caveat of historical difference –was Jim Crow.

There aren’t segregated bus stations. Instead, you get entire networks of road that - through military checkpoints, earthen barriers, and bridges and tunnels - have become effectively off-limits to Palestinians. I visited the Friends School of Ramallah, where just a few years ago the Lower School had over 60 students who lived in nearby Jerusalem; now, because of the Qalandiya checkpoint, there’s just one. From Nablus to Ramallah, maybe 30 miles apart, we had to go through three checkpoints, each of which takes anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours depending on the soldiers’ mood that day and the color of your skin. (Just so folks understand, 63% of the checkpoints aren’t along the “Green Line” between Israel and Palestine, or even along the Separation Wall; they’re between towns in the middle of the West Bank).

There aren’t burning crosses. But Palestinian shops and homes near Hebron’s city center – where approximately 500 well-armed, right-wing Israelis have built six settlements – get stoned on a near-daily basis. Over the historic central commercial thoroughfare the Israeli army had to install netting, due to all the refuse and bricks raining down on shoppers from the Israeli settlement overlooking it. There are literally thousands of Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood to keep the enclave secure, but they’re under strict orders not to touch the settlers; I spent a while talking with international monitors who now have to escort the Palestinian children to and from school to keep them from being pelted near the settlements. And so the Old City has become a ghost town: 42% of the Palestinian homes and 77% of the Palestinian businesses in the area near the settlements have been abandoned.


In Bethlehem, I got beers with this rad Palestinian community organizer named Samer Jaber, who, when I mentioned I was from Chicago, IL, went: “Saul Alinsky!” He threw a rock when he was 15 years old, and like many Palestinian kids, spent the next six years in an Israeli prison for it. (His friend described his experience being tortured in jail: “If you go through that process, you will see both God and the Devil at the same time”).

There aren’t restrictive housing covenants. But there are streets in the West Bank that non-Jews just can’t walk down anymore.


There aren’t laws preventing blacks from testifying in court. But I spent a few hours at the emergency room and the police station in Hebron with a Palestinian man and his family after a drunken settler beat him on his doorstep. The Palestinians’ entrance to the police station - which consists of a barbed-wire fence, metal detector, and ten-foot concrete barriers – is around back; the settler entrance is in front. Still covered in his own blood, the man was told by the Chief Investigator that his testimony, that of multiple Palestinian witnesses, and videotape of the attacker weren’t enough. No one had expected any different, of course: they were there just to get a written confirmation that a complaint was made, “so maybe for history they will remember.”

And there aren’t separate water fountains for blacks and whites. Instead, Israel just takes a grossly disproportionate share of the water from shared underground aquifers and the upper portions of the Jordan River. Whereas Israel consumes 280-330 liters of water per day per person, consumption in the West Bank is 60 liters of water per day per person, 40% well below WHO and USAID guidelines for basic need. While Israeli golf courses stay green year-round, hundreds of villages in occupied Palestine are complete without running water.

While it’s still fairly unacceptable to call Israel an “apartheid state” in America, many people (including very well-intentioned folks) without hesitation decry the absence of a Palestinian Mandela or a Palestinian Gandhi. The thing that struck me most from my time in the West Bank, though, was how extraordinary it was that any sort of non-violent organizing was happening at all.

When I arrived in Israel I was supposed to stay with an Israeli friend Eran in Tel Aviv, but he was recuperating from being shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier during the weekly Friday demonstration in Bil’in a few days prior. It was a rubber-tipped bullet – one of the advantages of being an Israeli or international activist as opposed to a Palestinian – but it still ripped through his leg muscle and had to be surgically removed.

Samer invited me to come witness the Friday demonstration – they happen all across the West Bank – outside Al-Khader. When the wall construction there is completed soon, it will expropriate 5,000 acres of the small agricultural community’s land. The protest consisted of about fifty men saying Friday prayers for fifteen minutes in the street, at least a football field’s distance away from the nearest soldiers, who had blocked off the street with armored jeeps and barbed wire barricades for the event. Then they went home. Up on the hillside, Israeli snipers trained their rifles on the men the entire time.

But it’s also important to remember that non-violent resistance means a lot of different things, and it’s pretty much everywhere. It’s the weekly protests against the Wall, but it’s also those folks in Hebron who take the time to fill out those police reports even though they know nothing will come of it. I spent the day with this guy Issa who was documenting every broken, interviewing evicted families, making reports with the authorities, and when I asked why he kept it up he replied, “because they want us to stop.” It’s also the teachers and parents who continue educating their kids during curfew or other adversity, or anyone else just managing to get along day-to-day under what are truly brutal conditions.

Post-Script:

Israeli intelligence stole my dirty socks, and everything else I’ve been traveling with for the past three months.

During the typical pre-flight questioning they decided to search my bags, during which security came across a Palestinian soccer jersey, which I explained I had picked up as a gift in Ramallah. This set off all sorts of alarm bells, and upon closer inspection they then found information from B’Tselem – perhaps the foremost Israeli human rights organization – and the Alternative Information Center, a joint Israeli-Palestinian NGO. Furiously I was asked why I was “exporting enemy propaganda,” taken into a back room where I stripped down to my underwear, and interrogated there for the next two hours. At one point I counted thirteen people going through my clothes, music, and every piece of paper in my wallet.

Twenty-five minutes before departure I was escorted through security, directly onto the boarding ramp for my flight, sans any of my belongings. I want my friggin’ socks back, please.

Tour, Gig #5

After the show in Bristol, Al Baker gave me a lift to Newcastle where we were playing the following night. We got to Newcastle in plenty of time, because also fortuitously playing that afternoon were Premier League squads Newcastle United and Blackburn Rovers. Being on tour our budgets were rather tight, but if there's one thing I learned from certain past political (mis)adventures - okay, I learned a lot of things - it's that confident white people can get in to almost anywhere if they really try.

Attempt 1 at sneaking into St. James' Park involved circling the stadium knocking on closed doors, and when they'd open kindly ask to be let in. You know how British people can say almost anything and Americans find it super-charming? Yeah, turns out it doesn't work the other way around.

Attempt 2 at sneaking into St. James' Park consisted of hanging around the gate and trying to organize the local kids to all storm in at the same time. It didn't really get off the ground, but not for lack of the little guys' toughness. After the game, a buzz cut 11-year-old with his track suit tucked into his pulled-up socks came up to my friend Niall. "Give us that cigarette, yeah?" Niall, a good eight years the boy's senior, quickly hands over the half-smoked cigarette, explaining later: "They'll hit you for no reason at all! They're unpredictable the little ones... just like junkies!".

Finally we figure out that we're over-thinking the whole matter, and that the back door to the "Platinum Club" happens to be wide open where people who have paid too much for their seats come out for cigarettes. We chat up the usher guarding the doorway into the lounge proper, buy some chips to look less conspicuous, then pass through the second layer of ushers with the herd during the post-halftime rush back to the stands. Suddenly we find ourselves smack in the middle of the luxury seats inside the stadium! Newcastle definitely outplayed Blackburn, but American Brad Friedel had a couple unconscious saves in goal for the Rovers, who steal three points on a last minute goal by Matt Derbyshire. Afterwards, a kindly looking, well-dressed man comes up to us smiling. "So you blagged us then, did ya?" I'm not sure what that means, but I'm pretty sure we did, and he winks as he walks away.

We play that night in a gazebo in a park right in the shadow of St. James' Park stadium. It's cold as hell, but between sets there're liters of cider and the bedlam of Shoe Game to stay warm.

