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Daily Bloggerback
Best of Blogs Round-Up: Friday, February 10
EDITED BY PIERRE TRISTAM/Candide's Notebooks
Non-disclaimer: We're liberal to the core, but we include in this daily blog review the political, the social, the cultural and the undefinable from the left, the right, the in-between from all over the globe. And we're suckers for good writing regardless of ideology. Clicking the link will take you to the original post.
Featured Blog I: Cedar Query
What Is and Isn't Lebanese?
DOHA, Lebanese Bloggers  /
February 6, 2006
It's been a year now, since Lebanon has brandished headline news on American newspapers. Today, as I grabbed the "Express" (a shortened version of the Washington Post), I saw a picture of a protester with the Shahadatan banded around his forehead and the familiar Tabaris building burning behind him. What happened yesterday was at best surreal. An event of hatred that was uncalled for. It's as if the hands of those who want to break Lebanon are itching for yet another plot to break us, break our will of living free, free of hate, fear, and death. It's been a year, a year of tests, one after the other...but how much can the Lebanese take. The anger I saw on the faces of the Achrafieh residents made me realize that patience has limits...and I cannot blame them. Whether in Tripoli or the South, there are hundreds of churches and mazars, never thrown stones at, never ravaged in such a way. Why this time around? Why are Tripolitans driving all the way to Beirut, to throw stones at cars in a Christian neighborhood? Read the rest at The Lebanese Bloggers...
Featured Blogger II: Between Counterculture and Consensus
Focus and Fellowship Along with the Fire
Just a Bump in the Beltway  /February 9, 2006
Occasional essays here over the past month and a half have pointed the way to the need for the kind of fire and spirit that drive a sustained countercultural movement, a path of resistance to the large cultural currents that are swallowing us up. In many ways, we do need to swim against the tide that carries other people along, and the community of Bumpers is, in many ways, devoted to furthering a way of life that counters what other people (especially in places of entrenched power and leverage) are doing. After all, if "WE" are all on our own, that means "THEY" are causing us to be all on our own. There is an inevitable awareness of segregation that comes from apprehending the reality of the world today, and moreover, there is--to a certain extent and in a very particular sense--a need to further this segregation by making our lives different from "THEIRS." Ah, but in these troubling and overwhelmingly complex times, there must be balance in all things, and so today, one must make a plea for consensus-building, for making a connection in which "WE" can meet "THEM" halfway. I had a post-Super Bowl commentary in mind--not the football kind, but the sociological kind--on Monday. I was ready to comment on the absurdity Detroit experienced amidst its staging of the Big Game: tens of thousands of homeless people living but five minutes from jaw-droppingly lavish and bacchanalian bashes involving crowds whose collective net wealth--from their possessions to their clothing to their contracts to the food and drink they consumed--had to be in the billions, if not the TENS of billions. But the gulf that existed in Detroit last week--and which demanded exposure--was a gulf whose sickening width suddenly seemed to pale in comparison to the breach that was revealed not just between Western Europe and the extremist (not authentically) Muslim world, but between Scandinavian Europe, that seemingly most sensitive of places, and a community that responded to a caricature of violence with.... what else?.... violence. Read the rest at Just a Bump in the Beltway...
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