Kitchen Condition

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 15:55

Meanwhile Lebanon is on my mind… I kicked out our resident quarrelsome Jew (American) on an impulse after watching on Al Jazeera covering the barrage against Christians and Muslims in Southern Lebanon. Not so many weeks ago our “live in” squatter needed temporary accommodation like Anne Frank from a relationship/domestic situation that went sour. When this fellow moved in with so much baggage (literally and figuratively) that I felt like I could identify with a Palestinian in 1948... Now the Anne Frank guy isn’t talking to me even though that other housemate here is probably more fed up with him than me: So much for helping my fellow Americans in need here in Villette. Yesterday was Brussels march to support the atrocity in Lebanon – it was funny seeing how all the young Muslim guys and girls were killing two birds with one stone – showing their support for what is happening to Lebanon mercilessly by the Israeli Corporate machinations and, two, using the public gathering as a boy/girl meeting place – this provided a happier lighter edge to a harrowing reality not so far from European privileges. Technically we here in Europe can drive to the carnage in Lebanon because our roads connected up with theirs before the Israeli’s bombed them to pieces. For this reason alone Europeans should be a bit more decisive about what Israel is doing to Lebanon.

I’ve been having terrible asthma and hay fever and am a mess from that. My guess it’s from a strange mixture of summer pollen blowing across Flanders and urban diesel auto exhaust from all the Dutchlings driving through Belgium in their caravans/(RV’s) to Southern Europe. Add to that mixture industrial and agricultural pollution plus all the greasy exhaust from summer fritkots – (fry stands): One such fritkot of which is temporarily parked like an unwanted recreational vehicle (RV/caravan) and doing daily and nightly business on the square at the end of the street - its arrival there coincidentally or not arrived with my asthma and allergy problems du jour.

Just to get me out of the house sometimes I have serious thoughts about going to Lebanon to fight the Israelis (and die there)… My Google news alerts sent me a link to a South East Asian organization actively soliciting online recruits to go help in Lebanon. I don’t think I would actually go though because I don’t even like to eat meat and therefore I don’t want to hurt anyone including even an Israeli from their unjustified inhumane warmongering. It would though be nice having a purpose in life for a change. I do though seriously want to go to Damascus and see the old city soon – before it gets bombed to hell and back from the Americans in Iraq in the East and from the Israelis in the South after they have taken the whole of Lebanon. And all of this before the myth of the next cease-fire is put on Israel by the UN. If this isn’t another false start at the Mother of all Battles then Syria will be invaded by Israeli missiles next. My guess is Israel has always wanted to extend their unholy land from Cypress in the Mediterranean Sea in the West, to Saudi Arabia (and the Sinai Peninsula) in the South – Across Iran to Afghanistan and Uzbekistan in the East, to the city of Baku in the North… I believe this is Israel’s collective dream of an Israeli run neo-Orientalist Empire. Why they aren’t content with Southern California and Jew York City I don’t know (oh yeah and Miami)… Given that they have all those places in North America I don’t get why they even need that tiny little bit of land in Palestine and Lebanon. The funny thing is I am wondering where Bin Laden is now that the world really needs him. My God who is the more criminal terrorist? Bush junior and his warmongering administration in Iraq – or the current vegetative Sharon and his henchmen with their incarceration and controls of Palestinians and Lebanese? Compared to these guys who are the bigger criminals? Like I said where is Bin Laden now that the world needs him?

Funny though what the Talmud actually says about the New State of Israel. But even religious Israelis have selective ideas about their sacred religious texts. I do admire anyone whose has a religious lifestyle in pursuit of the divine that goes against the consumerist human resource lifestyle standards imposed on the world’s human population. And I especially have a fondness for men who wear their beards au natural, including anachronistic Hasidim like the ones who recently at a New York City gathering for Lebanon were carrying placards reminding the world about what the Talmud actually says regarding a modern Israeli state: Let alone one who perpetuates terrorism on Lebanon and the always forgotten Palestinians. Qana and Gaza are the evidence that Israel is after all like the US is now, first and foremost a terrorist state organization, unlike Hamas or Hezbollah.