Afterwards we crash on a floor in Widdrington, a working-class mining town by the sea where the British government recently deposited tens of thousands of cattle carcasses to be cremated during the last foot-and-mouth outbreak. In the morning we head to the beach at Creswell, spending an hour jumping dunes and seeing just how much sand we can take to Scotland with us in our shoes. It was beautiful there, like Rehoboth in the winter, only with more rocks and a castle. Tour is wicked fun.

(All photo credits to Al Baker and his camera phone).

China. Rock City.

After three days hiking in Wenhai, Max and I came back to the guesthouse sunburned, exhausted, and pungent. As we climbed the old stone stairs to the courtyard, though, we noted something was different since we'd left: the ground was carpeted with fresh pine needles, a 12-piece orchestra was striking up Naxi tunes, and a 60-odd person wedding party was hanging out singing along to the jams. We hustle into our room where Max has first dibs on the shower, and I peek my head out to see if I can figure out what's going on.

Then things start happening very fast. Before I know it, I've been spotted by a drunk uncle, dragged across the courtyard, and seated next to (what I now understand to be) the groom of the wedding. Other relatives or family friends then kindly notice my inexcusable lack of cigarettes and Chinese grain alcohol, and without speaking a word of English politely communicate that I have no choice but to begin drinking and smoking. By the time Max gets out of the shower to translate such key phrases as, "Sorry I reek so bad," or, "No more... I think my lungs are collapsing," I've been compelled to consume three shots of baiju and two cigarettes (which, incidentally, brings my lifetime cigarette total to five).

Post-shower and change, the groom asks me if that was my guitar he saw, and would I bring it out, and again there's no real way to politely decline. So a few minutes later the orchestra is silenced, the groom "opens" for me with a song, and then I (already a bit buzzed from the baiju) stumble through "Honesty Is Not Fucking Emo." All in all I think it was pretty well received, in a generally insane sort of way.

The show Max set up for me in Changsha was slightly less impromptu. A buddy of his runs the premiere punk rock bar in town, and he was able to add to the bill with this folk singer from Beijing. We (Max, myself, and a few friends) arrive at the place via a fleet of motorcycle taxis, and it felt like we were superheroes or something zooming through the cool, disgustingly polluted Changsha night. It was a ton of fun, obviously, and the kids were all super friendly. Afterwards we went to another bar that had a full drum kit and PA set up, and for a few brief shining moments 2/5 of Sharks and Guns! (the best ever college band out of New Haven, CT) would ride again.

What I Do With My Free Time

I had a plan to pose as the scion of a wealthy American textile family, set up meetings to discuss sourcing opportunities with manufacturers, and then go poking around some of the massive factories in the Pearl River Delta's “special economic zones” (SEZs) on my way out of China. As of 2001, nearly five percent of the entire world’s goods were manufactured in the Pearl River Delta (worth US $265 billion), and it continues to grow at a rate over 15% per year. Introduce the unbridled forces of global neoliberal capital to an impoverished, near-limitless workforce enjoying all the individual liberties of a bureaucratic Communist state, a lot of cheap action figurines are going to get made.

Alas, the ruse proved to require a bit more effort than I was prepared to invest, and instead the afternoon before my flight out of Hong Kong I met up with Geoffrey Crothall from China Labor Bulletin (CLB). Founded in 1994 by labor activist Han Dongfang – whose abortive efforts to form the Beijing Autonomous Workers’ Federation during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 made him one of China’s most wanted political dissidents – CLB is widely regarded as the leading independent voice for workers’ rights within China. For more on Han Dongfang, check out the interview in New Left Review (and, while you’re at it, almost anything else in that “Movement of Movements” series is worth reading). Below are some summarized notes, not a transcript, of our conversation.

(I realize this may seem incredibly nerdy and of only moderate interest to many of you; the next post will involve far less weighty material, I promise.)

What sort of work is CLB doing now?

Basically there are two sides to our work. The first deals with individual workers’ rights and is primarily done through our litigation program. Workers face huge obstacles with regards to employment discrimination, non-payment of wages, disability benefits, and responding to privatization of formerly state-owned companies. We’ve had some successes at the District Court level and we've also gotten workers out of jail when they’ve been arrested illegally. The second is collective workers’ rights, which essentially means encouraging collective bargaining.

What does collective bargaining look like presently?

Well, there’s the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which is the sole official union in China, with about 130,000,000 members. Employers finance the union at a rate of 2% of payroll, which by US standards might seem like a great thing, but then they also wield complete control of the organization. Union representatives are usually managers; if they’re not, they wouldn’t dare go against them.

Would the ACFTU ever, say, call for a strike?

No, never. The right to strike is actually a grey area. It was part of the Constitution until the early 1980s, then was removed, but a strike itself isn’t illegal. It’s complicated.

But there are still work actions happening?

There are 1,000+ worker strikes and sit-ins happening every single day in the Pearl River Delta. Some of our information we get from government statistics – which report tens of thousands of worker disputes going through the official arbitration procedures – but we also get calls from all over China from Han Dongfang’s weekly radio show [broadcast on US-government funded Radio Free Asia].

What’s the government’s reaction to all this?

Officially, the line is that these are ‘manifestations of internal contradictions within the people that naturally occur during a period of economic transformation and reform.’ It is the role of the Party to alleviate and channel that tension.

Wow, they talk just like Cultural Studies grad students! My friend Max suggested the government was pretty much untroubled by individual labor disputes at this point; that what they’re really opposed to is the formation of any sort of broader organization or framework that might ultimately rival the Party. What’s your take on it?

I think that’s pretty much spot on. [Pause]. And I should say that CLB is not advocating the establishment of independent labor unions, which is illegal. We’re saying that there’s a great opportunity here [with the implementation of China’s new “Labour Contract Law” on January 1, 2008] for the AFCTU to start acting like a real union.

Do you really think the ACFTU can become a real voice for workers? Does the Labour Contract Law indicate a genuine shift on the government’s part towards a more tolerant attitude on trade unionism? [Until recently, CLB maintained any engagement with the ACFTU was futile].

[Carefully] With any organization, political and economic changes engender new opportunities. The new labor law does offer a lot of new opportunities. At least on the municipal level, we think there’s definitely room now to pressure ACFTU officials and engage with them. There would be a lot fewer strikes if they make these unions legitimate vehicles for workers to air their grievances. [Somewhat quieter, almost as confession] But the legal changes we’ve seen so far aren’t really anything beyond tokenism… it’s by no means a transformation towards liberalism.

What position should the international labor community take towards the ACFTU then?

We’re a domestic NGO in China. We work from the bottom up. We leave the big decisions up to the international labor movement. There’s room for a wide range of strategies, and really we’re not in a position to tell the labor community what to do. They’re accountable to themselves and their own members.

If you’re interested, check out China Labor Bulletin’s most recent report, “Speaking Out: The Workers’ Movement in China 2005-2006,” or the other reports on the website. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions' (ICFTU) position on the ACFTU is also online.

Mountains and Such

I apologize for taking so long between posts. I’ve officially entered the punk rock phase of my travels, and since being anti-social to update your blog for a few hours isn’t terribly punk rock, the journal has suffered accordingly. I’ve got a day off without a show in the little Dutch town of Den Bosch, though, so hopefully I can get close to up-to-date. Also, all the photos on here are Max's... props to Max.

The highlight of Xi’an – obligatory terra cotta warriors aside, of course – was when Max got cheated by the dumpling lady, brazenly decided to liberate the dumplings from her stand, and then in the ensuing bedlam insisted in Mandarin, “My bag is too light! How can I leave two dumplings short?” This, of course, was translated to me later, since I was standing there mildly terrified by the incomprehensible and rapidly escalating shouting match (rendered all the more surreal because of Max’s typical Siddhartha-like calmness). But the move paid off, and the laughter from fellow vendors quickly compelled the woman to relent.

