Alea Jacta Est!

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5

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. 

 

Indeed I said it:* the regime is “dead,” the Baathists are “idiots,” and a baptismal rite by “blood and mayhem” seems ever in the offing for the country. But, are we to learn anything from this? This is indeed my hope, though I doubt it, as I doubt everything these days, including, of course, my own assessment of things.**

Yet I don’t doubt this, and neither should you: it is because I was so filled with fear yesterday that I am so rebellious today, and will continue to be.

The regime reaps what the regime sows I guess. Their foolhardiness begets and feeds mine. That’s the irony of it all.

My demons rape me. I spit acid in my demons’ face. My demons rape me again, and so again I spit acid, until we are all eventually vanquished. There are no winners in this game. Nor will there ever be. – So be it, for now.

If my demons want me dead, mine will be a public crucifixion – this I promise.
If my demons keep me alive, theirs will be a public trial – constant, nagging, merciless.

If my demons get me by the throat, I’ll get them by the balls.
If they get me by the hand, I’ll get them by their hooves.
And if they hang me by my legs, I’ll piss in their face,
and perhaps even mine… who cares?

I might just be their last straw, you know.
I might just be that little tiny hair that will soon break their backs.

Or, I might be just a nasty little tidbit stuck in their collective throat, which, once swallowed, will leave a somewhat rancid aftertaste, and no more.

So, which am I? What am I destined for?

Oh, dear whoever, do hazard a guess, do place your bet, for the die has indeed been cast. Alea jacta est.

_____________
* NY times – Enigma of Damascus: Given focus by the chaos in Iraq, that is a vision of the end days of this regime that many Syrians fear. A green-domed mosque in the hills above Damascus marks the spot where Cain is said to have slain Abel. The city took its name from the stream of blood that ran down. There are those who think that a time of violent reckoning with sectarian hatreds may be necessary. 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.”
* New Republic – “Bashar Assad knows what he is doing”: You can hear it in the very dissident voices so often hailed as standard bearers by people in Washington. Take Ammar Abdulhamid, Satloff’s source for the quip comparing Assad to Fredo Corleone. His blog entires following the Baath Party congress in June reflect a higher estimation of Assad’s faculties–a notion that the young leader has come into his own. In a play on words–Assad means “lion” in Arabic–Abdulhamid writes, “No longer a lion cub, ours is now the real grown thing.” The blog, written in English, also conveys his personal sense of impending doom:
[I]f I should get jailed one day for these blog entries, for my newspaper articles or for my activities with the Tharwa Project, among other things, there should be no doubt that I will have earned it. Whether I deserve it or not, in the moral sense, is a different matter. … [T]here is something ominous in the air, I am not really sure what to make of it, I mean there is nothing really concrete, just a vague feeling that something bad is about to happen…

5 thoughts on “Alea Jacta Est!”

  1. Woah, incredible post. Piss in their face! Piss in their face!I hope your piss is acid and their mouths are open. But please, if this is the case, don’t piss on your face too.

  2. Wow, Amar.I have no way to know what incited this post, but I hope the effect and action is not as rancid as your mood is here.Stay safe. The people of Syria need you.

  3. It is often difficult to make value judgements. Reason is a humans’ tool of survival. Yet, those who do not respect reason, all tyrants and faithists, respect only force.Survive. Please keep posting.—Dan

  4. “The regime reaps what the regime sows I guess. Their foolhardiness begets and feeds mine. That’s the irony of it all.”Indeed. Steinbeck wrote: “If you who own the things people must have [in this case, the people’s very soul’s!], you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results; if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’.”The regime today has sown a sorry seed for forty years–it neglects to water it, to allow it sunshine, even to irrigate it. In fact, it intentionally suffocates and starves it, all the while forgetting, as it imprisons the stronger seeds and dissenters, that it itself has been the cause of their rebellion. But the gardener soon shall be overwrought with fear as those seeds, despite their torture, are well concealed beneath the soil. And, when one seed overcomes the regimes’ barriers to bear its own fruit, the others shall take note.The human soul can be left in the dark only until it becomes aware of itself and demands its liberty, demands the light…Persevere, Mr. Abdulhammid. The harvest has merely been delayed by bad weather.Fiat lux.

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