In the power of a Moroccan madman

Marrakesh. Cooler at night.

We needed to get to the train station and the sign on the Marrakech bank said 46° C. My boiling brain calculated for a second...115°F? Yup. No, no way my ex-girlfriend and I were going to walk two miles across concrete oven streets in that. Time for a taxi.

One problem. We’d stepped out of the bus station a few days before to watch the only taxi in sight be chased off by a crowd of shouting men banging on the windows and throwing shoes at the windshield. The taxi drivers of Morocco were on strike.

I believe in unions and collective bargaining. I believe they’re among the essential tools for the progress of our species. But as the sign clicked up to 47°C I was glad to see a strike breaker cruise past in a beat up old Hyundai. My ex climbed in back, I took the passenger seat, and away we went.

We were at the tail end of two months in Africa and had been on a few taxi rides that were, shall we say, exhilarating? Even among a cast of maniacal rides, this one stood out. Hoping to escape the notice of the striking cabbies, he took vehicular madness to a whole new level of cuts and swerves, traffic lights are only decoration, and wrong way on a one-way street, all at the poor little Hyundai’s maximum velocity. The brain-addling heat can’t have helped (AC? hahaha) and it being the middle of Ramadan so he hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since dawn probably didn’t help either.

In situations like that I’d learned to just sit back and relax. Nothing to do about it. Fretting and tensing up were useless, and they say that only adds to your odds of serious injury anyway. So I just sat back and observed to see if we’d survive the ride.

We did! To my delight, we arrived at the train station intact. I paid him and climbed out into the sandblasting sunlight. The second he pulled away my ex broke out with “What was THAT?!?”

“Probably a new record for crazy,” I laughed some precious moisture into the air. “He was an even worse driver than that guy in Dar Es Salaam...”

“No! I don’t mean his driving. I mean what was the deal with that head wound?”

That whatnow? From my passenger seat perspective I’d missed what she had been staring at the whole time. Apparently the guy had a large open wound still leaking bodily fluid from the torn flesh that stretched across the back third of his skull. Oh. I hadn’t thought to check that before getting in.

The ability to sit back and accept the reality of the moment is essential, both in travel and normal life. But even though I tried so hard to stay away from Trump for this post, and the looming danger for America that’s about to break, this, as with everything else, is caught up in the imminent danger of his presidency.

Because when you’re speeding across Marrakech in a taxi driven by a head-wounded madman, it’s kinda too late to do anything. You’re not going to wrest the steering wheel away from him. And to be honest, I don’t think we can wrest the wheel away from the Alt Right either. Not yet. But this is not a time for acceptance. Not a time to sit back and wait to see what form the suffering may take. This is a time for active intervention.

Oddly enough, Morocco was having elections at the time.
Each box represents a party/candidate.

Because this is not normal. This is not my America. This is not something to just accept. I don’t know how to oppose it, and I ask your help in finding ways, because we as a nation are much worse off than unsuspecting passengers in the power of a skull-cracked whacko. Our lunatic has a cabinet of human vileness for an executive branch, a compliant legislative branch, and a vulnerable judicial branch. Oh, and the nuclear codes but no understanding of diplomacy or the realities of the world today.

So no, don’t sit back and wait. Let’s help each other find ways to do better than that. Complacency is for safer times.

(An easy one, if you believe in the core American values of freedom of expression, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to clean water, the government’s responsibility to protect and respect its citizens, all that good stuff, and/or you don’t like when police spray protesters with water cannons in freezing temperatures, and you have a Citibank account (or TD, Mizuho) you can tell them you don’t like what they’re funding. It’s easier than you think to switch banks, and money seems to count more than votes these days.)

Where to find, where to miss, and how to kill the divine

My view that morning

The coarse wool of my djellaba was scratchier than the sand blowing against my bare legs. Maybe the other way around. One does not customarily wear shorts in the desert, but I welcomed the contact, the tactile connection to this landscape where the life stayed hidden and the death stood obvious. The sun was still under, but the wind was up, slowly burying me in Sahara. The steady movement, as I stayed immobile, reminded me of Pacific beaches, where outgoing waves slowly sift you into the sand, a memory from this place’s opposite twin, the sensation’s antipodal kin.

Everyone else still slept while I climbed the tallest dune around our sheltering valley to watch the Saharan sunrise. Seated on the ridge, as the last of the stars dissolved in the growing blue and the curves of this sere place consented to my eyes, I felt an unexpected stirring.