In part due to the cold weather, in part fleeing enraged street vendors, we decided to hightail it down to rural southwestern China, near the border with Burma. We caught a flight to Kunming (“the City of Eternal Spring”), the provincial capital of Yunnan, and from there it was seven hours in minibuses before we got to the small city of Lijiang. Eventually we stumble upon this little unmarked footpath over a hill that leads into the Old City, and come out onto this absolutely breathtaking vista. We throw our bags down at the first guesthouse we find, where much to their Pekinese puppy’s delight the family is hacking up a massive pig in the courtyard, and retire to our balcony to sip Tsingtao as the sun sets.

Lijiang was beautiful, but got less and less cool the longer we spent there. The historic home of the Naxi people - one of China’s 53 recognized ethnic minority groups, who have their own language, religion, pictograph language, and matriarchal social structure - Lijiang is now a burgeoning tourist destination for Chinese vacationers and a “protected” UNESCO World Heritage site. I put protected in inverted commas, apologies to Prof. Gilmore, because although the physical infrastructure seems to be is nicely maintained (witness the wood-paneled public bathroom stalls, each with 9-inch TVs playing music videos of traditional Naxi song and dance), all the actual Naxi people have been priced out into the countryside. In their place are Han people wearing authentic Naxi costume, selling traditional Naxi trinkets and food, and performing traditional Naxi dances as entertainment in the bars. It felt weirdly meta-touristic watching the Chinese tourists eat this up, gawking at the gawkers, as it were.

The next five days, though, were definitely the high point of traveling in China. Leaving most of our stuff in Lijiang, Max and I first hiked off to a relatively nearby village called Wenhai. We met up with a guide north of Lijiang who helps run the one little lodge in town (founded as an eco-tourism project with help from the Nature Conservancy), and spent about three hours hiking in over a deceptively steep mountain pass. After an ungodly number of hours of muscle atrophy on planes, trains, and buses over the past little while the trek was sort of brutal, but the views back down over the valley below made it worth every minute.

It’s tough to describe how picturesque Wenhai is once you arrive. Nestled in a little a valley right at the foothills of the Himalayas, Wenhai is this tiny 900 person Naxi village. Until a couple of years ago, when Wenhai got its first dirt road link-up to Lijiang, hiking (3-4 hours over the mountain, or 6-7 hours the longer way around) was the only way to get to there. Behind it towers Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (18,360 ft), of which we have a perfect view from our room, and all around are wooded hills and mountains where the cattle and sheep go to graze. In town there’s a big golden pig with little black piglets running around her, and a big pink one with little red piglets. In the summer the village is right on the edge of a lake, but in winter the water recedes and leaves behind a flat bowl that looks almost like a moonscape at night. We have the lodge to ourselves, and at night sit out in the courtyard around a bowl of coals watching the stars and satellites (which are probably as clear here as anywhere in China), and then pass out around 8PM since there’s not a whole lot else to do.

The next morning we try to see how far up Jade Dragon Snow Mountain we can hike. We have our sights set on a vast rocky clearing a good ways up (before it looks like the hike turns technical), but our plan is complicated by 1) the fact that Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is 18,000 feet tall and an indeterminate distance away, and 2) there’s no real trail up it. Some of the way (well, the first 15 minutes) there’s dirt road, some of the time we’re able to follow actual trails (though we have no idea where they lead), but most of time we just follow little paths blazed by the goats and cattle. When those die out, it’s “let’s go that way” and we bushwhack our way up the mountainside until we find another animal trail. At one point climbing up a wash, the road must have been nearby, we stopped for a few minutes listening to this Naxi girl singing in the most hauntingly clear voice.

It’s steep going and slow, but we keep getting higher and better views. Around mid-day we stumble into a mountain pasture where some goats are chilling and join them for lunch. There are some curious looking dug-out caves nearby with blocked off entrances – maybe for a shepherd escaping the rain – but rather than exploring we keep pushing on. (On the way down we stumble across six or seven similar caves in the woods, and I’m greatly relieved we didn’t crawl in when we realize they’re probably Naxi graves). Finally we make a last push up a steep ascent above the tree-line, and find ourselves on a ridge with one of the most epic 360 degree views I’ve ever seen. We’re nowhere near where we set off to get to up Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, but the top of this ridge opposite it is one of those vistas that just makes you want to laugh and giggle and shout. It’s like a friggin’ Shelly poem or something... definitely one of my best hikes ever.

We hike back to Lijiang, this time forging our own path through the woods the long way around mountains. Hiking is so much fun when you don’t really know how you’re supposed to get somewhere, just its general direction and approximate distance, and every so often you stumble upon a family of goats, or a graveyard, or maybe a Naxi villager collecting firewood.

The next morning we head out to Tiger Leaping Gorge. Carved out over millenia by the Yangtze River, the gorge is the steepest in the world: you look down and 1500m straight below is a river, you look up and towering above are a staggering series of peaks. The hike takes two days, and at the midway point (for less than $3 per night) you stay at a guesthouse with bedroom views that, again, are just epic. We watched a Chinese soccer match on TV with the owner’s family, then stayed up till the impossibly late hour of 11:30 drinking beers and talking about DC and Yale, kids we knew, trading stories. I haven’t had too many “remember that time back at Yale” sessions since graduation – they offend my political sensibilities, naturally – but reminiscing with Max felt surprisingly good.

The next day we hike out of the gorge, finally arriving in an eerily quiet little town called Daju. The buildings are either abandoned or only half-built, and we come across a school that still has yellowing exam results posted almost two years ago. The power station’s windows are broken, as are those at the old Communist Party building. Also, there isn’t a single light on in town and it’s starting to get late, though we learn later that that’s because the town hasn’t had power for a few days. In short, Daju seemed to be lifted straight from a post-apocalyptic zombie movie, and we resolved to get the hell out of there on the first bus the next morning. Max and I start rewriting the words to Bob Dylan’s “Oxford Town” (“Daju-town, Daju-town, better get away from Daju-town”), and somehow it seems a fitting end to the mountain adventures part of our travels.

New Years in Beijing

Should war ever break out between the United States and China, the Chinese populace will start off with one huge advantage. No, not the population’s uncanny ability to dodge rapidly approaching projectiles, honed daily in Frogger-like pedestrian adventures; nor will it be the thick coating of particulates already insulating Chinese lungs from any potential U.S. chemical or biological agent. Rather, it’s that most Chinese folks are 100% unfazed by massive explosions everywhere around them, and, in fact, seem to rather enjoy it.

Max and I were at his friend’s apartment for Chinese New Year, in what I’m told is a relatively tranquil part of Beijing. But starting around 3PM, a low-level rolling thunder starts building in every direction, and the crescendo doesn’t peak for the next 12 hours. From the 37th floor rooftop of this building, we had an incredible 360 degree view of the whole city. But perhaps the most awesome sight of the evening was when one of our host’s friends - perhaps having imbibed too much Chivas and sweet green tea, the Chinese answer to vodka and Red Bull - inadvertently shot off roman candle charges directly at two ladies walking their dog. The charges missed by a few feet, but what was really impressive was that they didn’t even flinch... not even the dog! Hard! (Max's pictures, which establish that I was not nearly so stoic, will be shared as soon as he sends them to me).

Then you learn that Spring Festival actually lasts for about two weeks. So three days later, when you’re strolling out from a nice dumpling dinner, “BANG!” and little kids scurry everywhere like insurgents with IEDs.

