EXPERIENCING BELGIUM
Thursday, November 30, 2006
 

After English Before Bed

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 16:40

You know how it goes, just before you fall asleep you have an idea that gets between you and the dreamland calling you into sleep. I had just one epigrammatic thought last night and so thinking it would diminish its power, so I could fall off to sleep, I scribbled it down. Last night it didn't go that way though. Upon writing that very thought down the idea I set to paper set off a synaptic chain reaction of thoughts in my tired brain so that sleep eluded me until dawn. Here is that thought:

After English, Arabic is perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of languages.

The thoughts that followed that gem of an idea were more sinister and all too true and kept me awake like old Christmas time Scrooge waiting his night-time unwelcome spirited visitors.

If the English language sparked off the crusades and set the world on its disasterous course of history toward this present modernity regarding the rise of "foreign policy" as a tool to control other peoples resources - arbitrarily carving up other lands and other cultures with the blood of bystanders caught in the way of the history of the unfolding of Western greed. Then perhaps despite all attempts at vilifying the Arabic cultures, languages and religion - perhaps Arabic still stands as the antidote to the highly infectuous disease the English language has on the human mind.

Of course the Majestic Arabic language of old is an infection on the human mind too but perhaps it is a healthier infection. It only takes listening to a native Arabic speaker talk at length in another language to get a glimpse at the power of reasoning that the Arabic language has. Arabic require the capacity for a long attention span by both the speaker and the listener which is why the BBC and other Western media conglomerates can't cope with an Arabic speaker as interview subjects. This is why I for one am eagarly anticipating the coming new media giant of Al Jazeera broadcast around the world in English.

English as a language has devolved itself by its consummerist tendencies into short breaths of useless soundsbytes to control other human beings. Arabic by its linguistic nature requires the capacity for extended lengthy thought and reasoning. No other language has the power to change the structure of human mental reasoning than the Arabic and English languages. Of course Shakespeare proved the superiority and potential of the English language but capitalism and greed reduced English to a marketing tool.

Therefore Arabic remains the antidote of our Anglophone consummerist syndrome. Classical Arabic is still very much kept alive by Islam and the Muslims and the modern adaptation of Standard Arabic still retains Arabic's lengthy thought analysis process that is more capable of reasoning and finding solutions to the problems of the world brought about by Western and Anglophone syndromes.

The greatest gift the Arabic language has given the rest of world trapped in the consummerism and exportation of the West is that in even only attempting to learn a small part of the Arabic language one learns the capacity of ones own mind. At first when I began to study to Arabic I was humiliated by how quickly I would forget one new phonetic sound, character or word. I learned very quickly that to learn Arabic was going to be a humiliating process at understanding the limits of my own mental capacity. At the same time Arabic taught me a new mental structure with which to reason and think and build a better mind. For Arabic is a whole different way of thinking and using ones brain. Any artist can use Arabic as a tool to open ones mind and to begin to see the world differently. Thus for artist who are blocked Arabic is a wonderful remedy to a mental condition. It is for this reason that I maintain that perhaps Arabic might hold the antidote to the present global downward spiral into corporate greed and exploitation of other lands resources for which wars are made for profit. It is time the West began to learn how to listen in the ways that Arab are known for thinking, reasoning and lastly speaking. If nothing else this could become a step towards peace for the wars that the Anglophone of the incorporated Western world has set upon the Arabic speaking peoples of Iraq and Palestine.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
 

Amoebic Swarms of Black Birds over old Brussels Urban Landscapes

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 18:45

From the old Brussels styled wooden window that lets out onto a blue stone and rod iron balcony, over a pre-automotive era medieval aged road, over the stone street – through the single paned old and distorted glass – above the terra cotta orange rooftops of the buildings attached to this house and the ones across the street – I can see just a narrow strip of sky. Just as the white light of sundown sets in swallowing up the blue sky of the day from the angle of the sun in decline this time of year at this latitude - From my place in a 21st century Villette I stood and watched black birds that seem to swim in the sky in that amoebic swarm together that only occurs this time of year. I think Vincent Van Gogh painted this bird swarm phenomenon in some long time famous painting of his. These swarms are mesmerizing. Before all those birds went out of view behind the street roof line, the whole swarm expanded and then flew close together as if the amoebae shape collectively decided to collapse in on itself into a dark black singular object. I wish I were outside the city in the damp flat fields of western Flanders in some small old farm house at a table with a window drinking tea watching this autumnal phenomenon. It felt like the closest one can get to observing Allah Almighty God from here in Flanders - I swear - it’s somehow true. That’s all we get as humans for seeing God in this lifetime if we take the chance to witness nature’s subtleties. Nothing more in this life time for us bad souls than these kinds of glimpses in nature as visual evidence of the Divine to long for. But if you think this way you find the Almighty in the blue of the sky - or the swift dark clouds we have here. You can find something of Allah even in the brisk autumn air. Or in the shudder of an urban growing mature tree as the wind takes its red and yellowed leaves. It is then that I don't feel alone - and then that I stop wanting. Meanwhile I just wish I were outside with the big sky on flat land with far away horizons. I want to be with dogs in fields and pastures free from walls and fences in a land where the cars and trucks have stopped because somehow capitalism collapsed and the oil became irrelevant and we could all take the time to watch Nature die from our greedy industrializations.
 

