It's Friday. For the first time in the two weeks since I came back from vacation in Japan, I am going to get a day off tomorrow.
The office manager has come back to our office from a trip to Hong Kong. For that reason, I started singing the opening hook from 'Without Me' by Eminem, as I was meeting my coworker in the back pit. Right around the beginning of my walk back down the corridor to the section of the office that holds my desk, 'Without Me' somehow morphed into the chorus of 'Rock the Casbah', which for me always had a really nice electro house sound, mainly in the choral voices and the jangly guitar hook (I think there is probably also a house version floating around out there that I have heard).
Arriving back at my desk I opened up youtube and started watching the video, which features the Clash playing and dancing in front of oil derricks, as well as an obvious arab character(wearing a thawb and keffiyeh) and a jewish character(black suit, payoth, beard) taking a ride together, swilling champagne, and going to Burger King.
The first thing that I thought of while watching the video was my friend's description of his trip to Dubai. My friend went to a nightclub- however, of course, one of the main pastimes in nightclubs is drinking, which is forbidden by Islam. My friend said that instead of drinking vodka and redbull, clubbers just consumed straight redbull. He described a conversation that he had with some guy who he met in the club:
Guy: Ohh man I am so wasted, this club is great!
Friend: Oh really, what are you drinking?
Guy: Redbull man!
Wikipedia says that the song may be alluding to the banning of rock music in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeni. It was also popular with the US armed forces during the first gulf war. I wonder if similar songs were written during the most recent invasion of Iraq, and also what soldiers are listening to these days.
I met some navy people the last time I was in Tokyo. They were partying at a club in Shibuya, and quite a lot of them were eating pills and rather high. I gathered that they were stationed at the naval base near Yokohama, and a bit bored with life. They were pretty nice and friendly people on the whole, even though I find the idea of people in my country's armed forces taking recreational drugs to be ever so slightly disconcerting. On the one hand, being a soldier is a pretty high-stress job, so I can understand wanting to blow off some steam, but on the other hand, I also want the people whose fingers are on the buttons, triggers, etc. of instruments of death to be able to think clearly, and of course, recreational drug use doesn't particularly encourage clear thinking in my book. Circumstantial book/movie evidence suggests that a fair part of the US army in Vietnam was smoking quite a fair bit, and also I remember hearing about blue-on-blue incidents in recent years partially caused by poor perception due to Air Force pilot use of (airforce-supplied) stimulants to keep awake during long flights; however, wikipedia has litte to say about either.
My coworker stopped by my desk when I was watching the Rock the Casbah video and we had a short chat. He is a Queen fan but doesn't know the Clash. He also saw the joke Hilary Clinton card that my sister sent me (currently framed on my desk, it is a joke because HRC's right nipple is clearly visible through her jacket), which precipitated a short discussion about presidential politics. My coworker asked directly who I was planning on voting for, 'the woman or the black man?', my answer being that I would vote for whoever won the democratic primary as I think that the Iraq conflict was too costly for the US and therefore economically unsustainable. One of the clear split lines in my mind regarding the democratic and republican candidates is that the democrats are more for lessening of US involvement in Iraq, and this is something I am for.
In former times I would also have said that I didn't want my hypothetical tax money (were I living in the US and paying taxes) being spent for the war, but I now know that actually my tax money is spent on paying the interest on the national debt, so no worries there. I can only wonder what my tax money goes to in China, but of course I can say with more than half seriousness that it is probably spent on some combination of whisky, green tea, and mistresses for a Chinese official.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment