This piece originally appeared at Intuition: http://www.intuition-online.co.uk/article.php?id=1018. I am reposting it here because the links did not make it into the final edit properly.

When I was asked to write satire for Intuition’s January edition, I thought back to my undergraduate years and reading Aristophanes, Terence and Menander—classical satirists, in case anyone needs a primer—and wondered what on earth they would write about in this day and age. I often find myself reading the news in the morning, thinking of the three of them, throwing their hands in the air and saying “Gods! It can’t get any more ridiculously surreal than this!”

My brother, a visual artist, brought up exactly this topic after reading my first piece on Intuition. The example he chose: former (quitter) Alaska governor Sarah Palin becoming a talking-head on Rupert Murdoch’s precious flower, FOX News. He noted that during her inaugural appearance—let us please pray that this is the only context we ever hear “inaugural” associated with her name—fellow talking-head Glenn Beck asked if he could read something to her that he wrote in his journal the night before which included the words “tomorrow I meet Sarah Palin. I am a little nervous. I know she is the right person to lead our country out of the mess we are in but I wonder if God has given her the strength.” He said this with a plainly frightened look on his face. This comes right after watching a video clip in which Pat Robertson told faithful followers that the recent devastating earthquake in Haiti was to be attributed to a pact with the devil struck 200 years ago.

How would Aristophanes write about this this now? Well, for a clue, I looked to the the clip of Tina Faye spoofing then governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin in an interview with Katie Couric during the 2008 U.S. elections. Faye’s performance was a perfect example of modern satire carried off in a classical style. It is so much more subtle, though, and doesn’t need for characters to be caricatures of their intended victims because said victims are already caricatures unto themselves. It would appear that imitation is no longer the sincerest form of flattery, it is just a form of satirical insult. Another great example: the episode of South Park titled “Trapped in the Closet” in during which the core beliefs of the Church of Scientology are explicated while a notice flashes at the bottom of the screen that “THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE.”

Not intending harp on Palin, but the only thing simpler than this form of satire are those gorgeous occasions where an individual can participate directly in their own satirizing, as she did in the lsat presidential election cycle during a prank call from a radio show. We only have to look to the “W” years of the American presidency or to the humorous treasure-trove of North Korean news propaganda. All of these people have either made themselves or been made into caricatures. They need only to be mocked.

So why bother?

Well, it turns out that a lot of people the world over don’t have a sense of humour. It would appear that they simply do not understand how to look at the world around them in such a way that they could find it funny. They see the world as a serious place filled with serious people to be taken seriously. They don’t want to hear any snickering in the back rows. They are also very, very boring (see the above reference to Glenn Beck’s interview with ex-governor Palin).

All of that said, I shall propose a methodology for writing satire so that you too, humble reader, can flex your creative muscles and slag off the idiots that surround you by lobbing insults above their pathetically stupid heads.

First, read a book. Strike that, read a lot of books. To write well you have to be able to read, and be well read. Sci-fi works best because it hits that weird dystopian spot that only it can, but Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, Oscar Wilde: these will also work. If you want your writing to be really smart, read some philosophy as well, and of course The Classics, so you can be a snob. Reading Ulysses—that’s James Joyce, by the way—will give you the biggest boost in terms of snob-rating. Or you can just do what everyone else does and buy a used copy and the Cliff’s notes (remember those from before the internet?) and just tell everyone that you have read it. That is way easier.

Second, develop a superior attitude. It helps a great deal to feel superior to all of those idiots you are writing about. Reading Mencken and Oscar Wilde, as mentioned above, will help with this. Also see above regarding Ulysses.

Third, have a pint. On second thought, have two or five pints, or maybe several whiskies; preferably while reading the news online or (GASP!) a newspaper (I realize that this is an online publication. Give a brother a break). This will help you to see just what maddening depths to which the world around you is sinking. N.B.: the number of pints you hit the bottom of is proportional to the depth to which the world has sunken.
Now you’re ready. Pick a topic and let fly. Anything can happen. You might be reading an article on how some idiot doctor wants to petition to have butter banned as a toxic substance, and write a story in which some animals have revolted against their farmer oppressors and is now poisoning the rest of their human oppressors by putting saturated fat into the butter and melamine into the milk. You’re on a roll! A few hours later you might wake up on the floor of your flat and shout “Eureka!” and begin writing a dystopian tale of the future in which washed up politicos no longer have fade away but can become internationally famous news pundits and yap all the garbage commentary they like about things they know nothing about! That is almost certain to never happen. What absurdity.

