The days are getting much warmer in the money-losing operation that is Gouna; but the pool’s still almost too cold to swim in for long, even though the sand is starting to be too hot to walk on barefoot. The air is so dry here that I occasionally cough due to lack of moisture in my lungs, but it smells divine.
It smells like Egypt, the country of my childhood. It makes me think of me Mum, and when we lived here so long ago, when Egypt was paradise, but also think about what she is going through now, especially with the punishing late early Spring storms in NY continuing unabated for nearly a week.
It is Wednesday. The Cairo long-weekend people won’t be coming till tomorrow; the Moslems first, then the Copts on Saturday. I will be leaving this villa next week, and go to one right by sea for the last leg of my stay in Gouna. Hope the toe shit clears up by then.
It is difficult, almost the Arab burden, really, living amidst plump, Continentals and Northern bulldogs (complete with thick Manchester or impenetrable Gordie accents) who travel in insular pairs and have no interest in culture.
Going to Sea Cinema now and then doesn’t count, nor does figuring out how to gin up a Black and Tan with kits from your travel luggage.
I mean, by that — excuse me while I stuff some plums in my mouth — some cursory understanding of the Western canon (no, not the AR-15 version), sprinkled with perhaps a dollop of familiarity with all the usual third world literary resistance manifestos, supplemented by some passing acquaintance with, say, the Life and Death of The Strokes.
But the harshest Gouna ordeal is having to countenance the unending bruting of native complaints by largely uneducated people who are forced to live in a place where freedom is a mirage.
Then course — going up the social matrix — are those who parrot the catch phrases, dress and attitudes of those who despise them, or, at best, contemptuously relegate them to the second or third shelf of International Classism.
Just flip though the pages of the ridiculous Gouna Magazine, or turn to Channel 1 if you’re here, watch the airheads spout rubbish, and you will see what I mean.
They can never be what they are not, no matter how much money their parents have, no matter how pathetically the International School tries to teach their overprivileged children English, as the servants live in crappy, hot little quarters in El Bustan, six to a room, and the gibberish of Life as It Should Be is plastered around town.
There is so much to write about here, and I am speaking in general about the Middle East, but none that I shall publish in this blog. Despite a number of sites being blocked, I still am able to get a decent idea of what is actually going on around here, in the, yes, lands I grew up in.
Then I think of the Zouz, my beloved wife, stuck in FLA.
It is unbelievable to hear the sort of news coming out of America, and the vast amounts of former Soviet Union and Hebrew money from Israel corrupting the collection of scoundrels in the White House, them and of course their low-life associates.
The scope of corruption and incompetence under the so-called administration of the illegitimate Manchurian candidate is flabbergasting. It is as if Trump and his family and henchmen are out to eviscerate the United States, as Republicans in the Senate and House sit on their hands and dumbly applaud because the tax bill went through or gun control legislation has yet again been squelched. This, from a pathologically sick country that has the demented braggadocio to label any country that disagrees with it as a “rogue regime,” except of course for Mother Russia.
For my health, I will not write a thing here that gets to the real heart of the matter, meaning what is actually going on. In thinking about being an expat, my country — and America is my country, no matter what fuckface Trump implies about Arab-Americans — I will return in mid April.
And when I do, I shall not hold back on what I write — nice thing, that First Amendment.
You are a coward if you ditch your country when it is most in trouble, as Michael Caine once said in an interview.
So I will go back, and I will see what if the tide changes in the midterms. If it does not, after that, I am done — until the mad Orange pig and his family are escorted in chains to wherever they need to spend much of the rest of their lives. Maybe I will end up in the Lake District, or perhaps on the Left Bank somewhere.
In the meantime, I am thinking, too, of my son and grandson in Texas. Nice turnout, boys, keep it up, and let’s get rid of these leeches in the general.
Fuchs news (the original name in reality) is be shitting in their pants this morning; guess you only love conflict when things end up going your way.
Just wait till November.
This shit is only getting started.
Leaving Amerika 