But despite my personal measured ambivalence (read: uptight aversion) to fireworks/explosives, I have to confess that I really like the d.i.y. approach to the holiday. I get that the provision of certain non-rivalrous, non-excludable public goods is one of the things states are supposed to do, but there’s something really lame about celebrating one’s freedom by passive reception of government-provided spectacle. There is some irony to the fact the Chinese have a wildly more democratic approach to their blow-shit-up holiday than we do.

Top 10 Songs about D.C.

What do you do when you're on 23 hour train rides with an old friend from home? You make lists of songs about that place. So below, I give you Max West and Thomas Frampton's ten songs about, tangentially referencing, or in some other way related to Washington, DC.

10. "Lindbergh," by Woody Guthrie
Guthrie's song about the America First Committee, a cause championed by Charles Lindbergh, which sought to keep the United States out of WWII: "So I'm a gonna tell you people, if Hitler's gonna be beat / The common working people has got to take the seat / In Washington, in Washington / And I'm a gonna tell you workers, before you cash your checks / They say 'America First' but they mean 'America Next' / In Washington, in Washington."

9. "Washington, DC," by The Magnetic Fields
The song isn't really that good... It's just got the lyric: "W-A-S-H-I-N-G-T-O-N-baby-D-C."

8. "Guerrilla Radio," by Rage Against the Machine
"Contact I hijacked the frequencies / Blockin' the Beltway, move on DC"

7. "Mt. Pleasant Isn't," by The Evens

6. "Banned in DC," by Bad Brains



5. "This is DC," by DJ Eurok
"This is DC, you might think that you own it / A piece of South Africa on the Potomac..." Give it a listen: http://www.myspace.com/djeurok.

4. "Washington Bullets," by The Clash

3. "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight," The Postal Service
Probably a better ranking than it deserves, but I'm a sucker for that kinda stuff.

2. "Chocolate City," by Parliament

1. Specifically this version of "Hail to the Redskins"



Honorable Mentions: Every other Go-Go song ever; "District Night Prayer," by Q and not U; "Salvation," by Citizen Cope; "Christ for President," by Billy Bragg & Wilco; and we're pretty sure some stuff by Public Enemy.

Of Mongolians, Russians, and the Chinese...

NOTE: I get lonesome sometimes. Bonus points to anyone who posts a comment.

Maybe because it's so friggin' cold all the time - or maybe just because they're not Russian - Mongolians seem to be a really friendly people. You can't afford to be an asshole in such an unforgiving environment, I think. Another consequence of the cold (according to my new friend Rob, one of the Peace Corps kids and future anthropologist) is that Mongolians don't really open their mouths when they speak, producing this beautiful guttural language. Unfortunately, the Russians burned most of the books over the 75 years of their de facto control over the country, so the language is rather limited. (Mongolian hip-hop thus sounds kinda like M.O.P. with less-hardcore instrumentals).

I can't really do justice to how cold Ulan-Bator is this time of year (fun fact: it's the coldest capital in the world). One night I went out to get Indian food with some Peace Corps kids -who spend most of their time in one-person gurts 500km-700km outside the capital where it really gets cold - and one of them had the fantastic idea of walking back to the guesthouse. Now I can die knowing how miserable it feels to walk over a mile in -29 degree C. Then again (moment of sheepish/awkward self-awareness), that's probably the only reason one goes to Mongolia in February.

Lonely Planet describes Ulan-Bator as "a place that by no stretch of the imagination could be called beautiful," and despite the massive coal power plants billowing yellow-brown smoke on the edge of town, I found it really grew on me. Western business attire and cell phones are common now, but there are also plenty of folks walking around in fantastically colorful about-to-sack-a-Chinese-wall robes and pointy boots. Downtown features an even number of Soviet-design concrete apartments and traditional yurts. And the cars are all British-style, yet people inexplicably drive on the right. A palimpsest, if you will. It's all very confusing, in a charming sort of way.

Despite the book burning and wholesale annihilation of 1/3 the male population (including tens of thousands of Buddhist monks) Mongolians still love the Russians for one simple reason: they hate the Chinese even more. (Apologies, incidentally, for the totalizing and monolithic generalizations about races/nation-states in this blog... it comes with tourism). The Chinese and Mongolians have been going at it for, literally, a couple thousand years, most recently coming under Chinese domination during the Qing Dynasty in 1691. The tumult around the collapse of the Qings in 1911 and the October Revolution in Russia produced a period of instability in Mongolia, but by 1924 an independent (from China, anyway) Mongolian People's Republic was declared. The Mongolians are still so psyched about that that one of the top pop songs recently was an ode to Russian-Mongolian relations, and overlooking Ulan-Bator (which means"Red Hero") is a fantastic Russian mosaic paying tribute to the Unknown Mongolian Proletarian Hero. When the Soviet Union fell, the Mongolians followed right behind in transitioning to multi-party democracy and neoliberal capitalism in 1990 (though, interestingly, 99% of the country's land is still publicly owned, which probably makes sense if you're a nomad). And they put mutton, or mutton fat, or some other mutton byproduct in absolutely everything they cook, vegetarianism being, you know, a Chinese thing.

I didn't get a real good sense of the nightlife, on account of 14 Mongolians having died on New Year's after it turned out the vodka they were drinking was actually METHANOL. (This is why vodka costs 1/3 the price of an orange, apparently, and it made me glad I'm more of a plastic-bottle beer guy than a methanol-vodka drinker). Since the vodka producer put methanol not only in his company's bottles, but lots of other companies' bottles, as well, the government put a month-long prohibition on all booze for the month, on the bar scene was thus a little subdued. Just as well, more time in the unbelievably gorgeous countryside. On a side note, the Mongolian authorities quickly tied to the tainted vodka to the Chinese.

Novosibirsk is the New Brooklyn...

I had two weeks between the end of the Israel trip and the date I promised Max I'd meet him in China. My first impulse was to see if there was any way to hitch it, but unfortunately, the road between Tel Aviv and Beijing happens to pass through Baghdad, Tehran, Kabul, Islamabad, Kashmir, and a good chunk of the Himalayas. Tempted though I was by the prospect of immediate induction into the Crimethinc Hall of Fame, I eventually settled (sorry Mikey) on the cop-out, second-cheapest route: the Trans-Mongolian Railway.

The prequel to the trip, flying to Moscow on Aeroflot's discount competitor Kaliningrad Air, turned into something of an adventure in and of itself. Not wanting to arrive in suburban Moscow at 3AM in the dead of winter, I cleverly booked my ticket to include an 8-hour overnight layover in the Kaliningrad airpot. What I failed to anticipate was: 1) that the Kaliningrad airport closes in the evening, 2) that someone would forget to inform the humorless Kaliningrad military personnel that the Cold War was over, and 3) that I'd find myself sans clothes staring into the bleak, sleeting, pitch-black Kaliningrad night. This was not good. After a lot of begging and a few dollars' "change tax" - which I have good reason to suspect will not end up benefittng the good stakeholders of Kaliningrad Air - I managed a seat on the last flight out to Moscow that evening, arriving triumphantly in suburban Moscow at 3AM.

It's 6 days, 5 nights by train from Moscow to Ulan-Bator, Mongolia - 6,265km. In Moscow, I convinced this Dubliner kid named Steve to come with me, which was good since the two of us ended up being the sole non-Russian, non-Mongolian people on the train for the next 5,500km. Apparently late January isn't the peak of tourist season for Siberia. Steve affirmed all of my stereotypes about Irish people, which is to say he was incredibly amiable, was a minor drunkard, refused to pronounce the sound "th" (e.g. "tirty-tree and a tird"), and made up outrageous claims as to the exploits of various Irishmen. When you'd explain to Steve that such feats were simply mathematically impossible, he would respond in all earnestness, "No, no. Irish are hero people!"

