Yellow Flag

Let me tell you about how I came to own a bright yellow Hezbollah t-shirt.

I left DC one July day not knowing my life was about to change forever. I was a year into a job and airbound for Paris, and then to the Paris of the Middle East.

As we descended into this new-to-me city, I stared out at the blue honey of the Mediterranean wondering how it was possible for any place to be that beautiful. I had been starved of travel for a couple of years, and I was beside myself at the prospect of going to this mysterious city by my favorite sea.

As soon as I left the smokiness of the Beirut airport and felt the outside air that was as wet as the sea, I knew I was in another world. I was INSIDE the news. I would be there for two weeks of meetings, with one weekend between them to see the proverbial sites. I met with various dignitaries, from the US ambassador and the country head of USAID to the Lebanese minister of economy and the Lebanese Obama, Minister of Interior Ziad Baroud. The first meeting was in a bar where I witnessed young people hold actual hope for Lebanon, for Ziad's electoral reforms had been substantial. The second was in the massive palatial office inside the Ministry of Interior itself, where he looked tiny behind the biggest desk I have ever seen in my life. In the end, he WAS tiny, and he ended up having to resign due to political bullshit, thus effectively ending a period of relative stability in a country where stability was a luxury.

But that was later.

I had that weekend to myself. On Sunday, I took what passes for public transportation from Beirut to Baalbek, one of the most preserved Roman ruins sites in the world. (That trip is a story itself. Suffice it to say that the Lebanese I met thought I was insane for undertaking it.) A fully standing temple to Bacchus stands on the site, sans roof but with most everything else intact. At the complex's exit sits one of the oddest places I have ever encountered - a Hezbollah gift shop.

You see, Baalbek is controlled by those Party of God fascists who fly a yellow flag with a violent green rifle on it. Because the site and the adjoining city are situated in the Bekaa Valley, being in Baalbek gives them access to fertile land to grow their drug crops. That's how they buy their weapons, in a nutshell.

Like every other religious group on this very stupid planet, they are absolute hypocrites -  growing drugs, making money off a temple to an ancient wine god, and controlling the distribution of alcohol they allow for us tourist infidels near the site.

No, I did not buy the t-shirt in their gift shop. I had a hard enough time justifying the admission fees.

After I had been climbing through the ruins for a few hours, I decided to have a snack and an Almaza beer across the street. While contemplating what it must have been like to be a pilgrim traveling to this temple complex in its full splendor, the scrawniest man I have ever seen came up to my table in the hopes of earning anything for a scrap of food. The man was clearly starving. I gave him what was left on the table and bought one of the bright yellow shirts from him. It was $5.

Lebanon is a microcosm of global inequality. Beirut is home to glittering skyscrapers built by billionaires and playgrounds for wealthy Gulfies to express their religious hypocrisy in drunken, drug-induced, whoring stupors. At the same time, you have neighborhoods like Dahieh (if it still exists after Israeli bombings), the Akkar region in the north, and pockets like around Baalbek scattered throughout the country that are some of the poorest on the planet. Desperate people tend to cling to whatever person or group tells them that they will save them. That's why Hezbollah exists. That's why the PLO existed and why Hamas exists now. That doesn't make it right; it's just the miserable state of human nature.

Let me be perfectly clear: I HATE Hezbollah. I HATE fascism in all its forms. What Hezbollah has done to the Lebanese people is akin to what Hitler did to the Germans. It was Hezbollah that destroyed that period of stability. It was Hezbollah that brought Israeli bombs. This world is better off without Hassan Nasrallah in it, though innocent people shouldn't have been murdered to end his life.

It's Hezbollah that keeps its followers mired in poverty.

I still have that t-shirt buried in a box in a closet. It's beneath a flag of the Christian fascist party of Lebanon, the Phalange, one of the two parties responsible for starting the 15 year war in Lebanon. I pulled that one down from a light pole, disgusted that it turned up in my neighborhood when I was living in Beirut a half a year later.

Why do I keep these symbols of hate, I wonder. They are no different than a swastika or a confederate flag or a MAGA hat. They all represent ideologies of hate for The Other.

I think I keep the t-shirt to remember that man, to remind me that people don't always consciously choose hate, that sometimes they are drowning and clinging to any life raft they can, even if that raft is sinking itself and will take them down with it. Yellow is the perfect color for those people. Hate is for cowards.