Take Two a re-edit of a previous post

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 16:39

I have to make a confession for this blog record of my crazy over caffeinated rantiness - I seriously and I mean I seriously considered voting straight Republican for the elections this week - Which after the elections in 2000 I swore I would never and I mean never ever vote conservative again (Not that I did then either – I reluctantly voted for free speech rights inhibiting Gore). Every election is always about voting for the lesser of two Evils and this time around that was easier than in the past. Not that I am in the habit of voting conservative but I have I confess done so once or twice in the past before I knew better. In theory I am a tried and true Republican conservative - it is just that since - I don't know - maybe since Lincoln was shot - there hasn't been an actual Republican in Washington, D.C. to vote for and certainly never in my lifetime (except for maybe Gore Vidal and the Clintons). Although my ballot gets sent in from overseas and therefore probably gets lost much less not even counted as if it matters - which after the 2000 elections I don't much believe in the whole voting process in the states and can you honestly say - do you? Can't we like get NASA who in their day was able to land things on the moon to now accurately collect, collate if necessary and so gather our nations vote from within the US and from those of us happy and unhappy ex-pats - military and non-military types - from abroad?

Why are there not sophisticated like machines with GPS systems tagged to voter identification that can ensure safe, fair and accurate voting data via satellite? Maybe Google Earth could have all the Americans go outside and stand looking up holding their vote choices on a placard – and thus with facial recognition technology via satellite so our votes can get accurately counted while the census is being conducted.

I believe in 2000 Al Gore won a victory and that the familia Bush duped the nation and ignored international warnings about the imminent events that would take place on what would become what we now know as 9/11. Events that unlike anything imaginable, strangely (or perhaps even suspiciously), meshed nicely with the likes of Wolfowitz and Rumps-velds opportunistic sinister vision of control and fake purpose for the Americans a la text book applications of Leo Straussian philosophy.

I will say when I saw junior Bush talking post election this week on some Euro-News TV bit that the Bush guy sure looked relieved for someone who just learned the nation spoke against him and his kind in no uncertain terms. Even via radio this relief was audible in Bush's voice. Bush can - for the next two years without a guilty conscience - if he indeed has the capacity for that - now spend his time on some luxury private, chemically treated, green lawn golf course in as hot as it is flat Texas. Perhaps Bush's relief comes from having to stop being his father's puppet in the Oval Office. Or perhaps these sham-Republican types wanted to lose the election so that the Democrats can be kept busy from doing what they were voted in office to do and thus expend all their efforts (and popularity) cleaning up the consequences of the Bush Regimes merciless exploits abroad and extraordinary domestic neglect back home. (Remember when Ms. Katrina paid our nation a visit down there in New Orleans par example? Seen any new levee’s built? Heard of a reconstruction program to rejuvenate a living grand old predominately African American city)...

I don't believe Bush II should have been in office at least between 2000 and 2004 and without 9/11 his regime wouldn't have made it to now in 2006. This is why I wanted to vote straight Republican. I believe all these henchmen should be in office to clean up the mess they made and to face the consequences publicly for what we will see come back to haunt us from their irresponsibilies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Getting Iraq convinced (ordered) to execute Saddam Hussein in time for Christmas is just the very gift these so called Republicans - The Bush's and their henchmen - have on offer as a Pandora’s Box of a present for the Democrats who have usurped the Bush regime’s position. It is not a bad idea to consider that the US reinstate Saddam in Iraq - pull out from there and let the people of Iraq do as they will with their land, society and resources. Certainly Saddam was much better at running Iraq than the Americans and perhaps even it might be said that less lives were lost or exploited in Iraq under Saddam.

