Is this just another version of that?

I started rereading modern Italian history (Andreotti, Moro, Craxi, the Red Brigades, the goddamn Vatican).  What the fuck is wrong with us?  It reads like a catalog of murder, betrayal, corruption and every other base human impulse or behavior you can think of.  Italy is not unique, this shit is the same everywhere, although, in Italian politics, at least all the players are impeccably dressed.

I'm social to a fault, and I'm not the kind of person who hides behind her laptop... but I'm sort of worried these days that my increasingly intense obsession with the shithole mess we're making of our planet, our societies and ourselves may also serve the purpose of distracting me from the things right in front of me, like my friendly Indian neighbor and his charming wife (who -if the smells wafting out of their house are any indication- is a badass in the kitchen).  My question is: am I really all that different from those annoying people I see in line at the grocery store greedily reading People Magazine?  I'm far too much of a snoot to give a shit about which celebrity is sleeping with which, but plug me into an interview with anti-Mullah protesters in Tehran and the immediate and tangible world right in front of me could collapse on top of me before I'd notice.

Despite how blood-curdling politics always are, I will always follow the things we do to one another.   I am, as a friend who knows me extremely (often embarrassingly) well once said, a "specie-ist".  Given evolution and, to the extent that we are able, I would like to see us  become better than what we have been thus far, because, despite all our shortcomings and however much I love pooches and owls, I think we really are the best this planet has ever seen.  We kick the dinosaurs' asses.  We write sonnets for Christ's sake, we run into burning buildings to save small children, we build Paris, Cairo and New York.  We're Beethoven and Einstein and MLK and Dostoevsky and my loving parents and my inimitable brothers and sisters.  I fucking love humanity, for the way we sometimes are and for the things we aspire to be.  And I think we're worth saving.  But is obsessively following politics the best way to track our progress as a species? Might I not learn more about humanity and its potential and its direction in another, more immediate and usually less depressing way?  Could my excessive concern for far away lands be keeping me from knowing whether the dude who sells me cigarettes has children and what their names are?  Could it be that celebrity gossip addicts (did I mention how much they annoy me?) are doing more or less the same thing in their own uninteresting and unintelligent way?  Is tracking the Egyptian revolution like my life depended on it the same as needing to know what's the latest in the Brangelina drama?  Perhaps it isn't exactly the same but I am beginning to think it's not as dissimilar as I would like to believe.  Aren't we, in both cases, less present in the business of our own lives than we might be?

Or take another case.  My parents never fed us McDonald's.  Well, once in the early 90's when we were living in Italy and I was missing America terribly, my mother took me to Rome -Italy only had a handful of McDonald's back then- where we paid more for that greasy ingestable garbage than we would have for two heaping plates of the city's specialty: Bucatini all'Amatriciana and a glass each of a reasonable red.  Anyway I got my little piece of America and was as happy as could be expected for an awkward 14 year old.  But aside from associating McDonald's with the United States when I was in Italy, I have no comforting associations with that chain.  None.  I know this is unusual.  I know many people of my generation, even those who are normally careful about what they eat, find comfort in Big Macs and McChicken sandwiches.  I've said over and over again that I believe in personal responsibility and that, say, if no one ate that garbage, the chain would go out of business and everyone (including the rain forests, for instance) would ultimately be better off because of it.

But somehow that attitude's not exactly fair, is it? Parents take children to McDonald's because kids see commercials and want the Happy Meal and the toys it contains and beg and plead to eat there, the parents acquiesce eager to see their children happy and, perhaps, grateful for not having to cook.  Then, once those children grow up and life isn't as easy and sweet as it was when they were young, innocent and under the loving tutelage of their parents, they see the Golden Arches and can't help thinking of a simpler, better time; so (not unlike Pavlovian dogs) they find themselves craving a double cheeseburger.  I see all of this as a testament to the genius of McDonald's marketing and advertising executives.  And for the simple reason that, like I said, McDonald's was not in my family's repertoire, when I see the Golden Arches, all I think is: "yuk." I don't crave it, when I see one of their clever billboards, I don't think: "man, that would be perfect right about now."  I should take no credit for this response though.  I'm sure that I'd be salivating along with the rest of them if my parents had been accustomed to saying yes when my brothers and I begged and pleaded like the rest of the kids in our generation to be taken there. But even though I understand that my impervious-ness to that crap comes through no merit of my own, when I'm feeling snooty I wear it like a badge of honor.

