I have written before about growing up in Pittsburgh’s lower end of a working class family with one true gift — I loved to read. And I really loved to read history books. Looking back, I best described them as history, fiction, adventure stories.
I can’t remember not being able to read. The long humid summers of western Pennsylvania, and grade school years went slowly by, but what always stood out is my mom taking us to the local neighborhood Carnegie library. I didn’t know there was more than one. And until later in life, when I read about old Andy himself, I thought he was this great old guy who happened to put a lot of books in a big old building so kids like me could check out free books.
I read Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, Robinson Crusoe, a lot of Jack London books and I really thought that Moby Dick was about a one legged guy hunting a bad ass whale.
I’m always drawn to these earlier times when incredibly brave men faced unbelievable odds. They were living through great events, fighting evil kings and despots, facing dragons and enduring unrequited love.
I didn’t realize it at the time that these were all morality plays. Good versus evil, devil versus god, dark against light and later Japanese versus Marines, and good guy pros versus bad guy heels.
But the story line that I loved the most always took place in the Middle East. Richard the Lion Hearted and Saladin, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, mysterious Cairo and T.E Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia who I dubbed “Larry the Arab”). Those bold and strong men who always fought for what was right and good. The way we saw the world I later came to learn was from the European view point. The Balkans and Turkey were called the Near East. Asia was the Far East and we called Egypt and Arabia the Mid-East. Again as I progressed in my thinking and reading, the whole idea and my thought process shifted.
There seems to be more than enough blame to go around for what is happening in the Mid-East. More broken promises, assassinations and overthrows, enough inside jobs to make a mob boss blush.
Ruthless power, crazy religions invaders and defenders — a world I just returned from again. This time from Egypt. Traveling once more with Father Andrew Mhanna, Lebanese Maronite Catholic priest. As you may recall I went to Lebanon last summer and wrote about it here in the Chronicle. So now another personal look at the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and the lack of media coverage; both an outrage.
Last year seeing the outcome of the colossal failure of the Bush/ Cheney war of lies, this time I saw the aftermath of the Obama/Clinton Arab Spring. These are two of the saddest chapters in the history of American foreign policy. These two administrations have unleashed forces of radical Islam, overthrown governments, Byzantine plots and given rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood. There are growing attacks of terror, the same insanity that seems to be grafting itself into the fabric of our own country.
We met with families whose husbands and fathers were beheaded in Libya simply because they were Christians. We went into old Coptic Christian churches that Islamic police throw you out of simply because they can. One of my childhood dreams was to visit the Valley of Kings and see the face of the Sphinx and of the great pyramids — and in fact they are unbelievable.
The great line rings true — man fear time, time fears the Pyramids. It is also very real and time stands still.
Later I sat next to the Nile River at a restaurant and ate dinner with young Muslim men who loved my tattoos but they knew that they would be deemed religious criminals, if they dared to get any themselves.
All things come to us from the Nile. They flow from the water starting from Africa’s Lake Victoria to become the forces of civilizations. The Nile, where baby Moses was found, the Nile that I read about in the early 1950s laying on what my family called the day bed which was just really a fold out bed in my old man’s living room. Like Jem Finch I too tried to walk like an Egyptian.
So I wonder what Ramesses II (not John and Patsy) but the Pharaoh Ramesses would think now when a guy in a long dirty gray robe wearing a Chicago Bulls baseball hat, hustled my guide for some duty free Dunhill cigarettes so we could park our car closer to the Pyramids. What would he think of the horrible slums that grow almost to the edge of the Valley of the Kings? It is an unthinkably huge area entitled the City of the Dead and stretches as far as the distance from Orchard Road to Speer Boulevard, where people live in tombs for generations never leaving the equivalent of Gas Town in the latest Mad Max movie. In old Cairo we had full water bottles thrown at us as the Egyptian Army keeps a lid on all of it, and the City of the Dead could be the fuse that makes it all explode.
So what looms for the future of Egypt, nobody know for sure, but with time and history as our guide what happens in Egypt will affect the world.
— Peter