Certainly Saddam was for the Americans who put him there better as the devil we knew than the devil we didn't know - known as the Anarchy that is in Iraq now. The scariest attribute about being an American in these times is how with every misinformed vote we cast, for every election we miss, or any blank vote in our ballet we don't fill in - that because we are a "Democracy" that suppose-ably rides on our backs as citizens - we are morally held accountable to our higher power for the choices we make. The consequences of whatever we fill in for our vote selections invariably have consequences we don't see much less can get accurate information on in other peoples lives. Lives sitting in US prisons (from dubious wars on drugs and terror) or lives trapped in the foreign places our nation invades in our names. To think this all might have been by tricky vote rigging over time through strategically placed members of the Bush Royal Family - in a nation that has forgotten a banking crisis with the Bush boys name all over it... Well, I wanted to vote for these guys so they can be in power to reap what they have sown when the cows of consequences come home from Iraq from the blood for oil harvest there. But I could not accept that by my casting even one vote in these Bush regimes direction because I would be held morally responsible for perpetuating their godless tactics and lack of human compassion.

Much to my regret the only choices I had, had been for a few Independents and a lot of Democrats both of whom I know nothing about: Democrats who are Democrats without a cause that don't hinge on a reaction to Bush policies. For the Democrats are without vision or beliefs and just another politician like Gore with careers to protect. Or Independents who are good for nothing at this point in the state of the states democratic process than throwing your third party vote away and giving it to the conservative minority on a silver platter.

I don't want to be American because I don't want to participate in this corrupt process and have the blood of the decisions heartless greedy tyrants in economic power make in other lands oblivious to their own strip malled and freeway'd, parkinglotted, suburbanified, razor wire protected, human resourced like oil commodities into retail slave labor - once great and majestic land in America. Neither do I want to be counted among these new Bush era Americans who were once, in previous generations, kind and genuine and excessively generous people before they became the malcontents about their neighbors (the Mexicans) in typically tribal and selfish European ways. Oh say can you see by the freeway lights of capitalism that so proudly stand over where you shop, drive, park, eat, work and sleep....
Thursday, November 09, 2006
 

A Magic Carpet Ride Back For A New Day In Old Yemen

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 17:34

This text was written with personal gratitude after having seen a remarkable film screened at the Festival du Film du Monde Arabe de Bruxelles here in Villette.

A New Day In Old Sanaa
A very short review
Director: Bader Ben-Hirsi. 2005 Feature length film, In Arabic and English with English subtitles (and some amusing Yemeni dialect thrown in for those in the know)

A magical movie about the only world heritage site that is a complete and functioning city. I was in Yemen in 2005 in the area of Sana'a the film was made in. Indeed Sana'a is exactly as it is seen in this film! A secret treasure for a fearless traveler! If you are interested in the places in the world the media ignores (or has an agenda against) then this movie is for you! A New Day in Old Sanaa will give you a glimpse not just into a nearly forgotten way of life still very much thriving in Yemen but the film also shows the very hidden (especially to males) world of women in Yemen. A uniquely Arabic story line reveals in this movie something Hollywood or even Bollywood can't grasp - the dignity of unknown places and a forgotten way of life seamlessly merged and existing with modernity. This is not a travel film but the film will take you on a magic carpet ride to an actual place that not many travelers find! A literal and thriving Shangri-la from the Lost Horizons of Arabia! See this movie and see if you aren't ready to find your own passage to Sana'a!

And how - "mahow" lol
 

The Devil You Know and the Lesser of the Two Evils

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 15:57

I have to make a confession for this blog record of my crazy over caffeinated rantiness - I seriously and I mean I seriously considered voting straight Republican for the elections this week - Which after the elections in 2000 I swore I would never and I mean never ever vote conservative again (Not that I did then either – I reluctantly voted for free speech rights inhibiting Gore). Every election is always about voting for the lesser of two Evils and this time around that was easier than in the past. Not that I am in the habit of voting conservative but I have I confess done so once or twice in the past before I knew better. In theory I am a tried and true Republican conservative - it is just that since - I don't know - maybe since Lincoln was shot - there hasn't been an actual Republican in Washington, D.C. to vote for and certainly never in my lifetime (except for maybe Gore Vidal and the Clintons). Although my ballot gets sent in from overseas and therefore probably gets lost much less not even counted as if it matters - which after the 2000 elections I don't much believe in the whole voting process in the states and can you honestly say - do you? Can't we like get NASA who in their day was able to land things on the moon to now accurately collect, collate if necessary and so gather our nations vote from within the US and from those of us happy and unhappy ex-pats - military and non-military types - from abroad?

Why are there not sophisticated like machines with GPS systems tagged to voter identification that can ensure safe, fair and accurate voting data via satellite? Maybe Google Earth could have all the Americans go outside and stand looking up holding their vote choices on a placard – and thus with facial recognition technology via satellite so our votes can get accurately counted while the census is being conducted.