Walk me through any Whole Foods though and past an attractive display of organic, fair-traded, sustainably shade grown coffee beans and you might catch me thinking: "my life will actually improve if I purchase this wondrous product."  I might find myself thinking that I will become enveloped in a warm glow of love, good-will, deliciousness and comfort if only I fork over the twenty bucks for that organic-lavender-lemon-grass-never-ever-tested-on-cute-and-cuddly-little-animals-jojoba-oil-infused hand cream... Obviously this is bullshit, just like it's bullshit that eating MacDonald's is anything but fucking awful for you and that any self-preserving creature should do anything but run and hide at the site of it.  The leftie, hippie, bleeding heart, environmentalist marketing schtick works wonders on me though, it's my Golden Arches.  So again the question: is getting weak with desire at the site of raw, cold-pressed, hemp-seed oil really all that different from salivating over breakfast biscuits and sausage patties?  In both instances, aren't we both falling prey to marketing strategies designed to make us want, need, crave and happily dish out our money for stuff we could easily do without?

Is this just another version of that? I wonder.

Thoughts about my beloved Egypt

I was just rereading some old notes and stories from the time I spent in Egypt.  Most of what I have on the topic, the trip, the experience was written only once I got back to Rome, not in Cairo. I think I was too enchanted and having too much fun while I was in Egypt to bother writing anything. (Like I always say, you're either living life or you're recording it, you can't do both at one time.)  I was going to post something I had written immediately after my trip but everything I found was drippy and sentimental and overly romantic. You'd think I had taken a magic carpet ride alongside the Nile with an enigmatic poet/snake charmer with a deep dark soul named Moustafa the way I went on and on.  I have a tendency to embellish, denying it would be useless.  Actually I don't much care to deny it.  Whenever I leave my history in the capable hands of my memory I know that my tales and their historical validity become suspect.  So go on, suspect me.  I hope it becomes a habit.  It's a healthy one.

But even after all this time has passed and warped my memories (it's been almost 10 years now) I still have clear impressions of that city, the people I met and how wonderful it all was.  And, certain things are historical fact: I did send my resume to every English speaking publication with offices in Cairo I could find (I was working as a journalist at the time).  When I got back to Rome, I started belly dancing and Arabic classes, I left Cairo hoping and planning that it would be my next city of residence.  I still have a pang of remorse that that plan fell by the wayside with some of my other poorly but enthusiastically concocted projects.  Though I admit I've always had a weakness for Arabic culture, history and art, I was honestly smitten with Cairo, a city whose pyramids -sandwiched remarkably between the Sahara desert on one side and a Kentucky Fried Chicken on the city side- make the Colosseum in Rome look like a quaint, albeit dwarfish example of modern architecture. And the pyramids don't even begin to encapsulate all that Cairo has to offer: smells, sounds, atmosphere.. all of it oozing with millennia of palpable history and culture. Truly bewitching.

I have kept in contact with some of the people I met in Egypt during that trip and have become even closer friends with other Egyptians I met in New York subsequently.  Egyptians are, in my experience, wonderful people and one Egyptian at least, who is no longer with us, was one of my all time favorite people, one of the very best people.  I wonder what he would have said about what's been happening in his homeland, I think of my friend and his smile and the cloudy look he got on his beautiful good face when he was worried, as I fear he might be if he were still alive.  I am worried about Egyptians.  But I'm worried for the rest of us too.

I think it's common to wish someone who is in the process of changing his own destiny well but to harbor in the same breath the wish that his decisions in no way hurt or hinder ourselves.  I always feel guilty when I fall prey to this kind of double-sided concern, as though my concern for my own interests somehow subverts or corrupts the sincerity of my genuine altruistic concern for others.  So I want to come clean to my Egyptian friends: I am proud of what you're doing, it's about time, good for you, I wish you well AND I hope the next guy to take power isn't some crazy Koran-waving god-freak.  The expressions on either side of that conjunction are uttered with equal sincerity and perhaps the only honest thing to do is to utter them in the very same breath, incongruous though they may appear.  The best thing we, the onlookers, can do is just to spit it out.  So there it is: I'm extremely honored to know your country and countrymen and best of luck from the bottom of my heart and please make sure, for all our sakes, to keep god out of politics.