As for the flag, it reminds me of what people can do when they encounter hate. Rip the damn flag down. Don't just put up with it.

That's what we have to do in the coming darkness, no matter the danger to ourselves.

Blue

Let me tell you about the color of the European sky.

I noticed it almost immediately the first time I set foot on European soil. Before then I'd never been further north than Michigan, which starts nearly at the same latitude as the Mediterranean Sea. The scatter of sunlight appeared as the deepest blue I had ever had the good fortune to see, and to this day I make a note of it every time I'm in Europe.

It was under the spring version of this sky when I walked through one of the gates of Hell. Birds were celebrating the rebirth of the northern hemisphere with song. Flowers sprung up in every corner and crack in a sidewalk. The day was so clear that there wasn't even a haze over the mountains in the distance.

The beauty of that moment made standing on the site of one of the greatest atrocities humankind has ever known seem like just a plot to a horror movie. But as I walked through Satan's gate past the railroad tracks that carried more than a million human beings to their deaths, as I entered the rooms with the hard wooden bunks that had been the site of tortured sleep, as I looked up at the showerheads that had carried not water but deadly gas, as I kneeled by the ovens that had turned that cerulean sky to ash, I understood the evil that human beings can carry inside them. I cried.

I was 22 years old. The place was Auschwitz.

It wasn't even the first concentration camp I had visited. I had been to Dachau in Munich, where I saw the "work makes you free" slogan for the first time, and to Terezenstadt in Prague, which served as the "model" camp to lie to the world about what these camps really were. It was a place where they used human beings - many of them children - as living propaganda. But seeing Auschwitz was on another level.

And for what? Ethnicity. Race. Religion. Sexuality. Political ideology. Disability. Immigration status. The same categories of human being a candidate for President of the United States has been inciting certain Americans to hate.

The Nazi concentration camp system started out as a mass deportation system. It ended up murdering millions of human beings.

God, I hope America didn't choose this path today. It CAN happen here. It IS happening here. We don't live outside of history.

Phone Call

As I touch my pocket computer to send to my television by invisible waves a baseball game happening in a ballpark 509 miles from where I sit (I know exactly, because I looked it up on the GPS that comes from a satellite in SPACE,) I am thinking about the phone call I had today with my friend in Lebanon, a country that is 5,826 miles across an ocean, one that I have traversed countless times in a big metal room we call "airplane," a vehicle that has brought me to five continents and countless countries where I have met many people who would become my friends. 

He owns a tiny pub in a university district in Beirut. It is the very definition of a dive bar, with little lighting, no refrigerator (he has a giant cooler for beer), and the occassional cockroach that you learn to ignore. I spent countless hours there drinking Almaza beer, learning about life in Lebanon, meeting new people, and playing darts. He and a handful of others were the first to open bars in the neighborhood after the 15 year "civil war" in Lebanon, which was really just World War III fought on a tiny, beautiful piece of land next to the blue honey of the Mediterranean. It was a war between Lebanese, but also a war between Lebanese and Palestians, Lebanese and Israelis, Israelis and Palestians, Israelis and Syrians, Syrians and Lebanese, Americans and Soviets, Americans and Iranians, Iranians and Israelis...you get the point.

He has three rules in his bar: no politics, no religion, and no kissing. (LOL on that last one - he has a lot of college kids coming in.) Very rarely did I ever see the rules broken, because young Lebanese are fed up with sectarianism and just want to live their lives in peace. 

Now he has no business at all thanks to the atrocities happening to the south of Lebanon in the so-called Holy Land, because most of the foreign customers have left the country (Beirut is full of NGO workers, foreign correspondents, and businesspeople from Western and the Gulf states,) as well as many Lebanese nationals, who have a large diaspora spread across the globe because assholes won't stop fighting in their part of the world. The Lebanese economy had already basically collapsed before the genocide in Gaza; now it is...I don't even know how to describe it. Lebanese have been literally robbing banks to get their own money out for a couple of years. Now there isn't even money to rob. My friend is broke. I don't know how he is going to keep his bar open.