Ok back to my life here - I listen to the radio in my kitchen condition. My kitchen condition is my euphemism for my persistent battle with the dark dog of depression. Often times to alleviate my tormented brain fevers I make a hot cup of cheap Assam tea or spicy Pakistani chai and talk of conspiracy theories with my friends to explain the inexplicable lies in the news today. I know I take my paranoid conspiracy game humor too far or too seriously but very little these days makes me laugh. Perhaps that’s why I like Arab drag – it makes me happy to wear Islamist (men’s) clothing. Baggy crotch trousers and thobes or modest summer fashions like at Shukr online offer – precisely made in tailoring standards not seen in Europe in ages – now being made in Syria with exacting quality of fine tailoring. Some people wear women’s lingerie to get their kicks (men or women) I prefer Kalashnikovs as a fashion accessory. I know the paranoid conspiracies are a silly game but really when I observe the disparities in the news from CNN, BBC and EuroNews when compared to what I watch on Al Jazeera, Al Arabia. Al Maghrebia or the Arab News Network – then one does see what lies the media is capable of manufacturing. I really believe there is a Zionist conspiracy or at least overt sympathies in the Western media news and the Arab news network alternatives are exposing that better than Noam Chomsky can in any book of his which let’s face it don’t much get read anymore by the masses (if they ever did). Not that the Arab news networks don’t have their own agenda but it is nice to observe news freed from Zionist sympathies. Thank you Al Jazeera!

I still believe in Byzantium before 1453 of the Common Era – despite my thrills for the Modern Arabia of the future and the inter-galactic new Las Vegas of Dubai and the Arabesque of the past as still can be experienced in Sana’a, Yemen of today at least in the old city there. Certainly the rest of the world could learn from places like what remains of Byzantium of today in Bulgaria where multi-religious communities live in harmony and peace and have done so for centuries. Certainly Lebanon and Syria are ethnically and religiously more multi-cultural than Israel and its pure Jewish state will ever allow itself to be. We in the rest of the world have to live with other religions and cultures heaped by modern immigration needs into our respective worlds. Why should Israel even think it is a Democracy when it is a racially and religiously hierarchical pure state that Hitler looking down on us from the Star Vega would be jealous of? Funny even to realize or consider that in this day and age Saudi Arabia is better at being a multi-ethnic/religious culture than Israel. Meanwhile the UN and everyone else in the so called West – quietly gives Israel all the permission they need to behave like state sanctioned international terrorists.

And then there is Congo-leeza Rice talking to the world in media bits… Looking like she can’t be bothered by all these leviathan Levant problems when there is much more important oil to grab in Iraq and Iran. For someone reported as a foremost mind in the politics of the current Bush II administration/regime she sure does sound like an idiotic high school principal when addressing the needs of the Lebanese for a mandatory ceasefire to be levied against the terrorists of Israel. Congo-leeza Rice and her desperate housewife formal wear wardrobe and meanwhile the Congo is carrying out Democratic elections in the former Belgian colony. It’s scary to consider that the Congo of all places might actually be carrying out Democracy more legitimately (and efficiently) than the US elections in 2000 and 2004 - for which Congo-leeza Rice owes her current employment to. Does anyone really think those elections in Florida and Ohio weren’t rigged to put the Bushlings in office so that Israel could wage its wars on its neighbors in Gaza and Lebanon with the US shamelessly backing it. The very wars that Bush and co. condones which Clinton would not. It wouldn’t surprise me if like that high-colonic Powell, Congo-leeza Rice doesn’t wash off brown skin dye after work after removing her 1950’s Afro-American church lady’s wig. Under those brown tinted contact lenses I suspect blue eyes of an Aryan Master Race greedily peer out. My guess is Congo-leeza Rice is George Walker Bush’s illegitimate sister whom he has incestuous White House Oval Office relations with. My lawd the Bush II ratings are so low that Georgie-boy might just benefit from a blue dress and cigar styled White House sex scandal a la Kenneth Star. White house sex scandals aside what the world needs right now is Bill Clinton to go and tell Israel to back off (in his trade mark polite and articulate style) if it doesn’t want to be air-lifted like a 21st century version of the 1950’s Yemeni style Magic Carpet Ride to present day Southern Californian freeway culture to prevent another world war.

Meanwhile my home life is terrible. No fighting – but I now understand Janis Joplin when she sings about “take a little piece of my heart why don’t you – you know you’ve got it if it makes you feel good”. I imagine my estranged partner sitting around like Hannibal Lexter - whatever spelling – cannibalistically chewing on pieces of the muscle tissue of my heart like it were bubble gum while mindlessly watching outdated American TV programming on Flemish-Belgian TV networks.

What the rest of the world must come to grips with, and face the consequence of implication, that merits our global understanding is that the United States Military Industrial Complex and the Israelis are two Terrorist states. No matter how much finger pointing the US or Israel does in calling Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, or Al Qaeda – terrorist organizations – The United States and Israel are Terrorist Organizations unlike anything the world has ever seen. Clinton was a nicer face – a more articulate spokesman for - but never-the-less part of a corporate capitalistic based self legitimizing terrorist network. And anyone around the world caught in the beast of Capitalism’s grip by being a consumer/human resource – is very much a link in the chain and an integral part of State Sanctioned terrorism. Just ask Lebanon for every human being in Lebanon understands this more than anyone else except the Palestinians in Gaza or any decade’s old forgotten refugee camp in the burnt out remains of a land called Palestine.