Our best friends on the train were the party next door, the Mongolian Olympic Freestyle Wrestling Team. They were fresh from a competition in Krasnoyarsk, where apparently the squad performed quite respectably. In Nizhneudinsk, my buddy Bayaraa Naranbaatar (or "Sun Hero") bought a 5-liter plastic jug of beer to celebrate, and a good time was had by all.

The wagons on the train have nine compartments, each of which have four bunks and are about the size of a small prison cell (6'2" x 5'10" x 9'). Up above there's a cubby for blankets and whatever baggage doesn't fit beneath the bottom bunks, and there's a small table by the yellow-brown curtained window for tea or playing cards. The doors between each wagon are essentially the same heavy metal doors they use for industrial-sized freezers, and at each stop, the conductors spend 15 minutes chipping away at the ice that's accumulated on the bottom of the train since the last stop. For the first day and night we had a friendly young Russian trucker in our compartment - who successfully undermined my belief that Russians are uniformly the least adjectival hospitable people on earth - but for the vast majority of the trip, we had the cell to ourselves.

It took me a long time to realize what made the scenery seem so alien - aside from moonscapes of frozen lakes, the vast expanses of barren wilderness , and the occasional weathered, wooden houses with improbably colored shutters (yellow, bright turquoise, fuchsia, and dark blue are popular... together) - when finally I realized: there's no graffiti! It's really odd to spend so long on a train, cover so many miles, and not see the smallest piece on a passing freight train or village wall. Someone really needs to let all the hipsters back home know that Novosibirisk could, like, totally be the new Williamsburg. (It honestly felt like a relief to get to Mongolia, where there is an active hip-hop community, and see some tags again).

All in all it was a fairly easy and uneventful ride, but there were moments of terror, too. In my 24 years I feel like I've gotten myself into a respectful number of off-the-beaten-path places, and, if lucky, usually managed to get myself into trouble there. But this train ride produced probably the single most unsettlingly lonesome feeling I've ever had. It's 2AM and we pull into this little Siberian town called Zima (meaning "Winter," in Russian) where it's -20 degrees C. The stop is supposed to be for 25 minutes, and I haven't really stretched all day, so I put on all my clothes and wander outside. Through the window of a closed-down stall, you can see a healthy-sized bottle of vodka costs a third the price of one orange... seriously boondock country. And then suddenly, from a couple hundred meters away, you hear the sound of your train starting to pull away. (Luckily, it's just the engine being changed). It's the most sickeningly desperate feeling there is, and I didn't go further than 20 ft from the train the rest of the trip.

How the Other Half Lives

So with my passport surrendered to some friendly Russians who promised they could produce a tourist visa within 36 hours for a few sheckles (I procrastinated on a thing or two before leaving the States), I decided to try and skip across to the Palestinian town Beit Sahour before my flight out the following day. An American friend from college, Jared, came over a year ago on a Birthright trip, found an apartment, and has been working there for Ma'an News Agency ever since.

It took most of the day to get my act together in Tel Aviv, hop a bus, hike through Jerusalem, and find "Damascus Gate" along the Old City. After Birthright it feels a bit taboo (and thus quite exciting) being in a part of Jerusalem where Arabs are clearly in the majority, like venturing over to the girl's side of the gymnasium during the 5th grade dance, and by now it's getting dark. But with surprisingly little trouble I manage to find my way onto the "bus" (read: minivan) to Bethlehem, pay a few sheckles, and we're off.

Along the way I'm sort of poking my head out the window, checking out the scenery, and, yeah, trying to see if I can catch a peak of this separation fence I'd been hearing so much about. Then, all of sudden after about a half hour, a 30 feet high concrete barrier appears smack across the center of the road. For a brief moment I think we're going to hit it, but the bus driver pulls a fast one, circles around, and pulls to an abrupt stop. There's a small rush to the checkpoint, everyone's trying to get home from work, but I get stuck fetching my guitar out of the back (goddamn hippie) and end up at the end of the line.

To clarify, calling the Bethlehem crossing a "checkpoint" is sorta like calling King Kong a mid-sized monkey or Dick Cheney a great marksman. For some reason when I think of checkpoints I think of barbed-wire, some soldiers, and maybe some moveable wooden sawhorses blacking the road. At worst you think of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, maybe. The Bethlehem crossing is more like a prison intake facility, a massive structure with bright spotlights, dozens of lines and stations to file through, and long narrow corridors with 15 foot fencing (bending in at the top) taking you from place to place. A heavily-armed kid who couldn't be more than 18 helps sort out the rabble, pushing two or three folks in at a time, telling a father he can't go in the same line as his kid. My lack of a passport turns out to be no big thing, though --- white privilege mixed with confidence triumphs again! --- and finally you emerge into a big courtyard. It's still the Israeli side of the wall, and there's a massive banner draped on it reading, in Hebrew, English, and Arabic (without the slightest hint of irony), "Peace Be Upon You (Israeli Ministry of Tourism)." Finally I pass through a little gateway, down some more fenced corridors, and find a taxi to take me on to Beit Sahour.

(Aside: there is holy stuff EVERYWHERE in this place. That dirty, abandoned lot across the way from Jared's apartment? Yeah, it's the exact spot the three shepherds were hanging out when Jesus was born).

I'm drained as hell by the time we get there, but Jared prevails on me to go catch a movie at a friend's house. Along the way he translates a lot of the graffiti. There on the side of this gas station is an incredible piece by British artist Banksy. This poster is for this political party. This one is the most recent martyr poster... went to his funeral a few months ago. Around back of the police station he shows me where one night a gorgeous mural of historical Palestinian resistance leaders just appeared. The location of the mural is a key thing here, kind of a "fuck you": the Palestinian Authority police are widely seen as, at best, an infuriatingly inept and powerless force, and, at worst, collaborators in the occupation.

The next day the taxi takes me back to the wall, but I want to walk around some first before crossing back. There's a place where there's a very obviously sealed metal gate --- sort of like a giant garage door in the wall --- and I walk by some men say in English, "It's closed." This takes me a sec: the wall is very tall, and it seems very plain that no one is getting through this door, unless perhaps they're in an Israeli tank. Finally I realize that this is a joke, I make some sort of comment about how I've never scene anything like it, which earns a nod. The first man says, "May it fall soon," I reply with, "Inshallah," which gets a few more nods, and I walk on.

Two last observations from my briefest of visits to the "other side":

1) At least around Bethlehem, it's very clear that the wall's positioning has very little do with protecting Israel proper, or even Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The nearest house on the Israeli house here isn't actually anywhere close to the wall. If you step a block or two back onto higher ground, you can see how the wall cuts across the Green Line, literally right up to people's houses, and places a 30 foot concrete barrier between them and their olive groves. Now I've never cared for olives, I find them disgusting personally, but that would piss me the hell off.

2) The graffiti is absolutely incredible. Recently a lot of European artists came down and did pieces in this area (not to universal acclaim by the locals, incidentally) but it really is a hell of a gallery. One piece consists of a couple of stencilled kids, who appear to have cracked a hole in the wall, and "through it" in bright, photo-realist style, you can see a tropical paradise scene. Another piece just consists of bold, black, 6 foot letters that read, "ICH BIN EIN BERLINER." My favorite, though, was definitely:
I spend the day making my way back to Tel Aviv, where I play a punk show that night that's a benefit for a group called Jews Against Ghettos. (How do you argue against that, really?). The band after me had a pretty impressive video display of actions in the West Bank projected behind them while they played, and someone else passed out their lyric sheet before their set. There should be a rule that all punk bands have to go back to doing that (nah, all musicians really), because if you're not saying something that some kid can back home afterwards and re-read and think about it, you shouldn't be opening your mouth in the first place. It made me realize how long it'd been since I've been in a place where punk actually felt like it might matter. The show hardly raised any money after paying for the space, but that turned out not to be that relevant. The gig was supposed to be for medical bills for a girl who'd recently been shot in the head, but that evening she died anyway.