Now, with that said, I hope that sonofabitch gets the hint and gets the hell out and leaves you to your country as soon as possible.

Good conversation, I play it sometimes while I'm doing housework

The four horsemen, part 1 of 2

The four horsemen, part 2 of 2

Lessons I've Learned from Gay Marriage

I'm an opinionated know-it-all who doesn't know nearly as much as she'd like to think.  And I'm more naïve than is justifiable for a 34 year old woman who claims to be as worldly as I do when I’m in a bragging mood.

I was raised by unusually unbiased parents.  Not all Italian-Americans can say the same. And I while I bitch often about some of the other pedagogical shortcomings of my mother and father, I will sing their praises to high heaven for having encouraged open-mindedness in me and in the rest of my siblings.  In this regard, both of them did a stellar job.  Perhaps too good.  I'm sometimes utterly and stupidly bewildered at the close-minded way in which many people in this country think and operate.  I should also say that the bulk of my experience in this great nation has been in cities like New York and Los Angeles and, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it is uncommon to find myopic intolerant people in these places, one may indeed be more likely to encounter them in other parts of the country.  So sometimes, like a deer frozen by the light of an oncoming car, I just get side-swiped by the opinions people hold.

Take gay marriage.  As a straight person with a pretty low opinion of marriage as an institution in general, my initial response to the issue was: Why are we even talking about this? They want to get married? Let them! And then can we PLEASE move onto something IMPORTANT like childhood illiteracy, this fucking war, or the sad (and racist) state of the U.S. justice system?  Mine was a "let them eat cake" attitude that I have come to rethink and regret.

Now, I hope it does not but perhaps it requires mentioning that I think homosexuality is a splendid lifestyle that increases the variety of people we have the good fortune to get to know on this planet and that it is another aspect of our collective nature that we should relish in, learn about and from and, YES, expose our children to.  But naïve though I may be, I wasn’t born yesterday and I know that not everyone in this country feels the way I do. Still, I was astonished at how many people had -not just opinions- but strong crusade-like opinions about what gay people should not be allowed to do.  I just didn't get it.  I'm saying this with my hand on my conscience, I'm not being cheeky: why anyone who wasn't gay would have more than a passing "whatever" attitude about the whole thing absolutely escaped me.  Like I said, I am a dummy.

The anti-gay lobby uttered some incendiary one-liners about "sanctity" and "the children" and presto, all of a sudden we had an issue that everyone had to have an opinion about.  Its vitriol bulldozed me.  The arguments about the “sanctity” of marriage repulsed me.  First of all, what’s so sacred about marriage?  As far as I can tell, marriage hasn’t been sacred for a few generations at least (a very good thing if you ask me).  Was it sacred for Elizabeth Taylor?  Many married people I know are moderately to extremely unhappy in their “sacred institutions”.  Besides, this country still does enjoy separation of church and state, no one was telling Roman Catholics they had to let Adam and Steve get married in Saint Patrick’s but why would the SECULAR state be opposed to it based on the “sanctity” of the institution?  Since when is sanctity a criteria for deciding PUBLIC (that is, SECULAR) issues?  And this whole business about what it will do to the children! I am outraged at how kids are always being used for these obscenely transparent ends.  But you’ve all heard the rhetoric, I don't intend to get into each ridiculous claim of the anti-gay lobby.  Suffice it to say, in the face of all this, I ended up feeling awful about having been so cavalier about the whole thing at the beginning.

