A New Blog to Visit & Talar bara du English?


I have posted a link to a blogger who lives in Baghdad. His blog is titled "Where Date Palms Grow" and is located right under "Treasure of Baghdad." He posted a very disturbing account of some developments in Baghdad yesterday--some of which are talked about in the American Media, but he provides a "boots on the ground" point of view that is invaluable.

A Sunni politician had his house raided last night, and some of the upheaval has to do with this. I think this blog is excellent, and would recommend it to students who are doing any of the topics for your paper. And I would recommend it to anyone else as well!

I'm struck by how many Iraqis blog in English, their great command of English (including idiomatic expressions), and how beautifully they write. I would dare say that not many of us, native non-Arab citizens, could post such blogs in Arabic (or Farsi). When a professor at our university proposed to teach Arabic (he taught in another department) to students at no extra cost, he was turned down. This decision amazed me. Arabic and Chinese are two of the languages most in demand around the world, not just for the United States' purposes. In Brazil, there are a multitude of "Chinese Language Schools," which are highly in demand, so that those in business can communicate with the Chinese, the largest growing market in the world. The same goes for Arabic. I would venture to say that besides Spanish, Arabic and Chinese would be the languages to learn, starting in either elementary or middle school. Also, those who study foreign languages do so much better in English courses--because they know the parts of speech, can see grammatical strutures that work and don't work, and in general are more savvy about language arts. And like reading, speaking another language builds the ability to understand abtractions, which helps not only in language, but in math (which is a language, only with different symbols, if you think about it).

But we don't encourage other language arts in our schools, and this is to our great detriment. If I were a Chinese business person, I would probably be more impressed with a Brazilian that spoke even elementary Chinese than an American who assumed that I either spoke English or had to have a translator. The Brazilians' efforts to learn Chinese should be a wake up call to International Business majors. . .

Draft

This is open to both my students and anyone else that wants to answer this question.

If there was a draft implemented to cover the shortage of troops both for Iraq and if we move on Iran, as some pundits think we will, would you go? Or would you try to seek asylum? Do you think the draft is a good idea to put more "boots on the ground," which several generals have indicated that we need--especially if we attack Iran.

Do you think women should be drafted as well? If women want equal rights at home, shouldn't this apply to the military draft as well? Or do you think that women should be exempted from the draft? And why?

ATTENTION STUDENTS

Our blog's good friend and soldier in Iraq, Trevor, posted this article from Time Magazine by a correspondent that covered Iraq and lost his hand in an attack. It may prove useful for your papers since it is sort of journal/article, and stresses the hazards of covering this war. It also is a personal account, which fits into our paper about blogs--whether or not they are becoming a popular and more personal way (and sometimes more accurate) to get news about conflicts. Just click on the words: Time Magazine above. Visit Trevor at "will to exist": he is one of our solider bloggers who, fortunately, will be returning to the states soon.

After reading about all the furor surrounding the pope's address (which I read in it entirety, and did find demeaning), I decided to post one of my favorite poems of all time, by American poet, Thomas Lux (and he does bring light in poem to what seems to be an eternal and horrible truth)

THE PEOPLE OF THE OTHER VILLAGE

hate the people of this village
and would nail our hats
to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
or staple our hands to our foreheads
for refusing to salute them
if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
mix their flour at night with broken glass.
We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brother's throats.
We devein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.
We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace.
They do this, we do that.
We canceled our sheep imports.
They no longer bought our blankets.
We mocked their greatest poet
and when that had no effect
we parodied the way they dance
which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
was leprous, hairless.
We do this, they do that.
Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
(10,000) brutal, beautiful years.



from SPLIT HORIZON, (Houghton Mifflin, 1994)

Yesterday, in my classes, I had students write an essay about September 11th: e.g. where they were when the planes hit the towers, what their reactions were to seeing this, and how it changed their lives, and how they view the incident in the light of the 5th anniversary of 9/11. It was really enlightening to see how differently people reacted and still react to this attack. One of my students, from another country that has had its share of terror and strife, sympathized deeply with the victims and their families, but pointed out that America has to move on, put this incident behind it because so many other countries have experienced similar tragedies, albeit not in such a spectacular "action film" sort of manner. Think of Rwanda, the Sudan, Chechnya, the Balkans--these bloody conflicts have dotted the map in just the last 15 years, and over 2 million people have died as the result. We don't hear much about them.