Of course churches can be beautiful.
Reminiscent of the divine even.

I’ve long known myself as a disciple of the ocean and devotee of the redwood forests where my soul was born and my body grew up, places where I felt the presence of the divine far more than I ever had in any manmade coffin of stone or wood, but now, here, on the other side of our galactic rock, I had found another holy place, built of dry textured grains, saturated in burning and freezing, the dust of bones from the places where humans began, but had abused into infertility. And it was undeniably holy.

On a sand dune in Morocco, as in a surf swell in Monterey or a sylvan glade in Mendocino, it was clear to me, illuminated by more than the morning sun, that religion is an improper response to the divine.

Beautiful churches, reminiscent of the divine

The divine is fundamentally unknowable, and religion claims to write it down. The divine is essentially personal, and religion wants all to abide by a standard doctrine. The divine is eternally changing, and religion tries to spike it to a stationary cross. In the end, that's what religion does to the divine: it crucifies it. Impaled on nails of dogma, bound to a fixed position, delineated in an X marks the spot. But the divine does not work that way. The divine is cosmic wind, ocean currents, spring growth and autumn shedding, and now, I added, the migration of Saharan dunes.

I looked down from my moment’s seat atop a slow-sliding deity at the camp below, where my fellow short-lived humans gathered, and thought That is a church. A mosque, a synagogue, a temple, a cathedral, a tent: these are where we upright monkeys find mutual support, shelter, and community. These things are important. Crucial. Beautiful. Even holy, in their human way. They are to be respected, enjoyed, and cherished.

Beautiful churches

We gather together in these places, seeking to know the divine, but over time we grow fatigued of looking at mystery, which never seems to change, never speaks, never seems to notice us, and eventually our vision shortens, and we find ourselves mistaking the setting for the goal.

When we have forgotten the point so completely as to think that our rituals and forms ARE the divine? When we take that confusion as a justification for violence, spiritual or physical, against other seekers (and we are all seekers, even and perhaps especially the Atheists and Agnostics) that is when we have taken a misconception and made it truly blasphemous.

It is not blasphemy to disagree, it’s when we inflict that disagreement on others.

Gaza

This all seemed very clear, in the quiet howling wind of a Saharan morning, and it was easy to think I was the only one listening. But I was not. Talking heads encourage me to believe that Islam and Christianity are at war, but they are not. Some Muslims and some Christians are, minorities both, but those are the squabbles of the sleeping, the martyring of the misled. Religions are just windows, and fanatics can only break them.

We're all just standing in the same tent, trying to understand the sensual slopes outside, the benevolent menace and looming placidity of an incomprehensible power outside. Some might push and shove, thinking they have the best views, telling others what to see, but in the end, we need to leave the confines of the tent and walk the slopes for ourselves.

Censorship; or, Celebrity ____ likes to smoke ____!

Anthony Bourdain was in Tangier. That’s an interesting city, and from what I’ve seen of him, an interesting man, so I put my book away to listen. But in this boarding area in San Francisco International Airport, the speakers were well behind the TV, giving you the choice of either audio or video, you can’t eat your cake too.

Bourdain was eating couscous, not cake, but you get the idea.

I opted for visual, since Tangier’s...uglyprettyinteresting. He talked to young people, he talked to old people, he talked about Paul Bowles. Then he talked about hash. Or at least, that’s what the dimly heard audio whispered about, in sibilant syllables of illicit cannabis (the video avoided anything too overt). But it was the subtitles that caught my attention.

Subtitles always run a little behind, but they were doing a pretty good job. Until the hash. Then they paused. Froze. Stopped. AndAllOfASudden blasted through, the words regarding hash flying past, nearly too fast to read.

Hmm.

At another point in the episode, again mentioning hash, the same thing happened. A subtitle pause followed by a gushing. I think the same thing happened when he mentioned sexuality.

Was this CNN’s semi-censorship? They couldn’t block the topic completely, but they could muffle it, smother it, push it to the side. Or was it just coincidence?

Censorship.

I was on my way to Venezuela. What censorship would I (not) see there?

In my 4th of July post, I briefly mentioned USAID and its connection with the CIA, but thought it prudent not to expound at length on the issue, given that I was bound for a nation that many claim is the current site of a CIA-sponsored opposition movement intent on toppling the democratically elected government. So I self-censored, a little, the product of an environment and notoriety whose veracity I could not verify.