I believe in 2000 Al Gore won a victory and that the familia Bush duped the nation and ignored international warnings about the imminent events that would take place on what would become what we now know as 9/11. Events that unlike anything imaginable, strangely (or perhaps even suspiciously), meshed nicely with the likes of Wolfowitz and Rumps-velds opportunistic sinister vision of control and fake purpose for the Americans a la text book applications of Leo Straussian philosophy.

I will say when I saw junior Bush talking post election this week on some Euro-News TV bit that the Bush guy sure looked relieved for someone who just learned the nation spoke against him and his kind in no uncertain terms. Even via radio this relief was audible in Bush's voice. Bush can - for the next two years without a guilty conscience - if he indeed has the capacity for that - now spend his time on some luxury private, chemically treated, green lawn golf course in as hot as it is flat Texas. Perhaps Bush's relief comes from having to stop being his father's puppet in the Oval Office. Or perhaps these sham-Republican types wanted to lose the election so that the Democrats can be kept busy from doing what they were voted in office to do and thus expend all their efforts (and popularity) cleaning up the consequences of the Bush Regimes merciless exploits abroad and extraordinary domestic neglect back home. (Remember when Ms. Katrina paid our nation a visit down there in New Orleans par example? Seen any new levee’s built? Heard of a reconstruction program to rejuvenate a living grand old predominately African American city)...

I don't believe Bush II should have been in office at least between 2000 and 2004 and without 9/11 his regime wouldn't have made it to now in 2006. This is why I wanted to vote straight Republican. I believe all these henchmen should be in office to clean up the mess they made and to face the consequences publicly for what we will see come back to haunt us from their irresponsibilies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Getting Iraq convinced (ordered) to execute Saddam Hussein in time for Christmas is just the very gift these so called Republicans - The Bush's and their henchmen - have on offer as a Pandora’s Box of a present for the Democrats who have usurped the Bush regime’s position. It is not a bad idea to consider that the US reinstate Saddam in Iraq - pull out from there and let the people of Iraq do as they will with their land, society and resources. Certainly Saddam was much better at running Iraq than the Americans and perhaps even it might be said that less lives were lost or exploited in Iraq under Saddam.

Certainly Saddam was for the Americans who put him there better as the devil we knew than the devil we didn't know - known as the Anarchy that is in Iraq now. The scariest attribute about being an American in these times is how with every misinformed vote we cast, for every election we miss, or any blank vote in our ballet we don't fill in - that because we are a "Democracy" that suppose-ably rides on our backs as citizens - we are morally held accountable to our higher power for the choices we make. The consequences of whatever we fill in for our vote selections invariably have consequences we don't see much less can get accurate information on in other peoples lives. Lives sitting in US prisons (from dubious wars on drugs and terror) or lives trapped in the foreign places our nation invades in our names. To think this all might have been by tricky vote rigging over time through strategically placed members of the Bush Royal Family - in a nation that has forgotten a banking crisis with the Bush boys name all over it... Well, I wanted to vote for these guys so they can be in power to reap what they have sown when the cows of consequences come home from Iraq from the blood for oil harvest there. But I could not accept that by my casting even one vote in these Bush regimes direction because I would be held morally responsible for perpetuating their godless tactics and lack of human compassion.

Much to my regret the only choices I had, had been for a few Independents and a lot of Democrats both of whom I know nothing about: Democrats who are Democrats without a cause that don't hinge on a reaction to Bush policies. For the Democrats are without vision or beliefs and just another politician like Gore with careers to protect. Or Independents who are good for nothing at this point in the state of the states democratic process than throwing your third party vote away and giving it to the conservative minority on a silver platter.

I don't want to be American because I don't want to participate in this corrupt process and have the blood of the decisions heartless greedy tyrants in economic power make in other lands oblivious to their own strip malled and freeway'd, parkinglotted, suburbanified, razor wire protected, human resourced like oil commodities into retail slave labor - once great and majestic land in America. Neither do I want to be counted among these new Bush era Americans who were once, in previous generations, kind and genuine and excessively generous people before they became the malcontents about their neighbors (the Mexicans) in typically tribal and selfish European ways. Oh say can you see by the freeway lights of capitalism that so proudly stand over where you shop, drive, park, eat, work and sleep....
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
 

Ever Asked Yourself Why You Don't Want That Burrito You Just Ate Wrapped Up By Mexican Slave Labor?