Many Americans had thought they were immune--that attacks on civilians just happened "on TV," in countries that most younger people never heard of, let alone knew their history and what events spurred on the conflicts. The majority of citizens in the U.S. had never heard of Osama bin Laden, even though his henchmen had bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and the people in Tanzania and Kenya knew him well as al Qaida bombed the American embassies there and killed hundreds of people, and wounded thousands in 1998. Bin Laden had even given an interview with correspondent Peter Bergen in 1998 stating he was determined to implement attacks on Americans in order, in his view, "to wake them up" and force American troops to leave Saudi Arabia, where they had been stationed since the Gulf War, and bring some resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people, which he envisioned as eliminating Israel (although there is debate on this matter--some have reported that he wants Israel to retreat to the 1967 borders). Shortly after the embassy attacks, he initiated an attack that blew up the U.S. Cole, docked in Yemen, killing 17 sailors. We cannot say we were not warned.

Our popularity, as a country, as sunk so low internationally that only 2% of the world's polled citizens (a Pew poll) reported that they felt "postively about the United States." Two percent!!!! So we live treading on egg shells, waiting for the next attack. But the world is not as sympathetic now; as one European paper noted, "America squandered its goodwill after 9/11 by invading Iraq." We now know that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks, and that Saddam was a target of bin Laden too (for reasons too numerous and cumbersome to get into here). A European friend of mine, who has experienced sectarian violence firsthand told me that "the 9/11 attacks were like America getting slapped--we felt that the slap was too hard and too devastating, but it was about time that America experienced what the rest of the world has had to endure."

So what do we do? Do we continue an endless "war on terror," or do we look at the reasons behind terrorism? What attracts people to movements like al Qaida? Poverty? A sense of inequity? A sense of being bullied by countries and forces one has no control over? Nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies flying planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but we must understand this was not an irrational act: it was a statement. And considering how unpopular we are with the rest of the world, we probably should pay some attention to what's behind all this aminosity (and please don't say it's because "they hate our freedom": it's a cop out, and doesn't address the more pressing and complex issues).

Where do we go from here? I'd love some feedback from my international friends.

Vietnam guilt-syndrome, The U.S. Open, and Iraq.

I have been watching the U.S. Open (tennis) all weekend. Overall, sports, especially hockey, are my narcotic, my escape, but watching the U.S. Open is really a ritual. Andre Agassi retired after being beat by a 25 y/o German. Agassi was obviously in physical distress (wincing during every serve and sometimes crying out in pain), and that was emotionally very hard to watch, since I had seen every one of his 21 U.S. Open performances: I hated to see him go out on such a painful, psychologically and physically, note.

But this entertainment brings me to something that I noticed during the Vietnam war (I was a young kid) and even more so now. The war in Iraq seems like some bad dream that no one, except for people, like me, who have a relative in the service, wants to think or talk about. Everyday life is everyday life, and the war is really not a part of it. One of the reasons I posted the U.S. and Iraqi "death counters" on my blog was to remind myself and everyone who visits the blog the cost of this war. Just since Friday, the U.S. death count has risen by 10 (actually more have died, but the counter only records those officially announced as deceased) and the Iraqi death count has risen by 300. While I've been watching tennis, good people have died (and some bad people too). Both figures are appalling, but I don't see any urgency on the U.S. public's part, especially younger citizens, to address this conflict or even discuss it. When it has been brought up in my classes (least semester), some students said, and I quote verbatim here, "I don't want to talk about this--it's too depressing." It's really hard for me not to become distressed by such comments, but I realize that this war is an abstraction (unless a student has lost a friend or family member) and that life goes on as usual, and little thought is given to either U.S. soldiers or Iraqis, unless it is some regurgitated patriotic lip service that falls apart upon questioning the speaker about what he or she has read or really knows about Iraq, its people, and our presence there. Those who have relatives or friends in the conflict speak far more realistically and with more authority. When protesters on both sides of the war demonstrated last year (pro-war and anti-war), they consisted of a handful of people, and most students laughed at them when walking by the protests between classes.

My father's theory about this apathy is that there is no draft. He thinks there should be one, and that, unlike in Vietnam, college students should not be exempt. He also feels that women should not be exempt, since equality shouldn't stop at the battlefield. Many argue that drafted soldiers are horrible. Their morale is bad. They aren't there because they want to be. But others argue that morale is already bad among the troops who are doing the actual fighting since they are serving an average of 18 month or more deployments (during Vietnam, it was 6 months), and they don't know who the enemy is since it is an asymetrical war, like Vietnam. Also an argument for a draft is that if more kids go, it will relieve those who have been there too long, and it may force a conclusion to this war sooner, since the draft is never popular.

What do you think?