But I still think that gay marriage should be something like a non-issue, where do straight people get off telling gays what they "think" about them having the same rights? The cheek of it still kind of shocks me.  And I do think that our energies as a nation would be better focused on what I consider to be much more pressing problems.  A large part of me suspects that part of the reason why this issue was so polemicized is that its resolution was “simple”: i.e. we either decide to let gay people do what they want or we decide instead what they can and cannot do. It’s an easy thing to talk about in sound bites.  Other issues, like an increasingly awful education system, an increasingly doped up population of children who don't spend enough time with their parents but spend WAY too much time in front of the TV, are complex and require thoughtful reflection and discussion and their resolution is likely to come in stages and to be expensive.  So while I have the anti-gay lobby to thank that I have become convinced that marriage is a civil right after all and that gay people were absolutely right to make a stink and hopefully this insane notion that straight people should get to dictate whether gays marry will eventually fall into an ugly part of our past along with state-sanctioned segregation, I also worry that the only problems we tend to focus on are these controversial, yes, but ultimately easily digested ones, ones that make snazzy headlines, ones around which people are easily galvanize-able.

If I’m right, we’re in trouble.  Because it means that complicated issues will always be eclipsed by sexy headlines and facile polemics.  I’m glad that things seem to be moving –albeit slowly- in the right direction when it comes to gay marriage but I fear that our other, truly big troubles may never be so lucky if we insist on only focusing the public dialogue on problems that can easily be categorized as polarizing yes or no issues.
Unfortunately, certain problems can not be addressed by simply forcing people to answer the question: For or Against?

Zia Lisetta, Great Aunt is right

For those of you raised in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, let me explain what may not be clear: family ties tend to be tighter for people with Mediterranean temperaments.  Cousins are like siblings. This may lead you to the very reasonable question, what, then, are siblings like? Siblings are like an extension of yourself, a limb you hold very dear, say.  So that the feeling of seeing a sibling in pain is not unlike the feeling of being wounded on your own limb.  This is the only way I know how to describe it, I'm not saying this is always a good thing nor am I in any way suggesting that we love more than you, just that we're crazy when it comes to family. CRAZY. My family is particularly insane in this respect, I won't go into specifics and I know everyone thinks his/her family is nuts so you'll just have to take my word for it (or not, whatever). 

Zia Lisetta, my grandmother's sister, for example, was not someone I only saw twice a year at family reunions. This was the lady whose house my little brothers and I would run to when my grandmother was being mean to us.  She always stuck up for us, she'd get into screaming matches with her older sister, call her a tyrant, stop speaking to her for weeks, all to defend four little rugrats who, truth be told, probably had whatever they got coming to them.  She was a drunk.  I can count on one hand the times in my life that I saw her sober and in rural Italy being a drunk is bad enough but a drunken woman is just short of criminal.  Zia Lisetta didn't seem to care much what the townsfolk thought of her though and neither do I.  You'd be hard pressed to find a cooler lady.  She was the mail lady in our village, the first woman in the town of 800 to get her license, back when women did not drive. Her beat up old Fiat always smelled like homemade wine and the back was always filled with burlap sacks of undelivered mail and she's drive it around the steep narrow treacherous roads of our little mountain village like it was a Ferrari... Zia Lisetta usually forgot to wear her dentures which made the many kisses she always insisted on showering upon us rather painful since her pointy protruding chin would always reach our cheeks long before her lips did.  I'm thinking about her today because I'd give anything to be sitting in her kitchen right now, pouring myself a glass of gassosa with a healthy helping of wine added to it and listen to her drunken ramblings for hours on end.  Zia Lisetta was a hot-blooded, hardcore, tell it like it is, powerhouse.  And I loved her awful. 

Pedorast Defender Beatifies Aids Spreader

Pope Paves way to beatification of John Paul II

I admit it, I fall completely into the ex-Catholic atheist-convert stereotype.  Catholics may not be any more wacky than any other religious kooks but for some reason no one pisses me off quite like Catholics do, too many years under the tyrannical reign of Sister Charlotte Anne and Don Settimio perhaps.  Mormons, Muslims, Jews, Baptists, Buddhists, Hindus, you name it, as far as I can tell they're all at best harmlessly delusional, at worst dangerously so. I feel safe throwing them all in the same box because they have one major thing in common: they encourage the outsourcing of one's morality and basing one's sense of right and wrong not on one's own measured and thoughtful consideration of what's at stake but rather on the ideas expoused in ancient texts whose origins and authority are suspicious at best.  But I digress, that's a matter for another day.

Still, Catholics may be special.  They have been around for awhile so the number of atrocities they have to be ashamed of are all but innumerable and yet one must on some level marvel at their staying power, their ability to reinvent themselves, reinterpret doctrines, etc etc. After forcing him to recant the heliocentric theory of the cosmos, the Church cleared Galileo of any wrongdoing and reversed the edict of Inquisition on him, in 1992 a year when everyone had already realized that - although my esteemed compatriot may have been on the right track - neither the earth NOR the sun were the center of the universe! (This sort of begs the question: where was Galileo's soul in the interim between his death in 1642 and the reversal of his fortune in 1992, did he wait in the anti-room of heaven, isn't that called purgatory?  I may have to consult Dante for the specifics.) If I'm not mistaken the previous Pope, a Pole by the name of Wojtyla, in the year 2000 had the good sense to apologize for the horrible acts committed against many of the Church's victims throughout the centuries, including against the native peoples of Latin America, women, Jews.  He referred to these bone- chilling acts as "the use of violence some used in the service of truth."  I've given more sincere apologies to furniture I've bumped into.  As for the Church's strange love affair with fascism and national socialism, perhaps this new German Pope will get to apologizing for that before his black smoke comes rushing out of Saint Peter's. 

Catholics may sort all their ideas out eventually, but when, and at what cost?  Perhaps in a couple of years they will actually let (or if I may dream, even encourage that) child raping priests be prosecuted to the full extent of the law without protecting them in any way but how many more kids will be molested by these monsters before that happens?

Perhaps Ratzinger will get around to that but he's a busy man and first things first, first he should beatify Wojtyla, Wojtyla whose pet cause was campaigning against the use of condoms and so condemned vast numbers of people in Africa to death by AIDS and vast numbers of children on the same continent to life as sick abandoned orphans.  He actually equated condom use with abortion! Come on! While I believe in abortion rights, I think every abortion represents a severe tragedy and I would hate to ever be put in a position to have to make such a difficult decision, this is why I am a firm believer in the almighty condom!  Maybe eventually the Church will concede that even if some weirdo God has a divine hard-on for sex only for baby-making (it seems strange that He would have made the activity so enjoyable if this were its sole intended purpose), He probably has more of a hard-on for His beloved creatures not perishing senselessly of an unspeakably hideous disease and one, it bears mentioning, which we know how to avoid contracting!  But before the Church gets around to making that concession how many more people will die?

Don't get me wrong, Catholics have some geat things going for them: pretty churches, gorgeous religious paintings, bloody crucifixes and all that other gory shit that looked great in Madonna's Like a Prayer video.  No one loves sitting in churches more than I, I used to hang out in the Vatican when I was living in Rome and read (Bukowski, a little private joke I found endlessly entertaining). I'm torn because I was raised Catholic, I love the aesthetics of the Church but unlike most Italians I cannot even justify some purely formal Catholicism, the Catholicism of Christmas, Easter, Weddings and Funerals.  The Church is NOT harmless, it hasn't been historically by its own admission (like Christopher Hitchens said, "Better late than never.") but what most Catholics refuse to admit is that it still isn't.  And though ideally I'd much rather not be bothered with all this God mumbo jumbo at all, and would prefer it if these beautiful buildings were preserved as historical landmarks and museums of an at-once ugly and beautiful past, still, I'd feel better about entering the "House of the Lord" if His ambassador, Ratzinger put exposing child rapists higher on his list of priorities than beatifying a de-facto spreader of Aids.

JUMO

JUMO I just watched an interview with its founder, Chris Hughes, on the Colbert Report and it seemed like an omen.  I had been talking earlier today to a dear friend about wanting to find good organizations to volunteer with.  Even if you don't have the time to do much vonlunteering, it may still be worth signing up, you can stay informed about the causes that interest you.  Check it out!

I'm pasting a portion of their About Us section below:

Why Jumo?

Founded in February 2010, Jumo set out to address three key challenges:

• There are millions of people working to improve the lives of others, many of whom lack the resources to have greatest impact.
• There are millions more who want to help, but don’t know how.
• Despite huge advancements in connection technologies, it’s hard to find meaningful opportunities to get involved.

We believe we can do better.

What we do

Jumo makes it easy to:

• Find the issues and organization you care about
• Follow the latest news and updates
• Support their work with your time, money and skills.

Together we can speed the pace of global change.