Explicit

He who thinks and thinks for himself, will always have a claim to thanks; it is no matter whether it be right or wrong, so as it be explicit. If it is right, it will serve as a guide to direct; if wrong, as a beacon to warn. – Jeremy Bentham

A lovely sunset picture of the Dead Sea and Israel (or Palestine?) in the distance, for your enjoyment. More on that later.

Wow, so Gaddafi’s dead. Movers informed me just as we got home from Arabic classes on Thursday, settling into our daily afternoon ritual of slumping into the living room sofa and losing ourselves in the Internet for a good hour. We both looked at each other in shock and then started speed-googling for any related news until I remembered that we had to pay the electric bill. So I took out nine dinars (about $13) and Movers followed me to our landlord’s house, since it would be somewhat awkward for me as a young, single, and unrelated woman to visit his place alone.

Of course, our landlord happily invited us in to watch the news on Al-Jazeera with him and his family. His wife served us bubbly orange soda on a gorgeously adorned tray, his sons shyly sat with us, and we stared in horror at the images we saw spread across the television screen. A blown up, somewhat blurry photo of Gaddafi with a gash in his left temple and a pathetic expression full of pain on his face. A video of Gaddafi’s second-in-command collapsed in the back of a pick-up, his face an eerie shade of blue, his eyes frozen in the horror of his death, a rugged gash torn deep into his neck. Would any of these images ever be publicly broadcast by a widely recognized news source in the states?

In broken Arabic, I explain to my landlord that we’d never see this kind of images on American news channels. They would be seen as too inappropriate, too gory.

My landlord raised his eyebrows in surprise and said in Arabic, “Really? Here, people need to see these images to know that what they are hearing is actually true. They need to see evidence.” Understandable.

I couldn’t help but continue to compare between cultures. I thought about all the gory violence in fictional movies that spring from Hollywood. There’s no less violence that’s publicly accessible. But, with the exception of what you can find on the internet, it’s mostly fictional. So, if America is already very violence-oriented, if any 11-year-old could youtube Saddam Hussein’s hanging and if Americans flood the movie theatres to see Saw 8, why is real violence so taboo in the news? Food for thought.

Speaking of explicit, my Arabic teachers love nothing more but to have us dissect and study the most controversial topics. My “Arabic in the Media” professor loves to give us fiery articles to translate, and then asks us to debate the topic. I squirmed when we debated whether domestic violence should be stopped, and whether the government has any right to step in. I felt even worse when I had to debate whether the hijab is wrong, especially when my teacher herself covers her head. My “Arabic in Literature” professor asked us this week about our opinions on the death penalty. All the students from Western countries were against the death penalty while all the students from so-called Eastern countries were for it. The conversation got messy fast, and ended with one student, an older man from Turkey, claiming in Arabic that, “You don’t understand because you don’t have children.” I was waiting for about half the class to start ripping open their shirts and throwing chairs. “So, next topic,” my teacher eagerly interjected.

Controversy is everywhere in this country, and people love it. From women’s rights to human rights to immigration to religion, I observe something that would incite hours of debate if I brought it up among a group of Jordanians. Or a group of expats, for that matter. Because the type of foreigners who are attracted to the Middle East love drama. I’ll probably go into the different types of expats (and Americans, specifically) that find themselves enamored by the Middle East. It’s quite a funny phenomenon. But that’s for a later post.