We live in this amazing world where we can watch a baseball game from a machine we carry in our pockets, talk to anyone on the planet at any time, and book flights so we can visit them anywhere and meet new people from different countries and different backgrounds, but instead of marveling at the world around us, people choose to divide themselves by "beliefs" and kill each other over what amounts to ancient fairytales that have been manipulated by politicians over millennia to control the masses.  

That my own country and so many people in it support a genocide is shameful. That college students are getting beaten by cops and faculty are facing termination for opposing genocide is fascism. Shame on those cheerleading mass murder, especially the so-called Christians, who are really rooting for the aggressors because their lives are so miserable they want an Apocalypse to end them, and they think forcing the fullfillment of a warped interpretation of an ancient prophecy will bring it.

Despite rightwing politicians trying to impose their Christian sharia laws they think their religion supports, in the Bible, Jesus only had a few rules, all of which are not difficult to follow but which are broken by American politico-Christians every day. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Shelter the homeless. Treat foreigners as one of you. Turn the other cheek. And do unto others as you would have done unto you. 

A hell of a lot of people want to be abused and murdered, apparently.

What it was like to go to a baseball game

Written in May 2021

The radar was green, yellow, and red across the eastern half of the US. I opened the radar app about every half hour throughout the day and watched as those color swirls advanced towards my city, the one with the baseball game scheduled to start at 7pm. I was pre-devastated. What had once been something of a ritual had been stolen from me - stolen from all of us. For the first time since October 2019, I had tickets to the one church that mattered to me, the Church of Baseball. But the rains came, as if the oceans of tears that have been by shed by the globe over the last year had broken a levee and were flooding everything.

Then, a rainbow. By 6:30, the rain had stopped completely. By 7pm, those two beautiful words "Play Ball!" were shouted to commence the ceremonial rite we know as Baseball.

I had to ask the bus driver if it were the right bus to the ballpark; what had been routine had become a disestablished novelty. He kind of laughed in recognition of our shared trauma.

When I was a kid growing up at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, there were three things I experienced that were akin to Christmas Eve. The first was stepping on the black squishy stuff (that actually was there to help concrete expansion during the blistering summer months.) The second was walking up the concrete ramps to what seemed like Heaven. The third was magic, that moment when you walked from the concourse through a kind of tunnel to get to your seats and you saw the field for the first time that day. The stadium is long gone now, but that green field beneath the ring of rainbow colored seats is embedded on my heart.

There have been some moments since then when baseball has made me feel that kind of magic. The first time I saw the field at Wrigley and Fenway. The World Series game I saw in San Francisco. Opening Day 2005 when baseball returned to our nation's capital after a three decade absence. Max's 20K game. And May 4, 2021.

I've probably done it 150 times before, walked through those centerfield gates to the glory of the baseball field at Nats Park. It's may be the best entrance gate in baseball. But the sight had never brought me to tears before Tuesday. And to be honest, if I hadn't needed the restroom immediately, I may have bawled like a newborn. LOL

It was a rebirth of sorts.

I sat just of the right of the foul pole in rightfield. I wore my 2019 World Series shirt with the shark holding the trophy. I drank shitty domestic beer and ate the best tasting hotdog I ever had because it tasted like liberation. I looked at every person with unconditional love and at everything in the stadium with a sense of awe. The World Series Champions banner. The four flag poles above the scoreboard that now have four pennants instead of three and an empty. The lightning rods atop the stadium. The yellow mustard colored foul pole. The neon clad vendors selling their intoxication libations. Every thing (except that stupid Natitude! sign  - it is still stupid) brought me joy.

The ballpark was filled to legal capacity with massive spacing between all of us, and masks were enforced. Being DC, where well-educated people respect expertise, no one threw the kind of fit you see in other places when told to put their masks on. I waited until two weeks after my second vaccine to go to a game, which I believe should be a requirement. 

This pandemic has changed me, because it has shown me how selfish and cowardly half of America is, that so many people are unwilling to lift a finger for their country and protect their fellow Americans. And for what? Freedom? You aren't free if you can't walk down the street without a controllable pandemic putting you and your loved ones at risk of death. If you're not willing to protect them, it isn't love. The opposite of love isn't hate; it's indifference.

I hope the next magical baseball game is not a meaningless game in May played by a bad team, but something truly special for baseball reasons rather than societal ones. I fear we are facing dark times ahead, so I will try to enjoy the time we have while there is still some stability left in the country.

