And so does Nadine. Thank you for voting on the Kindle question guys! Results shall be discussed this week. On to more pressing issues.

I was going to write a nice, happy, optimistic piece celebrating baby steps in the right direction, along the lines of what Thomas Freidman wrote in the NYTimes today.

Honest, I was.

Because I still remember being seven, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV (the kind with a manual spin dial for changing channels) on the threadbare Persian carpet in our living room in Beirut, watching Amine Gemayel, the handsome then-Lebanese-President/militiaman/murderer and not appreciating the look of disgust that crossed my aunts’ faces as they passed the television screen (they may have spat, memories are fuzzy). Did they not appreciate his hotness? The patriotic backdrop of a red-and-white Lebanese flag flapping behind him, set to our snazzy national anthem?

Why the hate, my little 7-year-old heart cried out. Can’t we just try and be optimistic for once?

Apparently not, because:

A) Arabs are inherently melancholy and nostalgic (and not the “good” nostalgic, either). This is why most Arab literature that gets translated into English only gets read by the same people who swear by the New York Times Literary Review, meaning you’ll never catch a dude on the subway with his/her nose buried in a fun/sexy/thrilling/romantic/funny novel by an Arab writer. This is something I really hope will change.

B) Arabs have a good century’s worth of broken promises under their collective belts, beginning with a promise of self-sufficiency and auto-governance by Brits and Frenchies at the end of WWI which turned into - quite literally - the fuck-up of the century. The tattered trail of broken promises is limping right into 2009 with yet another American president trying to make nice with Arabs. That kind of baggage can turn a ray of sunshine grouchy.

I say “Arabs” and not “Muslims” because most Muslims are not Arabs. Arabs account for only about 8% of the world’s one-and-a-half-billion Muslim souls. Indonesia is actually the country with the highest concentration of Muslims in the world and is - believe or not - a functioning, non-radical-Islamist democracy! Can you believe that? No? I don’t blame you. Though on a related note, how much must it suck to be one of the one-and-a-half billion NON-ARAB Muslims, and constantly see your religion depicted by a few hundred million dudes in white robes and checkered headscarves? Or being an Arab-Christian, like Zahra, in mu novel Cutting Loose (and many, many of my dear friends?)

Back to Obama… so what’s there to complain about now, you ask. And rightly so - we’re finally rid of Bush, surely there must be a silver lining somewhere.

Well, simply put, as nicely as Barak Obama speaks about this political theater that is the Middle-East peace process, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still political theater.

Bigger honchos than Barak have made promises to cut through the bullshit and said that they really mean it this time, and yet the only thing that’s changed since 1993 (date of the Oslo Peace Accords - it was a BIG deal at the time), is that I’m now sporting a few gray hairs on my head.

And with the gray hairs I suppose I should have sprouted some wisdom. But no, I read Thomas Friedman’s NYTimes piece this morning and allowed myself to feel as hopeful and optimistic as an American.

Then I read this Op Ed piece (also in the NTTimes) by an Egyptian journalist, and the picture he paints, in true Arab fashion, is pessimistic, grounded, and gray.

Reality is not usually a fun place to be. I don’t blame Americans for their aversion to it. It plain sucks, to tell you the truth.

And while you’re reading Hossam’s Op-ed piece, I’d like you to do a little compare-and-contrast exercise in your head, between Cuba and Egypt…

…both countries run by dictators-for-life with little to no respect for human rights? Check!
…critical-of-the-regime bloggers are getting fined and/or imprisoned left and right? Check!
…ruling elite hogs most of nation’s resources? Check, with one caveat: Fidel spreads the wealth around a little bit better, ensuring education, housing, and health care for all. Over in the land of the Nile, illiteracy is rampant, millions are homeless or live in shanty towns, electricity is not widespread, and health care? What’s health care?

…both countries getting ONE BILLION DOLLARS IN AID FROM THE US? Ch..uh… no, not quite. Egypt gets military aid (which of course, it can’t use against the only country likely to attack it, Israel), and Cuba gets a big fat embargo.

So why did Obama choose to visit Egypt (and they uber-dictatorial Saudi Arabia, which perfectly embodies Borat’s views on where women figure in society)?

Good question, but Thomas Friedman sure isn’t asking it.

Score one for delusion, and ziltch for a happy, sunny blog post about Obama’s Mideast visits.

Tomorrow: notes on the book club meeting! Thank you for voting! More Cristiano pics! GCC blog tour! No depressing political posts! Yay!

Ex-Lebanese President Ameen Gemayel

I know what you’re going to say.

I’ve been absent from my own website (let alone my friends’) only to lurch into the light with a post about Dick “Darth Vader” Cheney (I love a recent blog where it was pointed out that George Bush, a man of weak character, is Darth Vader. Cheney is the irredeemable Emperor, the origin of evil). But when I saw this this morning, I just couldn’t help myself.

