Mubarak is out! Here’s the happy scene on my local Arab drag: Steinway Street, in Astoria, Queens, New York.
Three of the five news vans:
A happy crowd (small, because I only got there at 4pm):
My friend, Ali El Sayed, making delicious food as always, equally happy:
(You can see the “1919 Trevor Ethnic map of New York City” I posted about earlier in the background.)
Attack Camels?! This is not a picture I ever expected to see:
Luckily, and unlike the tear gas, this tool of repression doesn’t have “Made in U.S.A.” stamped on it.
[“I mean whoa!”]
Here are some more pics from a good day in Bangkok last week.
Some of you may have posted comments and wondered why they didn’t appear (or think I deleted them). Turns out blogger/google automatically sorts out the spam comments. Problem is all the comments it thinks are spam, aren’t (including some of my own). I’ll try and check that “spam” folder more often, now that I know it exists.
Inshallah, Hosni Mubarak, the latest in a long line of Egyptian Pharaohs, will soon be history.
I think about Egypt more than most people. My wife studied in Cairo and speaks Arabic, I’ve visited Egypt three times, and one of my best friends here in New York is Egyptian-American, from Alexandria. He hates Mubarak, of course, and what Egyptian wouldn’t? He’s a bastard dictator and has been for decades.
How has Mubarak remained in power for so long? In large part because we give him billions of dollars a year. It started as a bribe to make peace with Israel. Do most Americans even think about the consequences of supporting bad rulers? Egyptians and Arabs don’t hate our freedom. But perhaps they should hate us for preventing them from having freedom. Egypt has been under “emergency rule” since 1981. It’s amazing they don’t hate us more.
Dictators can fall regardless of what the US knows or does. After supporting Saddam Hussein for so long, the US invaded Iraq. And for what? He would have fallen eventually, too. We just made the country worse.
In terms of foreign policy, this is yet another strong case for us doing less, not more. We get a lot wrong. And since we as a country don’t have as much control as we like to think we do, we might as well support democracy. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but at least we would be on the moral high ground.
Also, watching pictures of riot police shoot at people and also get routed is a good time to be remember and be thankful that police in the US are civilians–city workers and not soldiers or government agents–even if sometimes everybody forgets this important fact.
And assuming Mubarak falls (which is a wonderful assumption), will Obama get credit for change in the Middle-East just like Reagan gets credit for the fall of Communism? They’re both equally deserving. Did not Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo spark the whole democratic movement? I doubt it. But then neither did Reagan. (And did Obama really just say that Mubarak is not a dictator? Of course he’s a dictator. The only question is how bad of dictator he is.)
If the US doesn’t know which side to be on, why not be on the side againstcorrupt dictators? Who will replace Mubarak? Who knows. Will the next leader be better or worse than Mubarak? Who knows. But that’s no reason not to wish for Mubarak’s fall. And shame on us for supporting Mubarak for so long, pretending he wasn’t a bad man.
Mubarak is speaking right now and doesn’t seem to be saying much at all. But he’s not stepping down. And he looks healthier than I expected.
The man of the year, perhaps the decade, could be a humble unemployed university graduate, Mohammed Bouazizi.
I’m back in New York. Twenty-one hours of flight back was not nearly as bad as it should have been. And now it’s good to be home, but strange to see snow after a few weeks in Bangkok.
Here are some pics from our trip. Mostly of our day trip to the Maeklong market, which features a train running through it. There are lot market shots. We like markets. But also, Thailand is almost one big market. In Bangkok alone, there are an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 food carts. It’s hard to comprehend what this means till you see (and eat) it.
I guess I’m a day late and a dollar short. I didn’t actually know it was MLK Day (but hell, I’m in Thailand). But happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day to everybody. Seriously.
Some mock this holiday, but not me. Not only is it good to have more holidays in general and particularly in the dark days of January and February, but Martin Luther King Jr. was a great man. Perhaps the best American of the past half century. I truly believe that.