Mafioso

Someone suggested that I visit the "Las Vegas History Museum." They meant the Mob Museum. The two are indistinguishable, for the history of Las Vegas is the mob.

Yeah, yeah, there are natives tied to the area, but they weren't dumb enough to settle a desert with few resources to provide for them. A Spanish patrol scouted the area in the 1820s and named the area "The Meadows" after the springs there that have long since dried up. Some Mormons tried to settle the area in 1855, but they were out of there in two years. It wasn't until 1905 when the railroad came to the place that people actually settled. The railroad workers brought with them gambling and prostitution, railroad corporations brought privatization and development, and vice brought the mafia. The desert settlement was the perfect place to run booze operations while the rest of the country was going through the insanity of Prohibition. The Hoover Dam was constructed in 1931, bringing more workers, more prostitutes, more gambling, and more booze. That's when Fremont Street opened, full of casinos and showgirls to keep the workers content.

Hoover Dam Souvenirs. No idea what they are.

Religious whackjobs always ruin everything.

On sale at the museum gift shop

When people think of "The Mafia," they usually think of Italians, partly because of The Godfather. But there were many ethnicities with their own version of mafia - Irish, Jewish, and Mexican, to name a few. They arose out of discrimination after immigrating to America, or in the Mexican case, the takeover of their land by the United States. They provided services to immigrants that weren't available to them because of prejudice.

The Mob Museum does an excellent job tracing the history of Las Vegas, but becomes a bit too much copaganda by the end. The glorification of cops in this country can be traced to the pursuit of the mob when Murder, Inc. was in full operation and the violence got out of hand. Americans rightly wanted those criminals off the streets. Today's cops would pee their pants if they had to confront mobsters like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson. They're too busy shooting unarmed black men, harassing homeless people, beating their wives, and sexually assaulting children to go after real criminals.

Murder Inc was the enforcement arm of the National Crime Syndicate operating during Prohibition until 1941. It was an alliance of the the Jewish and Italian mafias that was responsible for up to 1000 contract killings and claimed many more innocent victims caught in the crossfire. The syndicate dissolved after the 1941 trials that saw many mobsters convicted and executed after members turned against it and informed on them.

The mob began to find more legitimate ways to make money in the form of casinos and divorce. The 1940s saw the rise of a divorce industry in a country where it was difficult to get one. The so-called "dude ranches" you'll find in Nevada were more often than not once divorce ranches. People who wanted divorce would stay on these ranches so they could establish residency in the state of Nevada and get a divorce in only six weeks. The industry thrived. Celebrities were among those who benefited from the set up. Many people had their next partner lined up to marry once the divorce was final, which is how Vegas became the place of quickie weddings.

Some old slots:

As mobsters transitioned to legit businessmen, one has to wonder - were the mobsters becoming better people or were the businesses becoming worse? As I walked through the final part of the museum, I saw displays of organized crime today, particularly drug trafficking. I ask you why narcotics cartels are any worse than the Sacklers causing an opioid epidemic in America or the founder of the pharmaceutical company Insys bribing doctors and pharmacists to prescribe fentanyl or Martin Shkreli jacking up the prices of multiple pharmaceuticals or Pfizer tripling their price for the life saving drug Paxlovid or the Republican congress fighting to overturn the law capping insulin at $35 for seniors so the companies can go back to charging them $600?

It isn't worse. It's the same damn thing. At least the Insys guy was charged with racketeering, but he only served two years of a five and a half year sentence because rich guys have a different system of justice. Shkreli is out of prison, too, and still a millionaire. But those in prison for selling illegal drugs can spend decades behind bars.

I left the museum and headed downstairs to their "speakeasy" bar called The Underground, where I had a drink popular during Prohibition called "the bees knees." There I watched a jazz trio (which became a quartet) perform songs from the era as well as much more modern Halloween-themed songs. The bar's walls were lined with replicas of old political ads and other Prohibition era memorabilia, as well as some factoids about the era. The band was good - I ended up staying for their whole set before heading back, for the next day was Monday and there was work to be done...