Banned in China

So, I promise I'll go back and write all about 12 hours in the West Bank, nearly dying in Kaliningrad (bonus points if you can find it on a map), the Trans-Mongolian Railway, etc., but skipping ahead real quick...

I'm now in Beijing, and it turns out that my blog - along with all of blogspot.com, wikipedia.com, bbcnews.com, and a couple million other websites - is banned in China! By some curious quirk, blogger.com (through which one updates a blogspot.com blog) isn't banned, so I can still post. Still, it's annoying, but in honor of the Party's concern for disseminating only officially-approved information, I instead share highlights from yesterday's edition of "China Daily."

Unstoppable economy (Editorial)
The severe weather conditions that have descended on the central and southern regions, devastating as they are, will not have very serious effect on the nation's economic fundamentals and will not dampen the strong momentum of economic growth, the National Development and Reform Commission has said... Our sizzling economic locomotive is simply too powerful to be hindered by such an episode. Neither the floods of 1998, nor the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic of 2003 could derail it. The damage wrought by the snowstorms will also pass, according to our economic authorities.

Migrants stay put in Guangdong
GUANGZHOU: More than 12.5 million migrant workers have been persuaded to stay in Guangdong province for Spring Festival, the local labor department said yesterday.

Questions raised over faith 'vote'
On Jan 6, the Dalai Lama compelled monks in India's Gaden Monastery to sign a pledge not to believe in the Buddhist Guardian, Gyaiqen Xudain, and expelled nine monks who refused to take the pledge...

In the 1990s, in the name of fighting against the Buddhist Guardian, the Dalai Lama started slaughtering members of the New Kadampa sect.

He incited the Tibetan Youth Congress, Tibetan Women's Federation and some other branches to forcefully dismantle statues of the Gyaiqen Xudain, and beat up people who refused to obey. Those who refused, were suppressed, and lamas and nuns were driven out of monasteries and nunneries.

Now, the Dalai Lama has resumed his old tricks by calling for a public vote.

Such a "public" vote is indeed blasphemy and is a mockery to democracy and freedom. Due to the Dalai Lama's religious autocratic behavior, people cannot help but think of the inquisition during the Dark Ages and the Pope's slaughter of heathens.

How can such a "Tibetan Buddhism leader" and winner of the "Nobel Peace Prize" resort to such actions?

The Briefest Respite

Lest anyone fear that perhaps I was growing increasingly, you know, cynical or angry over the course of my brief foray into blogging, I give you the cutest baby in the world (until maybe Leveille has his kid): August Langston Colvin Shenk.

"My, my, my, my slow descent..."

We leave the "Bedouin camp" to see the rest of the Negev Desert. There's hiking through sandstone canyons, sunrise atop the Masada, and a moment for quiet reflection on the rim of the Great Markesh. We crawl through intricate, impossibly narrow networks of tunnels the Jews (Vietcong-like) built to fight the Roman army in the 2nd century CE. And of course we go swimming in the Dead Sea. It's hard to describe how beautiful this all is.

A brief word about the Dead Sea, though. Life is so brief that I don't want to give the impression that I regret getting to swim there; I am a richer person for having experienced salinity 30 times that of Rehoboth Beach, DE. That said, no one can convince me that the Dead Sea, as tourist destination, is anything more than a sick Israeli hidden camera TV show. The "beach" is comprised of painfully sharp ridges of crystallized salt, which tear up your feet as you gingerly wade into the water. Some fell and their backs looked like they'd been whipped. If you make it waste deep without losing your balance, you then have to contend with the merciless sting of your calves, inner thighs, and anywhere else you might have the slightest chafing (thanks to the previous day's camel ride with the Bedouin). The women who recently shaved their legs reported unknowable agony. Then, finally, should a small wave or over-enthusiastic comrade splash even a drop of water on your face, prepare to be blinded for the next 4-6 hours. And all this is before the curative properties of the noxiously sulfurous hot springs.

But returning to the narrative: most nights, before drink, we did some sort of group activity, like games or a group discussion. The ones more expressly about Judaism or Jewish history I start to really like. I've always been really into history, I've always been really into genealogy... it makes sense. Plus, I learned at the Ghetto Fighters Museum (Mom and Dad, if you had taken us to museums with names like the Ghetto Fighters Museum when we were little, I would have been so much better behaved) that I look a little like Mordechai Anielewicz, an organizer in the Jewish Fighting Organization and 24-year-old martyr of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Other nights the activities appeal to me less. Like the evening where we watch a video that one of the Israeli soldiers in the special forces wanted to share of his commando unit. I'm expecting maybe some grainy home movies of soldiers hanging around on base, like the ones I've seen of Iraq. Instead, we first watch a sleekly produced, 7-minute advertisement (in English!?) for the unit, which tells the story of a young recruit's awesome first snatch squad operation nabbing a terrorist in a West Bank cafe. Then we watch another video, again well-edited, of an actual raid on a Nablus apartment. Upbeat European techno music pulses as commandos shout for a terrified woman and child to come out of the flat. There are blasts and gunshots. The last shot if from a hovering Israeli helicopter, smoke billowing from the apartment window, and the closing title informs us: "The mission was a success. The terrorist was killed." Perhaps 14 years of Quaker has just left me to soft for this sort of military pornography, 'cause I really don't know what to say. One of the softer-spoken girls on the trip, clearly similarly put off, raises her hand, "Why was the music so happy?" Make a note to talk to her later.

Around Day 6 I start to break down. Maybe it's the constant partying, the massive sleep deprivation, ethno-religious overload... Whenever we get back on the bus I can't seem to warm up if it's cool outside, and I can't cool down if it's warm. My back and shoulders start aching. We take a long drive from down south in the Negev up to the Galilee, going straight through the length of the West Bank on Highway 90 (a "settler highway") without so much as a mention, and I'm really struggling by the time we get there.

We spend the afternoon in the Golan Heights, annexed from Syria during the Six-Days War. We start on a hill just across the 1967 border, looking down into a valley where there are a number of old kibbutzes. From here the Syrians would shell and fire rockets at the kibbutzim, making life all but intolerable. Our guide grew up on a kibbutz here. He reads a victory poem from '67, that tells of a child and mother emerging from a bomb shelter (much like the converted bomb shelter/bar we will drink at this evening). "'Does this mean the rockets are gone?' he asks / 'Yes, my child,' with tears in her eyes." The ground is still littered with landmines, and the barbed wire fence only sometimes keeps the cattle from staying into the uncleared areas. It's cooler here, and that's when the shakes start.

A game where the Americans are made to break into three groups, and the Israeli soldiers read us scenarios. 1) A terrorist is firing rockets from a school. What should we do? (A: We tracked them with an unmanned aircraft until they came out, then killed them... No mention of cutting off power to 1.5 million residents in Gaza). 2) A woman comes to the Israeli border with no papers, like an undocumented Mexican at Juarez, claiming to be pregnant. What should we do? (A: Well, of course, we couldn't let her in. And then Israel got a lot of bad press when she had a child at the checkpoint). 3) A shepherd sees a group of Israeli commandos, and there's no way to detain him. If they left him go, he might go run and tell, thus compromising the mission. Do we kill him? (A: Jewish fighters faced such a situation in 1948. They let him go, and then 12 Jews were massacred).