Aristophanes, Menander, and that other guy are dead, but that doesn’t mean that their art has to be. Their world was completely ABSURD too. Once a year, people gathered, got trashed and had a public orgy while the rest of the town looked on from box seats. Men only married to perform their social duties and then buggered off with their youthful compatriots. Some of those men went around town asking questions until everyone decided that it would be best for society if they drank poison. They had good material to work with, and so do we. So, let’s get to it.

As I wrote that last line, I heard a BBC announcer mention that butter should possibly be banned as a toxic substance, given that we have so many healthier substitutes.

I rest my case.

The February issue of Intuition is out and I have two new articles in it.

Satire: What it is and how to write it

A meeting of minds

I’m going to be writing satire for an online UK (British, for the rest of you) magazine called Intuition in the coming months.

For those who don’t know satire is, you can find a satirical definition here. For a no less accurate—but certainly less amusing—definition, click here.

You can find my first piece published there by clicking below:

Check my underwear? Funny you ask… – John Martin | Intuition

Enjoy.

This is a recent paper I wrote for a seminar on Islamic Political Thought with Dr. Huda Lutfi at the American University in Cairo. I will post a few others that I am writing and have written recently in the coming weeks.

It isn’t that I haven’t been writing in the last two months of blog hiatus, it is that I have been writing this sort of thing. So, rather than not posting at all, when I have tortured my ever avid fans (?) by never posting, I will further torture you by making you read my academic work. More importantly, I am working on a few conference papers and journal submissions and any feedback—on content or style—is very helpful. Thanks in advance for your kind patience.

To view the paper click one of the links below. Enjoy.

View as PDF

View Online

Citation (Chicago/Turabian):

Martin III, John D. “Agency and Authority: Considering Free-Will in the Discursive Narrative on Caliphal Authority.” If You Don’t Know What You’re Doing, You Can’t Make Mistakes. http://youcantmakemistakes.com/2009/12/17/agency-and-authority/ [accessed February 9, 2010].

First Annual.

Tomorrow, or more accurately, tonight is my birthday. I usually let these things pass me by. The last few years have found me on planes or by myself in a strange city or somewhere. This year, my friends in Cairo have quietly insisted on a party, and I am going to indulge them.

I don’t like birthday parties, particularly for people who are in their late twenties and early thirties. These events tend toward the externally happy/internally maudlin, and who has time for that? I don’t lament getting older, though I recognize that it is happening more rapidly than any of us is comfortable with. I like it. I typically like to “celebrate” this aspect of life with a quiet drink in a dark bar and a good long self-reflection followed by fitful sleep. This, however, does not exactly make a good environment for whatever is the opposite of depression. On thinking about it this morning as I washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen floor waiting for my coffee to kick in, I realized that this might be another aspect of a childhood loathing that I carry with me even until today.

I hate kids. Hate them. I have since I was a kid, probably even moreso then. When I was a child, other children were mean, stupid, intentionally and willfully ignorant. They pretended not to know things and they were never interested in anything other than whatever everyone else was interested in. I didn’t get this. I don’t get it now. The kids I like are weird, peculiar little people. They say adult words in a tiny human voice. They ask questions that perplex the adults around them. They are also surrounded by adults, and tend to like it that way.

I wish I had known these kids when I was a kid. Alas, they tended not to be very visible, preferring adults. They hid away. They did not invite other weirdos around very often, and neither did I. What I never realized was that the others—the kids who didn’t spend all their time in their own heads—were actually interested in knowing me. I just didn’t let them for some reason.

When I was a child, I would have much rather spent time with my grandparents or my aunts and uncles than with other children. I even preferred to spend time with my parents, especially my parents, though I never let them know that. They all had stories, interesting stories. They had lived in places, jumped out of airplanes, gone to college, not gone to college, worked, built whole houses with their hands, cultivated plants, sewn clothing for their children, made bread, played softball, gotten in fights, swam in the south Pacific, flown on planes that had carried nuclear bombs, had cancer, and so many other things that my brain staggers to try to think of all the stories that they have told me.