Why are we STILL listening to this pompous douchebag’s endless ranting about how when HE was in charge - oops, I mean when George was in charge - everything was JUST FINE, thank you, and how Obama SUCKS, yes, he SUCKS, and beware people, because even though when Cheney had been the VP for a full year, more Americans were killed in war on American soil since Pearl Harbor, and we have yet to see anything happen under Mr. Obama, but BEWARE because Commie, tree-hugging, pro-diplomacy Obama is a threat to national security.

Not only must Dick Cheney shut the f**k up, but CNN, Fox et al. must stop enabling him by pretending he’s relevant.

No wonder Ashton Kutcher beat you out CNN - you are slowly going the way of granny underpants.

Obama as a mu-mu.

Do we love it or do we hate it?

Every time I switch the channel to CNN, MSNBC, PBS or BBC America, on every political blog I read, and with every right click of my mouse to yet another news link, I am reminded of just haw many days, hours, minutes and seconds are left before Barack “Blessing” (for that’s what “Barack” means) Obama takes over from the Biggest Loser in the modern history of the Oval Office.

A part of me wants to remind the American people that their country - and most of the world along with it - is still falling apart, despite the fact that they may be tired of hearing it and anxious for the kind of let’s-pretend-nothing-is-happening kind of news and entertainment they’ve been fed for decades.

Yet another part of me is a little bit (okay,very) annoyed with this extreme anticipation for Bush to end his reign of terror, incompetence, and theft and for the reasonable, eloquent, empathetic professor to take over, as if the American people could do nothing but hold their collective breath and wait.

But does the responsibility of every American to clean up the mess they were complicit in creating when they elected Bush - twice - end with having (finally - and only just) elected the better person for the job, as opposed to the guy they’d most like to have a beer with?

If all the people of the United States do is hold their breath and count down those final hours, minutes and seconds then they can hardly consider themselves worthy of the promise that is Barack Obama at this moment in history.

It may seem hard to decide when to stand up and fight, and when to turn the other cheek, but that’s only because we the public have had every one of our senses shocked and assaulted into submission, using every dirty trick in the book for so long, that we were reduced to playground politics as opposed to the kind of politics that are mulled over, debated in much of the rest of the world. Where others take up arms, we pick up the remote control. Where others have died, we fretted over which color of iPod to buy, whether a $900 pair of shoes was worth the splurge, and just how big of a car we could afford to drive.

Wouldn’t be nicer, more civilized, more American, to let Bush go quietly into the night without having to face his role in the holocaust-in-the-making that is Iraq? The reintroduction of the torture debate in co-called polite society? The fleecing of the national treasury? The dumbing down of American kids so they will be less able to participate in an economy that’s gone completely global? The depletion and desecration of every natural resource you can think of? The embarrassment on the world stage of epic proportions otherwise known as Katrina?

No. No,no, no, no, and, hmm, let me think…. NO.

When Bush was elected a second time, most of the world washed its hands of an America that had squandered a second chance at getting things on the right track again after a monumental blunder. To quote the Great Illiterate himself, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, er, ah… you can’t fool me twice.

As the institutions and ideas of social, economic and racial justice the boomers, gen-Xers and millennials inherited from the Greatest Generation all lie in ruins, can all the political activism we can muster be boiled down to one simple, finite act, that of casting a vote for the obviously more qualified guy? Do we get to pat ourselves on the back for electing a black dude when no one in the world thought we’d finally get over ourselves and our complexes, and join the twenty-first century?

Is that the best we in 2009 can do?

From the despair of the thirties emerged welfare, a minimum wage, and the beginning of a kind of consciousness that moved us from the era of every-man-for-himself to that of we’re-all-in-it-together.

From the ashes of World War II arose the United Nations and the understanding that our continued existence on this planet depends on mutually assured safety, not mutually assured destruction.

From the struggles of uncommonly brave women, today’s girls can opt to be Superwomen, traditional women, meek women, strong women, women who take on the world in stilettos and pink lipstick, or women who raise the next generation in sweatpants and scrunchies, all the while having achieved something men never have in millions of years of world domination: transcending the confines of gender.

From the grief of a nation reeling from the assassination of a great black leader, after much pain and patience, was born he next leader of the world’s only superpower, the child of two penniless dreamers, one white and one black.

And now, we stand at this moment in history, and dare to call it of our making.

If we let Bush and his gaggle of elitists in small town folks’ clothing, his masters of double-speak and his robber barons get away the greatest heist in American history, then we have effectively spat upon every single achievement of our predecessors, and are in no way worthy of any part of the promise that a president like Barack Obama just might fulfill.

When Obama addresses the nation as its president for the first time, he will likely allude to the long, hard road ahead. That journey along that road begins with George W. Bush’s moment of reckoning.

If you read this blog regularly, you might have guessed that I’m a pretty cynical person.

The cynical side of me says Bush should have lost both the 2000 and 2004 elections, that in those cases Florida and Ohio, respectively, were stolen, so why should this election be any different? It the wee hours of the last presidential election, it looked like Kerry would take Ohio, and with it, end Bush II’s ugly reign. But then we were told that no, the exit polls were wrong, there might have been some miscounting, but Bush definitely, maybe won. Yeah, make that definitely. He won. In the wake of today’s historic election, it’s hard to remember that the stakes were very high the last time around too - Iraq was growing increasingly unpopular, the media still reported the carnage back then, we were vaguely aware that something very sickening was happening and that it might one day turn right back and bite us in the behind, probably in the form of increased terrorism and instability in the world. The Kyoto Protocol was relegated to the same status as toilet paper, civil liberties became a privilege you earned by conforming, not a right you were supposed to have been born with as an American citizen.