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 01:15

That guy Michael Jones is a real American - unfortunately so is Ted Haggard the preacher man.
Today I unfortunately saw Bush and co were on TV Euro News in one of those bandstand like TV choreographed performance sketches and everyone looked so tweaked and pleased with themselves on who knows what drug - probably performance enhancing Aspartame and they all looked cardboard and paper doll like - including the carefully placed characatures of specific white middle American voters in the background... I was thinking well don't they all look as foreign to me as one of Kim Jong IL in North Korea better productions at political based public performance art state propaganda for which in that genre of course Adolf (better known as Hitler) was the best at especially for those Nuremberg Rallies Leni Reifenstahl so flawlessly documented. I mean Bush and co campaigning on the backs of dead American boys and the countless Iraqi people as if they weren't human beings but gamers tokens - it all looked as pathetic and boring as those Midwestern strip mall neon Jesus evangelism churches behind all that acreage of tarmac parkinglots.
This Ted Haggard sex scandal is like not really scandalous or a surprise - the real scandal is all those people dying in Iraq from economically deprived American family livelihoods... Or the scandal of how many Iraqi's are dead, dying or permanently maimed by our clumsy regime who should not be there nor should have ever gone there back then even under Bush I. Or the scandal of Israel yet again trouncing on Palestine while the news is not news about that at all but about Israels flimsy blame shifting excuses for its atrocious and ineffective military might. It's a sex scandal with only quasi religious overtones not the actual news of the world that is the scandle and it's only a scandal don't forget in the states. It is not a scandal about cleaning up cluster bombs from Lebanon in population centers for which cluster bombs aren't even supposed to have been used in the first place. Forgotten cluster bombs still in Lebanon in urban areas that are now land mines in hiding that the Israelis refuse to even help assist in cleaning up. Little landmines waiting for little children. And the scandal isn't that Israel gets away with all this but the scandal is an evangelical hustler hiring sodomist who hates faggots who incites Americans to become yet another religious state while deporting Mexicans - and to build Israeli styled walls along the US's southern border... My whole theory about that is that Israel needed someone to put up a bigger wall (than theirs) and since China's great wall is so irrelevant now given that China itself is everywhere... Or that the Iron Curtain has been pulled back and the Berlin wall pulled down all while Israel is building its own pogrom fortifications in concrete on the squalid remains of someone elses territory - I mean the scandal is a for paid aging hustler by a consenting adult evangelical who made his fortune lying to 30 million innocent consumers souls... Whether its marketing Coca-Cola or McBurgers and Pizza or JESUS and Elvis it all based in lies. My theory is Israel needed someone to make them look good. So they funded bad mouthed US politicians to get Americans to despise their southern neighbor and Mexican immigrants residing in the US - so these Zionist types could manipulate this new found North American scapegoat distraction fueled by American automotive road rage discontent into hate and discontent towards Mexico and Mexicans and thus get the US to get into the wall building business (built for certain by unscrupulous Jewish American mafia money - paid for by US taxpayers who back when I lived in the states had zero problem with Mexicans, cheap labor and exploitation of migrants) - the same suburban white types who would happily talk Spanish to that greasy sweaty under paid Mexican retail slave laborer wrapping up a beef burrito with those ridiculous plastic bags on their hands at the local tex-mex fry McFry pit... and now when I hear lefty educated types going on about "those Mexicans" sounding like desperate housewifery and spineless husband accomplises.... ("ever since they moved in and painted that house next door in creme de menthe green my houses real estate value just plummeted") I mean this is the scandal in the states - scapegoating Mexicans and building a wall in the insularity bubble of the US and that other economic apartheid bubble over there in post democracy Israel in the remains of Palestine in an age when the rest of the world for once doesn't want walls and is in the habit of removing them. I mean everything now flies over walls anyways so whats the point? So much for North American Free Trade when there is an Israeli styled wall between the Gulf of Mexico and the fucking Pacific Ocean being built up and fortified in concrete and ammunition - like what's next land mines along the US border with Mexico and Canada? Perhaps in the Bering Sea or throughout the English Channel?
Ever asked yourself why you don't want that Tex-Mex burrito you just ate wrapped up by Mexican slave labor but rather by Somalian hard labor? Ever asked yourself why you want the person wrapping up your food to wear hand condoms while not paying them enough to buy soap for their own family? Do you have a beef burrito digesting right now in your stomach? Ever wonder what kind of caged life did that beef in your belly that will soon be killing the organ muscle of your heart - ever wonder what that caged up career life you live is for - and who is going to eat you when you are all used up and defenseless?
What is this Planet and where do I get off - we are the architects and dreamers of our own children and grand childrens cozy little fortified home in Hell and this is Planet Earth. Meanwhile that al Gore film plays on and the Americans fail yet again at realizing what they lost in the last six, soon to be eight years, in cleaning up the overweight mess they made of that great big parkinglot in North America.

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