Kids don’t have any stories, at least not those that I had to choose from as a kid. They liked video games, they liked playing soccer. I hated those things, and I hated them. I didn’t give them a fair chance. I didn’t realize that they probably found me as strange and upsetting—or as exotic and fascinating—as I found them.

As I got older, I think I realized this. I did things with people my own age. It took a while, but by that point we were becoming adults, whether we liked it or not. I could finally almost relate to my peer group. They read books now, and some of them even wanted to talk about it.

And then there were the shared experiences that we all thought our parents didn’t have any experience of. Suddenly we were inventors. We invented smoking that first cigarette on a cold Michigan day. We invented sex. We invented drugs and going to concerts. We invented reading books banned by our grandparents’ generation. Our parents stood by and let us go on about our business. They were worried. They still are. They wouldn’t be parents if they didn’t. I think that maybe they also realized that they had done stupid and brilliant stuff that they thought their parents didn’t know anything about.

I knew better. My grandparents told me stories from their youth, from their partying days. They were wild. They drank whiskey, got into bar fights, played cards, smoked cigars and went to weird places in strange cities. They saved the best for when I was older. They were rebels, and they didn’t even know it. They made us look like prudes, like amateurs.

So, now here we are: adults. We make the stories now. We get lost down back alleys and drink from unmarked bottles, smoke cigarettes sometimes and hang out with weirdos. We have power, we no longer require supervision. Sometimes we are the supervisors of those in need of it. I wonder what skewed view this next generation of children—and the one after that—will take of us? Will they think that we were strange, reclusive loners with nothing but idle time on our hands before they were born? I don’t know. Probably, if that is what we let them believe.

In the mean time, I am going to a party, ostensibly in my honor, and hang out with the rest of the weirdos. And to all of those with whom I did not spend your birthdays or who were not celebrating with me either, maybe you can tell me your stories someday. I’m dying to hear them sometime, now that we’re all old enough to know better.

A Mosque on Every Corner.

While Nigel and Johnny were in from Taiwan, Megan and I decided to take them Mosque-walking from the Sayyida Zeinab Mosque to very near the Citadel in Islamic Cairo. We swiftly coined the term “Mosqueing” to refer to this activity. Check Webster’s in a few years, it will be there.

There are unfortunately no photos of Sayyida Zeinab in this collection. They wouldn’t let Megan in at all and the doorman was everything but friendly. I will try to go back soon and grab a few snaps of the outside at the very least.

The walk then proceeded down ‘Abd al-Magīd al-Libān St. and turned onto Ṣulayba St. near Ibn Tulūn Mosque. It was a fun afternoon and we got some decent snaps out of it. We ended up catching a cab—quite thirsty and exhausted—from in front of the Sultan Hassan Mosque to Falaki Square near Bab el-Louq. Those of you in the know know that this is also the location of everyone’s favorite dive/watering-hole Horreya. Cold Stella actually tastes good after a long hot walk through the dusty backstreets.

Enjoy the photos.

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God’s Country.

A couple of friends and I decided that it would be a good idea to get out of Cairo and breathe some clean air, swim in the sea and relax at the beach. So, we got a car, loaded up the cooler and drove across Sinai to a little coastal town called Nuweiba and chilled on the beach for a few days.

Driving through Sinai definitely gives one a sense of why nomadic folks often went there to talk to their god. It makes one feel small and alone. I can’t imagine taking the same journey on foot or camel-back. I got to drive back as well, which was pretty superb. I am most certainly in love with driving through the desert.

It was an absolute blast. Here are some pictures of our adventure.

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“A series of pipes.”

My dad has been hosting his origami site at Geocities for the past several years. I spoke to him yesterday about acquiring a domain name and self hosting the site as Geocities—presently owned and operated by Yahoo—will close its electronic doors very soon. He will move from there to a self-hosted site with its own independent address, which is inherently better because of greater control over the back-end of things. He rightly said that this was a good thing anyway, because this is how we keep these things—websites, the Internet—alive. This started me thinking about the Internet and how different a place it is from when I first started using it over a decade ago.