We lived in a very scary world four years ago, thought it only seems scarier now because many of us are losing our jobs and our homes, and those of us who haven’t yet feel like dead women and men walking. How long before the Grim Reaper of Layoffs and “rightsourcing” comes for us?

But here’s the thing about 2008 - in many ways we are much better off now than we were then.

First of all, enough of us now believe that climate change is real, and that it is man-made, that Sarah Palin could not bring herself to say outright in the vice presidential debates that she thinks global warming is just another sign of the End of Days. That’s major progress.

Second, what so many of us feared (and what Bush & co. exploited to no end over the last 7 years) did not come to pass - another terrorist attack. Terorrist attacks hit societies in two waves - the first punch comes on impact, shattering lives, communities, and that fragile perception of security so essential to a functioning democracy.

And then they come back again for a second swing, this time at common sense, and for some people, decency. How might America have reacted to a man with the middle name of “Hussein” had there been another attack, even though discriminating agaist Obama for that reason is akin to gathering anyone with either “Timothy” or “McVeigh” in their name in room and torching it? We have been very lucky  to have been spared from finding out.

Although not much of a consolation at this point, the case Naomi Klein laid out in 2007 in her brilliant exposé, The Shock Doctrine against market capitalism has been proven in brilliant, gruesome glory, and on a gigantic scale that is rocking the entire world. (If you haven’t read this - please go out and buy it or borrow it from the library - it’s available in paperback… democracy does indeed depend on people knowing how governments manipulate them so they can guard against it.)  Will this mean the end of the brutal brand of “Me First” Capitalism that’s become popular the world over, not just in American (see recent French and Canadian elections)?

Probably not. Depending on how prolonged this recession is, it might take people a couple of years to a couple of decades, but eventually they will get caught up in making easy money all over again, and resist all pleas anyone makes that unbridled greed brings us all down, sooner or later. But at least for now, no matter who wins, we have a shot at an egalitarian society once again.

Finally, this time around we do not have a poser, puppet president going against a decorated Vietnam veteran - and winning because he talks like “regular folk” even though he was born with a silver spoon twice the size of Kerry’s up his behind. That was the most insulting thing to me about the 2004 election - and should be the greatest source of shame for anyone who claims to ”support the troops”. In 2004 it came to pass that one such soldier’s service was trumped and dishonored by a man who through family connections found a way to evade those very same responsibilities he inflicted on the young generation he was entrusted with when he became president. This should not be forgotten. Whatever happens in 2008, no matter how much we disliked McCain’s campaigning tactics, he did serve his country and survived torture while George W. Bush was partying it up in Texas. And that also, is progress.

But here’s where things get personal for me. As Palestinians who have to listen to desperate McCain aides try to disprove Obama’s commitment to Israel because he also happens to acknowlege that Palestinians exist for the sake of a few Florida votes, my parents don’t really care much who wins. As far as they’re concerned, Arabs are not just second-class citizens in North America, but more like third or fourth class. In a campaign where the biggest smear against Obama is the attempt to paint him as a Muslim, this perception isn’t paranoia - it’s simply pointing to the elephant of legitimate racism in the room. It is legitimate in the United States of 2008 to paint Muslims as lesser Americans, who should not be considered for higher office. While there were a few lone voices out there that dared ask the nation: how does a Muslim-American listen to these swipes taken at Obama and not take them personally, most in the media responded with ”how dare you suggest Obama is a Muslim” when the correct answer should have been: “actually, he happens not to be Muslim, but why are you asking? Is there something wrong with being Muslim?”

It took Colin Powell to make that point, finally, and to try and get it across to Americans through the image of a Muslim kid who bled and died for America - making it seem to the rest of us that only by bleeding can we prove our worth to this society.

But for all my parents’ disbelief, for my own cynicism, for a society steeped in racism, scared and confused by the paradox of being a nation that aspires both to lmperialism and lofty ideals of equality and social justice, for an old woman who could best articulate her fears of the “other” by calling Obama and Arab and McCain’s retort that Obama is not Arab but “decent”, this remains a historic day.

It is the day that Americans have the chance to not just talk the talk of a society they claim gives equal rights to everyone, a meritocracy blind to race, religion, gender or blue-blooded birth, but also to walk the walk and elect the first half-black American president in history who came from humble origins and made something meaningful of himself.

Obama is the public face of every child of immigrants who, in spite of staggering odds, in spite of entrenched racism and a skewed social landscape, works twice as hard to achieve half as much - and still makes it.

No matter what happens today, I will always remember that a guy with the middle name “Hussein” was in the runnign for president in 2008. And that is something that ought to soften the heart of the staunchest cynic.