A Conference in Venice – Part One!

The raindrops rolled across my body like big wet kisses from the lips of a hungry and voracious whore. They denuded me and exposed my rotten core. They bit my earlobes and drenched my tits and my belly. They fucked my soul. They fucked my soul.

Everything comes like a violation to me these days, even my thoughts. Everything pains me, even hope. For hope is nothing more than a merciless rape of a tortured soul.

I am tired of hope. I am tired of rape. I am tired of ideas that keep bustling in my head. I am tired of a future that never comes yet never fails to make me oblivious to the present. I am tired of the constant wait and anticipation. I am tired of rain that wets but does not cleanse.

Still, Venice received me with a long sudden shower of omnivorous rain. Rain!

Alea Jacta Est!

The Whore is unruly.

The Pimp – a fiend.

The Seeds are but ignorant bastards –

nasty, brutish, mean. Mean.

This is the essence of the Syrian scene. Continue reading →

The Enigma of Damascus

By JAMES BENNET – New York Times

Ammar Abdulhamid, 39, runs the Tharwa Project, which tracks treatment of minorities in the region. He had a fellowship at the Brookings Institution in Washington last fall, and he has decorated his Damascus office with photographs from his walk to work along Connecticut Avenue. One shows the American flag through the bare limbs of trees. When I stopped by, he called the regime ”defunct” and the Baathists ”idiots” and ”morons” while we were still settling into our seats. He saw no alternative in civil society either. ”They all want a leader or a messiah,” he said. He did not advocate ”bloody revolution,” he said. But he also said that the civil strife accompanying regime change in Iraq might be the only way forward in the region. ”Stagnation is killing our souls and our minds,” he said. ”Hopefully, this baptism by blood and mayhem will teach us to cherish the liberties.”

A Prophet in Idlib!

No, this part of the world, this blessed plot, this realm, this Syria, has not forgotten that old habit of churning out prophets yet. One, in fact, has recently been taken out of his jail cell (and where would a prophet end up this day in age?) just to intercede with his followers, held in a different prison, calling for the release of that prison’s warden, whom they had taken hostage. Continue reading →