But maybe I’m biased. I spent the first nine years of my school life, K through 8, at King Lab school in Evanston, Illinois. The school is formally known as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Experimental Laboratory School. It even has its own Facebook fan page.
Anyway, it was a great school. And I’m sure it influenced me in ways I probably will never truly understand. And I also suppose I got more MLK indoctrination than your average white kid (I thought everybody knew the Stevie Wonder Happy Birthday song).
And let’s not forget how radical King was. There was nothing passive about non-violence. And King, as some hipsters like to forget, unlike Malcolm X, got sh*t done.
Too many Americans think it’s natural that we don’t have legal racial segregation. But it’s not. Who knows what side I would have been on back then. I’d like to think I would be on the winning team, but who knows? It’s easy to pick the winning team in hindsight. But it’s not so easy at the time. It’s too easy to forget how many good Americans were against King.
People fought and even died for Civil Rights. King was subversive. King was watched by the FBI. At the time, King was considered by many to be a criminal. He wasa criminal. Police arrested King for violating the law.
King was also assaulted. And of course he was killed.
But Martin Luther King Jr. was right. Because of all that, King’s national holiday may be the best (though I’m also partial to Thanksgiving). I mean, George Washington is a no-brainer for a holiday. Lincoln, well, he should have his own, too. But King… well, I don’t know what else to say except: “Happy birthday to ya, happy birthday!”
It’s my nameday, school is out, and my wife and I are whizzing through the air in an amazing flying machine that but 110 years ago, was an unimaginable fantasy. (When this post comes out, we’ll be on our way to Dubai, en-route to Bangkok.)
My second book, In Defense of Flogging, is all-but done. It’s been a slog. Last night I added 500 words on the subject of private prisons (when I noticed rather late in the process that I somehow failed to even mention the subject). Those 500 words took 10 hours. That’s less than a word a minute. Which is, unfortunately, par for the course. For the past few months, I feel like I’ve done nothing else, because, basically, I haven’t.
The good news is you can already pre-order a copy of In Defense of Flogging on Amazon (which is actually a bit disconcerting to the author, to see your book for sale before you’re done writing it–maybe I should have bought a copy to see how it turns out…). And I doubt the price is going to be much lower than super-cheap price of $13.60 they’re currently hawking it for.
As to vacation, I have two book reviews to write. But I’m healthy, I’m alive, I can’t complain. Bangkok, in case you’re wondering, is a city crazy about food. We will do our best to eat as much as possible, but even then we will barely scratch the surface of all the possibilities.
And though, as interesting as it is, I doubt I’ll be making a return to the Corrections Museum.
I have a few “Then and Now” posts lined up as fillers while I’m gone. I’m not certain if I’ll be posting much else until the end of the month.
Be good. Stay safe. Happy New Year!
From the Chicago Sun Times: Sex toy defendant arrested for failing to show up to court.
Warning: there’s a picture of Ms. Bildsten, 56, of Gurnee, Ill.
Here’s how she first came to our attention.
Why it’s that time of year again… you know, the time of year when I tell you to buy my book. It is a quick and easy present. Cop in the Hood, available from Amazon.com. And for all you cheapskate cops, it’s less than $15. Just lock up one looser and you’ll make more than that in overtime.
And if you don’t want to give a police book for Christmas–or maybe last year you already did–I’ve got another book you should buy: a cookbook. And I just happen to know just the book: Forking Fantastic(it was supposed to be called F*cking Delicious, and probably would have sold better had it been). And nothing says “Christmas love” like a cookbook with lots of swear words. Of course I’m biased (one of the authors is my wife), but they are damn good cooks. Plus you can see a picture of me holding an entire lamb on a spit and also follow my very own ceasar salad recipe (which just happens to be f*cking delicious).
Plus Forking Fantastic is less than $8on Amazon. Better yet, the cover price is $20, so you’re friends will never know just how cheap you really are.