What would I be able to verify once I got there? Is the opposition movement authentically (there’s that word again) Venezuelan, or fostered from abroad? Would it be a propaganda download? Toe the party line? Toe the opposition party line? Any agenda forced on me?

And would I even be able to tell?

6 Ways to be Better at my Secret Aspiration

Want to know a secret? I’d love to try being a tour guide. Sssh! Don’t tell!

My prior experience with tour guides was when they would glower at me, suspecting me of eavesdropping on their spiel about the Coliseum/temple/painting, or of being poised to purloin the pockets, purses, and possessions of their flock. As fun as it is to play Spy, I’d politely move away.

But that role, stockpiling information about a place, managing the distracted peregrinations of a population, and hopefully, somehow enhancing their travel experience? That looked...worthwhile. Challenging. Fun.

Had to dig deep into the files for this one.

I’ve fallen into something similar a couple times in the past, most memorably in Morocco, when I made travel arrangements for a dozen British university students who wanted to come with me into the Sahara, but didn’t know how to go about it.

Maybe it’s my WASPy, Victorian English-American upbringing, that yearns for connection but doesn’t always know how to get there, but I enjoy the finite closeness of a group of people bonded to me by some external factor. When I was a property manager, I felt I was just the right level of friends with most of my tenants, and in that accidental guide position, I felt a similar ease; these people needed me for something, which I was able to provide, and if they happened to like me..? .That’s what I call job satisfaction

Mint tea within sight of
the Algerian border

As the sun set into the Saharan dunes where laughing Liverpudlians sand-boarded, I took satisfaction in their shouts, and the words of thanks when we parted ways in Marrakech were even sweeter than the mint tea.

Cuba was the first time I've been in a formal flock, and our shepherd was an encyclopedia with legs and a fedora named Joel. I periodically pulled my attention from the sights, tastes, culture and culos of Cuba to watch how he did it.

For example, when we found ourselves with an extra hour, Jeff, Joel’s US counterpart, suggested an old cemetery on the edge of town. “No problem” said Joel, “I know the place, let's go.”

Inside the grand arch

Moments after walking under the grand arch, Jeff got a dubious look on his face. “This isn't the place I meant.” With no time to head to the other cemetery, what do we do? Get back on the bus in defeat?

“This cemetery is veerrry important” Joel assured us, and started the tour. Cuban leaders, businessmen, and landowners occupied places of honor near the entrance...and when Joel saw our eyes glazing over at the unfamiliar names, he moved right along.

“That big monument there, those are troops who died in South Africa fighting against....how do you say 'apartheid' in English?” We all nodded, murmuring “I had no idea Cubans fought against apartheid” and soberly read the names.

“Joel, what's the deal with these tiny tombstones?”

“In Cuba, people are usually buried, but after a couple years, when most of the body is gone, the bones are removed and cremated, and these are placed on the family tomb. Why? Because there is just not enough space for everybody.”

Direct sun turned markers into pizza stones, but under the pines and palms the air had the dry warmth that feels like falling asleep on an old book on an August afternoon. It's a comfortable feeling...a sleepy feeling...

“Did I ever tell you about the two lifelong friends?” Joel asked as our steps started to slog. “They were friends from childhood, playing baseball in the street of their barrio. As they got older, they made a deal: whoever died first would come back to tell the other one what heaven was like.

“So one day, one of them, he died. The other was very sad, he missed his friend, but that night, you know what? His friend came back to tell him about heaven. 'What is it like?' he asked him.

“'Well, I have good news, and bad news. The good news is we have baseball!' The living friend was very happy to hear this, because being Cuban, he loved baseball. 'And the bad news?'

'You're the starting pitcher in tomorrow's game.'”

We all groaned (as you do with jokes) and shook our heads, conveniently knocking some of the sleep out, and Joel’s tour moved on.

That hour Joel demonstrated six only slightly demanding rules:

1. Know every possible destination for every possible city, and how to get there.

2. Be able to talk up a location's importance.

3. Adapt instantly and effectively.

4. If using another language, have 99.9% of your lexicon listo, only words like “apartheid” get a pass.

5. Have the answer to every question.

6. Keep an awful joke on hand to make people groan themselves awake.

That's six, anything else I need to know before you'd take my tour?

What good or bad guides have you had?

(For a great story of the latter, check out this story from Iran on the wonderful Where To Next? blog.)