Thinking about Geocities in particular made me a bit reminiscent about all of the one-off, special interest sites that sprang up in the late 1990s. Usenet aside, you could find almost any information—be it quality or not—in single column pages with colored text and often over a bright—sometimes obnoxious—background. In those days, the big Internet companies had sites that were complex, multi-column affairs with boxes and ads, but the real Internet was the domain of the people writing whatever they wanted in center-aligned pages.

It was a great time to be a conspiracy theorist. Or really into Wicca.

Searching the Internet in the 90s was fantastic and weird. Democracy at its finest. All things change with time, some for worse some for better. There are reasonable arguments in either direction for the changes evident in the Internet over the last decade and a half. For some applications, the Internet has made life easier, obviously. Communication is fantastic. I live in Egypt and communicate with friends readily all over the world in an inexpensive and effective way. This is due to greater ubiquity of broadband Internet coverage in Egypt and elsewhere.

Websites have also become easier to create and maintain. I use Wordpress to generate this site and have been for several years. The first version of the site, however, was written in PHP by yours truly. It was an exercise in basics which has made working with and customizing Wordpress much easier for me in subsequent years. That said, it is really easy now to have a site that looks more or less professional, and everyone does. The downside is that now everything on the Internet seems to be a blog and sites grow stagnant as soon as the writer gets a book deal—which seems inevitable for many upstart bloggers these days.

The information which used to be so readily available on the Internet is now relegated to the All Thing¹ of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great tool as a first-reference: it democratizes basic reference, particularly for those who already have experience with traditional encyclopedias. It also contains vastly more information on a much wider variety of topics than do traditional encyclopedias. That said, it is still only a first reference, and the “peer-review” to which the information is subjected to is conducted by experts and non-experts alike.

My brother and I grew up with a set—two actually—of encyclopedia in the house. It was a great first- or quick-reference for almost anything that we wondered about or were writing about for school. As I got older and learned more about doing research, the references and bibliography proved perfect guides to more and deeper information on a given topic. That was how it was done.

The Internet changed all that. I cannot count the times that I heard college professors tell students that they had to use books and journal articles rather than online references. I was always confused. Did college students really not know how to use a library? It turns out that, no, they did—and do—not. Library usage seems to be, more and more, a thing of the past. The library at my present University is not expanding its collection very rapidly because they are exploring electronic alternatives—none of which work very well.

We used to go to the library with my mom almost every weekend. We had library cards by the time we were six or seven years old. I was—and am still—an avid reader because of this level of access to books. I am like a ship without a rudder—or more aptly, a ship without water—when I have no access to a library. This is not to say that I do not now primarily access academic journals via the Internet while conducting research. I do. It is easier, and saves me the time of sifting through stacks of journals in the basement in order to photocopy endless pages from them. This is an improvement.

Additionally, Google Books and the Internet Archive are becoming ever more useful resources for finding out-of-print and public-domain works written before the current copyright cutoff. They do not, however, replace the public or research library. Instances of false information being reported elsewhere in the media based on a Wikipedia article as an authoritative source are a good argument for returning to more rigorous forms of research on the part of journalists and academics alike.

Also, the above-mentioned one-off specialist sites seem to be going by the wayside as the Internet evolves into an archive of photoshopped pictures of cats and funny/stupid things. It used to be the case that the top of the search engine output would be a number of websites with a vast amount of—potentially questionable—data on almost any topic.

Now, on the other hand, Wikipedia is at the top of the list for almost anything that you can search for. That is unless you are accustomed to advance searching and particularly adept at using keywords. Most of the students who I help at the reference desk are not. They typically begin their research by going to Google and typing their topic or a full sentence (e.g. – “Mongolia” or “why is there domestic violence in the middle east?.” These are two recent examples of searches which students were having trouble with). To get to much of the real information that is available on the Internet these days you have to sift through hundreds of entries in blogs or advertisements. Monetizing the Internet proves to be primarily a tool for obfuscating it rather than improving user-as-content-generator experience.

This is one of the primary reasons that I am an advocate of net-neutrality and online rights—including, but not limited to, file-sharing, digitized books, and un-filtered/un-traffic-shaped Internet service, not to mention open-source/open-licensing. The Internet has the potential to be a tool for posterity, and indeed it is already serving us in this manner to some degree. It has the potential to be so much more. The moment that corporate interests became more important than the needs of Internet users, the system broke. It will limp though, but it will not recover fully and become the repository of information that it should be until corporate money-making interests are set aside.