The next day it's the Lebanese border. The group talks to a woman who refused to leave her family home when the war broke out in 2006, despite the hail of rockets. But I'm too weak to get off the bus, and the muscles in my back start to hurt from shaking so hard. Shlomo, our armed guard/medic (who, despite being an absolutely wonderful guy, is dubiously qualified for both his jobs) notes that my temperature has reached 39.9 C, which of course means nothing to me. I fall asleep collapse when we get back to the kibbutz for dinner, sleeping for the next 14 hours.

That night I'm back at the Western Wall. There's yelling and chasing, though I can't make out why exactly. I'm there, too, and for some reason everything is calmer right around me. At some point Shlomo comes in to check the fever, and I grow convinced I've been poisoned, that he's trying to kill me. This time I pray at the Wall, and unlike a week before, it feels right. It's the funniest thing how natural it feels. All of this starts to make sense, inexplicably clear sense. I hear more yelling, real this time, either the sound of incoming katyusha rockets or significant others back home being dropped. And then I'm standing on the white graves of the Mount of Olives, sweating and trembling violently.

When I wake the fever's broke, though vicious stomach cramps have taken its place. As we head to Tel Aviv I'm still pretty out of it, and despite trying I can't rouse myself for the last night of partying on the beach looking out over the Mediterranean. I've got nothing left. I make them take me to an Emergency Clinic while I still have 4 hours of Birthright medical insurance left, and wave goodbye, spent, when the bus leaves for the airport.

Desolation in the Negev

"A desolation that not even imagination can grace with pomp of life and action." - Mark Twain, on the Negev Desert, 1867

After a few days, we drive south down to the Negev Desert to spend an evening in a Bedouin tent, our first (and only) official encounter with an Arab Israeli during the 10-day program. This is something of a sensitive topic: Arabs comprise 1.3 million (or 19%) of Israel's 6.6 million population, and that percentage is growing fast. (This does not include the 3.1 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza). In 2005, Benjamin Netanyahu called "Israeli Arabs who remain... Israeli citizens" a "demographic problem" - others have used the more incendiary term "demographic bomb" - and warned that if Arabs reached 35% "than the Jewish state will be annulled." For more on the status of non-Jewish Israelis, this is a decent place to start.

I'm excited for the trip. The scenery along the way is simply staggering - within 25 minutes you transition from the lush, rolling hills of "Israeli Tuscany" to complete, rocky desert desolation - and the rustic setting is a welcome alternative to the Jerusalem bar scene. It's late, dark, and bitter cold by the time we roll into the camp - which essentially consists of a small corral for camels and six massive rectangular tents - and we're quickly brought a delicious meal as we sit cross-legged on the ground. After dinner we settle into our tents (there are quite a few different Birthright trips there at the time, and each group of 45-50 kids piles into its respective tent), and soon shuffle off to the "hospitality tent" to be formally received.

Reclining on a mat, sipping tea and playing a wonderfully twangy stringed instrument, is an undeniable, honest-to-God Bedouin. I stress this because I'm pretty certain the raggedly-dressed kids that served us dinner were Bedouin, too, but nothing distinguished them as such (for example, this guy's impressive drum and red-and-white checkered keffiyeh), and it's clear that now is our appointed Bedouin-meeting time. He welcomes us with tea and coffee, introduces himself in heavily accented English as Saleem (after some words in Hebrew to our guide), and we all settle down onto the mats for our 20-minute cultural talk. The prefatory comments are promising, introducing the fact that many traditionally-nomadic Bedouins are beginning to settle down, and how contemporary Bedouin culture represents a mix of traditional and modern culture.

And then things begin to get horribly, bewilderingly weird. "We have four wives! Yes, wonderful! I only have two wives, though." There are some gasps, some nervous laughs. "One wife is skinny, one wife is not so skinny." And then he goes on about how having many wives can create problems because of the multiple tents they necessitate; and how big trouble if two wives in one tent; and how great it is to be with skinny wife on Monday, and not so skinny wife on Tuesday; and the number of camels in dowry it would cost him to procure another. The presentation briefly leaves the topic of multiple-marriage to include Saleem's recollections of riding his camel to school, but I'm not really focusing at this point. At the end, a young woman in our group volunteers to try playing the drum Saleem has brought, and he's delighted at her effort: "Very good! I make you wife number three... Five camel dowry!"

There's a brief discussion back in our tent. Some complain that the presentation we just witnessed was offensive to women, but our trip leader is quick to help them move past such a naive, knee-jerk reaction. "Look, that's just their culture, okay? You can't say 'right' or 'wrong'... It's inappropriate of us to tell the Bedouins what they should or shouldn't do, because that's the way their culture is." The discussion doesn't last long, though, because seven beautiful, young Israeli soldiers have been assigned to our trip for the next few days, and tonight is our night to meet them. We play get-to-know you games for an hour and a half. One of the girls is a calisthenics instructor in the Army; one of the boys is part of an elite commando squad that kills terrorists.

The next morning I spot Saleem at the other side of the breakfast tent sipping coffee. His accent is noticeably milder. Saleem's been doing this gig as seasonal work for about a decade, he tells me, and before that he was a truck driver. Like most Bedouin, he doesn't actually have multiple wives. The "camp" is owned by a Jewish businessman from Jerusalem. His boss. He says what he's supposed to.

---

I want to make sure I'm as clear as possible on this. I, too, thought Saleem's presentation was offensive. Polygamy does still exists in a minority of Bedouin communities (Bedouins are a very tiny minority compared to the much larger Palestinian Arab population, it's probably worth mentioning), and there are many important Bedouin women's NGO's dealing specifically with this issue. (This might be a good place to start if you're interested in some of these groups , and if you're interested an overview of Bedouin culture that goes beyond polygamy - perhaps, for example, the Israeli government's systematic violation of Bedouins' human rights - this is a decent report).

But my anger at the presentation arises mainly for other reasons. Birthright trips are vetted incredibly closely - two independent evaluators shadowed us at different times during the program - and I simply can't believe it was an accident, an organizational oversight, that our sole official encounter with an Israeli Arab happened to be a complete minstrel show. One can argue over whether the Israeli formulation of "Jewish and democratic" is or is not an inherently racist precept, but Birthright's effective erasure of 20% of the citizenry (whose tax dollars, incidentally, funded 30% of my free trip to Israel) unquestionably crosses that threshold. It represents a form of what Amos Oz refers to as "moral autism," the willingness to assign to others a status that one would never accept for themselves. (Thanks for the book, Mom. Really good). Related to this is Judaism's encounter over the past few centuries with European humanism, particularly its liberal and socialist strains, and Oz goes on to write (critically) about the willingness of some in Israel to consign this rendezvous to the dustbins of history. In the long run, this latter tendency will do more harm to both Israel and Judaism than any suicide bomber.

Three Pictures of the Western Wall

A good friend, who for the sake of his blog's anonymity shall remain nameless, sent me an email asking about t-shirts in Israel. And, since the last post involved the Western Wall, I wanted to add this little coda.

For those not in the know, a brief history lesson. The Western Wall, or the Wailing Wall, or the Kotel, is most of what remains from the Second Temple (516 BCE - 70 CE). Probably the most sacred site in Judaism, the Western Wall has been a focus of longing and prayer since it was destroyed by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago. I mentioned that we visited it our first and second day in Israel. Here's a picture, complete with the induction stand for the paratroopers on the plaza.