Atomic City First Impressions

video

The plane descended onto an island of light after four and a half hours of traversing sunsets, stars, darkness, and xanax. The orb I had come to visit lit up the skyline as we taxied to a gate that would admit me to Atomic City to start a three week journey through the American desert. The early hours of Late Night had no effect on the city's infamous strip that night or any other, and I took a short stroll among the casinos and circuses with a frozen daiquiri in hand as soon as I was able. But there was work to be done in the morning, and I headed back for three days of labor, pools, and U2. (I will save my comments about the Sphere and the shows for another post.)

I wandered a bit each day I was in the city, my flip-flopped feet black with filth from streets unwashed by rain, the least pedestrian-friendly city I have ever walked. I found myself turning down dumpster drenched alleys or darkened parking garages, sometimes coming to dead ends, before I realized you were actually supposed to walk through the casinos to get anywhere. Marketing takes many forms...

The entire economy of Las Vegas is built on idleness, aside from the thousands of hardworking service industry folks that keep it running. (They are about to go on strike. Go labor!) The goal of the casino industry is to redistribute the wealth of the have nots, who gamble in the hopes of getting rich so they don't have to work, to the haves, who don't work and will never be rich enough to satisfy their own greed. I have no interest in that racket, except to watch it all as a curious observer.

The city is a show itself, with plots and subplots and sub-subplots. Casino owners, mobsters, and politicians are the main characters, many of whom belong to more than one of those groups at a time. Longtime figures, both living and dead (and some who may not quite be either) play prominent roles in the story. A pantheon of deities are still worshiped, with The King of the gods ever present. The shows are sometimes subplots, and sometimes part of the main story, almost religious services, even.

One night I ventured into The Venetian after looking at its fake canals in both disgust and wonder. It has been more than two decades since I've been to the real Venice, but the memory of it has been engraved in my brain. The fake version is terribly accurate. I went inside almost against my will, like something was pulling me in. What I saw was completely unexpected - a full canal running through a shopping mall, gondolas and all, under a fake blue sky dotted with fake fluffy clouds. I still don't understand why it exists, but it is...well, something to see since it's there. After I went home I looked up the cost of flights to the real Venice, Italy. They were cheaper than my flight to Vegas.

This being my first trip to a city I had never had a desire to visit (I was there as a small child but have no memories of it), I had not been prepared for the sheer tackiness of it all. I hated it but was fascinated at the same time. Later we had dinner in fake Paris (which was very good, btw), and then I started to appreciate the kitsch. I actually wanted to see fake Egypt and fake New York and fake Caribbean for the spectacle of it all.

But what I wanted to see most was the real Las Vegas, or at least the one that dwells in the nostalgic mind. I wanted to see the historical remnants of a city that shouldn't exist, for human civilizations weren't meant for deserts. A bunch of mobsters needed a base to operate, so what had been a tiny settlement for railworkers, miners, and courtesans became a major American city. I went downtown, first to the neon sign museum, a kind of graveyard for signs of old, many from casinos and motels that no longer exist. That was the first time I felt enthusiasm for what I was seeing, if only because it was from an era that preceded late capitalism's unbridled nihilism, even in a city that existed solely for money.

 

Then I walked down Fremont Street. Oh, what have they done to history? The famous street is covered with a massive screen flashing images of video games and ads for junk and seizure-inducing swirls of colors. Beneath it sounds a cacophony of idiocy, from the talentless rappers on fuzzy mics to death metal guitarists competing for highest decibel level to soundscan-inspired playlists blasting from every bar and store on the block. National junk food chains inhabit historic buildings alongside neo-drug stores with all manner of modern ways of killing yourself slowly.

I had to get out. So I wandered east, then I wandered some more, past the chic bars and the hip music venues to sketchy corners where people had lost more than a nickel in a slot machine. Then I found it - a part of old Las Vegas that still stood, a road with old motels who had their original signs and stories of millions of travellers who had passed through this desert town. An odd beauty wrapped itself around these old buildings as the October sun created a golden aura.

 

 

Sinking sun. I had to get back before the light faded into the darkness of poverty and the side effects that come to neighborhoods of human suffering.

So I went to the Mob Museum.

(To be continued...)

Here's what Fremont Street looked like in 1987:  

 

 

https://youtu.be/e3-5YC_oHjE?si=Jq3zB1UGYiM0gQMj