This will not happen anytime soon, and indeed, Yahoo’s decision to discontinue Geocities in order to promote their new web-hosting platform—which is pay to play—is a step in the wrong direction. The Internet is not about closing things down in order that they might not be in conflict with business interests: it is about information being freely and readily available the world over and even beyond. This used to be a purpose of libraries as well.

It seems, however, that we have lost sight of this, lulled into contented complacence by cute pictures of talking cats and repositories of awkward family photos. This does not bode well at all. It will eventually change, though. Economies and finance online are not, and never have been stable. The one thing that is stable at this stage is the ability of one computer to connect to another. As long as we have that, when the corporate hegemony Internet collapses, we will simply start over, one node at a time.

Until then, if anyone needs me I’ll be reading online comics and looking at pictures of sandwiches.

———
¹ A reference to the progeny of the blogosphere presented in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and Endymion.

Here’s to your inevitable political downfall!

I read this article about the respective public spectacles over Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin and it got me thinking about the spectacle that became Sarah Palin last autumn during the American presidential elections and her present attention-grabbing efforts. Her untimely resignation from the Alaska gubernatorial seat should be another nail in her political coffin, but apparently she is up in the polls with republicans. This does nothing to inspire confidence in her ability to lead—particularly considering that she has just stepped out of such a position in a fit of overly-self-confident irresponsibility. The GOP has backed some horrifying failures of late and continues in its ability to conflate “conservatism” with bigotry and fiscal liberality.

Perhaps this is the strangled choking death rattle of the GOP at last.

Somehow I doubt it, but it would be nice to think so.

This maneuver on Palin’s part is little more than her present attempt to get herself back in the spotlight of national political fame—and scrutiny. It turns out that the old marketing folk-wisdom approach—that both praise and criticism have equal value, as long as they turn heads—works as a strategy for political advancement in the United States now. Last autumn, Palin was roasted over and over again by critics, political rivals and comedians. Rather than taking any criticism seriously—and, though dismissive, it was serious—she soldiered on bravely, in the eyes of her supporters. The rest of thought that she did so foolishly. I often felt pity for her. She was placed in the public eye by the GOP essentially unprepared and then made a spectacle of. At the time, it seemed as though this was something that was being inflicted upon her. Now, however, her spectacular displays of incompetence and lack of judgment have proven to be self-motivated.

It is unfortunate for conservatives, particularly for women, to have to even give any thought to this rambling, silly woman as a viable candidate for anything, let alone the Presidency. It is also remarkable that the conservatives who support her, just as they supported President Bush, seem to do so uncritically, praising when she says something they agree with, ignoring the malapropisms and blaming her critics for their “meanness.” I say that it is remarkable because it demonstrates precisely the way that the American political machine has come to operate. Substance and form no longer matter, having been replaced by sentimentality and dogged devotion—probably driven by a desire not to be seen as backing a failure, fool, or asshole.

Perhaps this does represent the death rattle of the GOP after all. The Republicans would do well to leave some of their failures and garbage along the side of the road. If they don’t, they are likely looking at a series of very disappointing years before they figure out a way to turn the apathy and indecision of the Democrats against them again. So, here is to you Sarah, may you be taken out with the rest of the political celebrity trash. God help you until then. You’re going to need it.

Update:
10. July 2009 14:48

In case you needed another argument why we should let her go quietly into the night: here it is.

Nothing gets in or out.

I had to go to the American Embassy in Cairo this morning. My passport still has five years left before it expires, but all of my visa pages have been used up. This is not necessarily from traveling a lot—traveling between EU countries now requires no passport control—but from living long-term in a country that has very arbitrary and haphazard immigration and border control. My passport is chock full of Egyptian visas.

Here is how it works: you can get a temporary—tourist—visa to enter the country from your local Egyptian consulate or embassy. Or, you pay the visa fee and get the stamp when you enter the country at the airport. Either way, this takes one page of your passport. Upon landing, you get an arrival stamp (one-quarter of a page). If you leave and come back you get an exit stamp and another incoming stamp (half page). If you apply for a resident visa through a sponsor, such as the university, you will use up another page.