Now, this relates to t-shirts, postcards, and posters because of the image below. It's of a young Israeli paratrooper on Day 3 of the Six-Day War (1967), right after the liberation/occupation of Jerusalem, and it's one of the most iconic images in Israel today. If you're able to put aside politics for a moment, it's hard not to see it as incredibly stirring. The heroic angle and composition, the expression of complete awe and wonderment before God and State at these kids' accomplishment... It was the first time in 19 years that Jews had prayed at the Wall, and probably the first time in 2000 years that it was under Jewish control. The paratroopers became national heroes, and it's no accident that the swearing-in ceremonies for the paratroopers now happen on that plaza. Those that know me might find it hard to believe, but I really love this picture, and I seriously almost bought a postcard.

So when I went to visit my friend Jared in the West Bank, his roommate referenced what used to be on Western Wall plaza before it was a plaza. I didn't get a chance to look it up until I got to Moscow (spoiler alert: I survive Birthright), but it turns out there used to be a Morrocan Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, below. It was an 800 year old neighborhood, and it went all the way up to within 10 feet of the Western Wall. On June 10, 1967, three days after taking the Old City, Israeli soldiers began demolishing the "slum area" around the wall, giving the 650 inhabitants a few hours notice to leave.

With Apologies to Hunter S.

In the lead-up to the most recent Iraq War, President Bush announced a plan to use a program of "shock and awe” to cripple the Iraqi will to resist. The term comes from a military strategy paper published by the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) in 1996. The point, the authors write, is to:

...so overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels… To achieve this outcome, Rapid Dominance must control the operational environment and through that dominance, control what the adversary perceives, understands, and knows, as well as control or regulate what is not perceived, understood or known.

Naomi Klein also deals with the concept of "shock" in her latest book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which traces the not-terribly-democratic, not-terribly-gradual ascent of neoliberal ideology over the past four decades. Here "shock" serves to rearrange both geopolitical and economic landscapes.

Which is all by way of introducing the fact that it’s 7AM Saturday morning, I’m lying in bed spent and fighting back the vomit, waiting for the shower to free up. Then I’m gasping as the cold water hits, trying unsuccessfully to put together the past 48 hours of guns, alcohol, religion, sex and graves since we landed in Tel Aviv, and, yeah, it all feels like a bit of a shock.

Our flight to Israel is delayed 12 hours (due, we are told, to President Bush’s need to clear the airspace for his own arrival), so our group of 36 starts bonding over mini-bottles of wine and overpriced airport Heineken. Thus, I find myself not entirely on my toes for the slightly terrifying security interrogation during check-in: You never learned Hebrew? What was the last Jewish holiday you celebrated with your family, ‘Thomas Ward Frampton’? Really? And what do you call the piece of matzoh that gets hidden? Apparently I did better than the poor girls that got taken into the side-room. (On the Israeli side, though, we go through customs like it’s nothing. I guess Birthright’s got what they call “suction” on The Wire).

On the plane I sit next to an ultraorthodox rabbi, David. Actually, I sit next to a very attractive young woman, but David compels her to switch seats with him because he can’t sit next to the woman he’s been seated with. There’s a brief moment when I think David and a posse of other ultraorthodox guys are about to blow up the plane when they simultaneously break for the cockpit, but someone explains to me that they’re just putting together a minyan for prayer. But we end up hitting it off pretty well, all things considered, and he invites me to his place for shabbat after the trip.

We arrive at the hotel in Jerusalem in the very early morning. It occurs to me that despite spending the past 18 months working every day in hotels with UNITE-HERE, this will be the first time I’ve stayed as a hotel guest since I started union organizing. I pick up a towel and drop in on the ground, just because I can. Odd that hanging out in a guest room without worrying a boss is going to swing by feels like just as much a culture shock as, you know, being in Israel. (The room attendants, bussers, and bartenders at our hotel, incidentally, are all Israeli Arabs. The room attendants work on piecemeal – about $2.50 for a checkout room, less for an occupied one – which doesn’t compare too favorably to the $107.20 per sixteen-room-day that union room attendants currently make in Chicago, particularly given that the cost of living isn’t too much lower in Israel).

After a few hours of napping we’re taken to an overlook of Jerusalem. The vista is really staggering: the walls of the Old City, the Dome of the Rock, the gravestones along the Mount of Olives. We drink wine, read from Genesis, and are welcomed home. “This is not a tour, it’s a pilgrimage... this is your birthright.” To the east there’s another wall in the distance cutting across the hilltops, one that kind of gives lie to the posters around town promoting “40 Years of a Reunited Jerusalem,” but we don’t really dwell on it.

Then to the Jewish Quarter of the Old City for a few hours of tour. Again, fantastic. It so happens, though, that they’re inducting a new crop of paratroopers into the army at the base of the Western Wall that evening, so there are hundreds upon hundreds of 18-year-olds running around with guns. During lunch we’re told not to allowed past the border to the Muslim Quarter, that it’s not safe. Of course, I wander off and try and check out the Muslim Quarter, but I end up somehow getting lost in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (which I gather is part of the Christian Quarter).

Back to the hotel where we have a professional lecturer come in to deliver a presentation on the contemporary political situation. I don’t know what to say. The guy who delivered the lecture was fucking charming (British accents, tons of jokes, owned the room), and he’s so likable you almost don’t realize that the chat he’s giving is peppered with video of incoming Katyusha rockets and anecdotes about murdered friends, with no reference to settlements, cluster bombs, or collective punishment. Even the typically aloof 18-year-old girls with the “Rich Bitch” t-shirts seem engaged. He’s really, really good.

After dinner we go out to an Israeli club (conspicuously lacking in Israelis), where there’s a disastrous amount of drinking. It’s like summer camp with an open bar. All sorts of decadence and depravity transpire that, for the sake of propriety, I’m going to have to leave inferred. I think I end up in a pitch-black room in the basement of the hotel, though that may have been another night. We’re up in a few hours to do it again.

The second day continues much like the first, with an already-depleted crew staggering around Mount Herzl (where early Zionists, most important Israeli politicians, and military casualties are buried). It’s really more of a park than a cemetery, and I really like the beautiful tree-lined winding through hilly gravesites. Way nicer than Arlington National Cemetery. “These are kids your age, just like you, who died for Israel. This one here, with the Phillies helmet at the foot, he’s an American who volunteered to fight in Lebanon, to stop the rockets. This is Yitzhak Rabin. This one is my friend Roei, another tour guide who died when his tank was hit. He could have been a medic when he was called back up, but he wanted to drive the tank. Sometimes we have to fight for peace.”

In the evening we get dressed up in our Friday best. We load into the bus back to the Jewish Quarter, and as the sun goes down we enter the completely packed plaza of the Western Wall. There are thousands of worshippers – mostly ultraorthodox in either wide-brimmed or tall, furry black hats– bowing, crying, chanting, singing, shouting. There are also a lot of 18-year-olds with guns, even if the paratroopers are gone. Unlike what you might get at synagogue on Friday night, there isn’t any one shabbat prayer service: everyone pretty much does there own thing, with different leaders setting up their own tables and others crowding around. It’s really one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen. I wander around, overwhelmed by it all, trying to figure out if I find religious fervor more impressive or disquieting. I think about writing a prayer and sticking it in the cracks of the stone, but it doesn’t feel right at all.

Afterwards we walk back as a group to the hotel. Jerusalem largely shuts down once shabbat comes in, and driving is prohibited for the religious. Back at the hotel there’s more sex and alcohol, and even a couple hours sleep. This isn’t a tour, it’s a pilgrimage... this is our birthright.

A Brief Introduction...

It would be nice to have some unifying theme to this blog - a "project," right - but I'm afraid I just can't muster the forethought that would require. So it'll be a notebook, of travel, but not a friggin' travel blog/zine.

I'm hopping on the Chinatown bus in a couple hours for NYC, the first little leg of what should be a 25,000 mile trip. Something awesome (read: terrible) always happens on the Chinatown bus.