If you apply for a long-term tourist visa—which is what most people do whether they are working/attending university here or not—this takes yet another page. From the last calendar year, I have four tourist visas (4 pages), one multi-entry endorsement (1/2 page), two full-time student/resident visas (2 pages), and about six exit/entry stamps (1 1/2 pages). That is a total of nine out of the sixteen-odd visa pages in my passport gone. My most recent resident visa has expired and I have two weeks to get a tourist visa for the summer in order to fill the gap before the University will sponsor me for another visa. The Mogamma will not place another visa in my passport becasue I am out of pages.

It was time to have pages added to the ol’ passport. So, I checked the embassy hours online: 8am until 11am, every Sunday through Thursday except for holidays and the last Tuesday of every month.

Confused yet? Just hang on.

So, this morning, I dragged myself out of bed and staggered downstairs to catch a cab downtown. I arrived near the embassy and walked, looking for the entrance. The American Embassy in Cairo appears to be a tribute to the concrete fortress-style architecture of the American 1970s. Here is a picture, which I do not own the rights to, but gets the point across. I would have taken my own picture but likely this would have ended in my being arrested and beaten. What you will not see in that picture is the 5 meter high wall that surrounds the triangular tower in the middle of an triangular city block. I didn’t know which of the three streets the main entrance was on, so I just picked a side and started walking.

It was the wrong side.

There are three or four doors in the two-kilometer long embassy wall, labeled cryptically. I just kept walking and walking and finally asked one of the many Egyptian National Security guys standing outside the walls where the entrance was. He gave me directions. By this point I am already worried that I will not have enough time to get inside, wait in line and submit my paperwork. I am also a little put off by how—not—inviting the embassy building itself is.

A few weeks prior to this, I was invited by one of the committee members at the BCA to the Queen’s Birthday Party at the British Embassy. It was a giant cocktail party for the Queen. Bagpipes, drinks, food, ice-cream, hundreds and hundreds of diplomats. It was pretty cool. The party was held in the garden at the embassy residence: a very lovely, very comfortable setting. Grand British architectural style, but quite modern. Apparently, before the construction of the Nile Corniche road, the garden had extended all the way to the river. Lovely. The American Embassy is the opposite of this. While the British seemed to say, “Come in. Have a drink,” the Americans seemed to be saying, “Please leave now, or we might beat you.”

I finally found the entrance and a man pointed me to the left door as he was pointing couples of people to the door on the right. I noticed an AUC professor who I often see in the library in the line ahead of me. Once inside the security chamber—for lack of a better term—I was relieved of my mobile phone and my identification. I had been warned about this by a friend who had told me to take a book, but nothing electronic. After reassembling my person, I was told that to get to the American Citizen Services section I would need to go right then right again, left, up the stairs outside, through the doors, right, then down the stairs inside and then left. There were no signs. I noticed the visa section for Egyptians trying to get entry visas on my left before the stairs and the doors and things. It was outside. At 10am the temperature was already 30C (86F). No better way to say “please come to our country” than “please sit in this horrifyingly hot place and wait forever for the privilege.”

Even once inside, the place screamed “Go away! You do not belong here!” The ceiling was 50 meters above and there were rows of identical windows. The room was triangular. I was standing below ground in the center of the triangular tower. I took a number from a machine, which was tiny, unlabeled and on a shelf practically at eye-level so that you would have to search the entire high-ceilinged chamber before finding it. Then I waited. There were 30 people ahead of me. This took the better part of the hour.

Once my number was called, the rest was relatively painless. I submitted my passport and application and was then instructed to take a blue form to the cashier, even though there is no charge for additional pages being added to a passport. I was told that I needed to get a “no-charge” receipt from the cashier. I rolled my eyes. The woman on the other side of the bullet-proof glass did not blink and pointed in the direction of the cashier.

And that was it. I was told to come back the next morning and my passport would be ready. Relatively painless. I just wonder what goes on inside the embassy that requires that level of fortress-like security and obfuscation. We—Americans—really are crazed when it comes to security theater. We just can’t get enough. So, tomorrow morning I will get up and repeat the process before work, or just wait until Wednesday when I can go to the Mogamma as well—an experience which I will also write about, I’m sure.