TEST: The sad decline of Kuwaiti theatre

Last week I had the misfortune of attending "Qannas Khaitan", a so-called satirical play which got rave reviews from almost everyone who went to see it. Maybe it's just me but I found myself fighting the urge to scream at the actors to just SHUT THE FUCK UP! It was so beyond awful, and such a collosal letdown. It wouldn't have been so bad if I had gone with low expectations, but as everybody kept saying it was a return to the glory days of Kuwaiti theatre in the 70s, I went expecting a solid piece with an actual narrative. Instead, the once mighty Hussein Abdul-Reda and Hayat Al-Fahad were reduced to crass, vulgar jokes that were slapped onto the script for no apparent reason. It was just gratuitous vulgarity that added nothing to the story... well, what little story there was in the first place.

I squirmed in my seat during the first act, but still kept my hopes up for a better second act. Alas, it was even worse. I sat there, paralyzed, staring at the stage and unable to get up and leave, in total shock at the level to which two of Kuwait's leading actors had sunk. Most people seemed to like the tough "jokes" criticizing one current political scenario after the other, but they were done in such a crude and primitive way, where the actors would just lecture about the issues. How pathetic that the so-called playwright couldn't even create any scenes to embody and address any particular issue.

Is it just me? Are my standards too high? Am I being a snob? I don't think so... one viewing of any of the great plays of the 70s and 80s will confirm my opinions. Of course, I went as a guest of a friend who was kind enough to invite me. Had I known ahead of time that the play had been written and produced by the God-awful Fajer Al-Sa3eed I would have declined the invitation and stayed home. That woman has produced some of the worst trash to make its way onto Kuwait's TV and stage.

The Al-Watan columnist Fouad Al-Hashem was also in attendance that night, and I had hoped that someone like him with a sharp eye for satire and quality arts would rip the play to shreds in his column. Boy was I was wrong!! The man raved about it - I was tempted to send him a letter asking him if we were indeed at the same play or if he was on some controlled substance (and where I could get some!). This just confirms the long standing rumours that Al-Watan's editorial staff are under strict instructions not to write anything negative about Ms. Al-Saeed, no matter how blatantly awful her output..... Kind of like Rolling Stone magazine's relationship with Yoko Ono :-P

And so it begins...... the war that was ostensibly fought to make the world a safer place has, instead, aggravated the already deranged lunatics of Al-Qaeda.



A Saudi dissident, exiled in the UK, says that even US troop withdrawal from Saudi Arabia is too little too late, and will not save the Saudi regime.

I see Salam Pax is back on the air, or on the "blogsphere" as it were... Glad to see he is safe!

This is hysterical. On David Letterman's nightly Top Ten List, here are the Top Ten President Bush Excuses For Not Finding Weapons of Mass Destruction

10. "We've only looked through 99% of the country"

9. "We spent entire budget making those playing cards"

8. "Containers are labeled in some crazy language"

7. "They must have been stolen by some of them evil X-Men mutants"

6. "Did I say Iraq has weapons of mass destruction? I meant they have goats"

5. "How are we supposed to find weapons of mass destruction when we can't even find Cheney?"

4. "Still screwed up because of Daylight Savings Time"

3. "When you're trying to find something, it's always in the last place you look, am I right, people?"

2. "Let's face it -- I ain't exactly a genius"

1. "Geraldo took them"

I can't decide if I should smile at this story or roll my eyes at the thought of a French pastry chef being flown from Kuwait to Baghdad to prepare meals for 350 Iraqi and American delegates convening in Baghdad to map out Iraq's future. I'm not familiar with the Crowne Plaza hotel's cuisine, save for the excellent sushi, so I can't really comment much.

As for "suffering through fine dinners with nothing more than bootleg homemade wine"... Zut alors! Il faut aller a l'ambassade Francaise, ou il y a plein de bon vin!!

It's been a while, but I had to comment on the mass graves found outside Najaf and near Babylon with scores of human remains - all victims of Saddam's regime.



I saw the most gruesome images on TV last night, worse than these pictures. I had to flip the channel when a young woman whose brother was killed by Saddam's thugs began wailing out of control. It was too painful to watch.

I wasn't aware that Saddam's minister of information Mohamed Saeed Al-Sahaf was not on the deck of cards of 55 most wanted. You may recall that after running through the entire list my eyes glazed over and I couldn't tell one from the other, so I must have missed that. Anyway, it seems that he's been trying to surrender to US forces in Baghdad, but since he's not on the most wanted list.. they refused to arrest him.



It's funny and sad at the same time. While we all enjoyed his ridiculous statements during the war, don't believe for one minute that he actually meant everything he said. You could tell from his eyes that he knew he wasn't making any sense, and that he was speaking with a gun pointed at his head from behind the scenes.

Who needs Las Vegas when we have our own Sin City to our north? I don't know where this reporter got his information from, but Baghdad was never a "conservative" city and all kinds of vice flourished regularly under Saddam's watch.



In any case, it makes for entertaining reading and you can't help but smile at Baghdad residents' new found freedom; freedom to be as bad or as good as they want!

Sometimes I wonder how come if Osama Bin Laden was so hell-bent on getting the US out of Arab soil, he would pull off the one event guaranteed to step up US presence in the region? Why would he do something akin to an invitation?

Think about the US reaction to 9/11: First bomb Afghanistan where Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda is hiding, then wage war on Saddam who is supposedly connected to Al-Qaeda. Then after taking over Iraq, pull out the troops quietly from Saudi Arabia to Qatar, thus getting out of Bin Laden's hair yet maintaining presence in the Gulf ...... cigars for everyone!!

Now if that wasn't a whopping conspiracy theory, I don't know what is!

The "First Strike Era" is now upon us, according to Donald Rumsfeld - he of the "YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!" approach to international relations, to quote Jon Stewart. This means that the US "has entered a new era in which it must pre-emptively seek out and prevent attacks by terrorists and terrorist states".

Of course, this may have the reverse effect of pissing off even more countries and driving more people crazy enough to contemplate more terrorist attacks against the US. But why quibble?

This is bad.... seriously bad. It's everyone's worst nightmare come to life. I don't even want to think about the repercussions, nor can I bear to hear some Pentagon flack dismiss its importance, as will surely happen.

It seems my friends at QHATE have called it a day.... Blogging is time consuming and exhausting. I feel their pain. We all started in the frenzy of the days leading up to and then during the war and we were energized by the tumultuous events. There was so much going on and so much to talk about. But not being professional writers who do this for a living, we were bound to get tired sooner or later. I'm surprised I lasted this long, and that I ever had it in me to start a blog in the first place!

I'm not going to stop it yet, but I will be slowing down.. and I might start a new random, general interest blog where I can talk about anything, not just politics, and at my own pace.

Hmm... Christopher Hitchens says Ahmad Chalabi isn't as bad as he's made out to be. He may have a point. Iraq could do a lot worse. And it has!

Today is Saddam's birthday. He would be 66 if he was alive. I want to see how the residents of Baghdad commemorate this day. Reports say that many Iraqis, cowed by fear and still not used to the freedom suddenly thrust upon them, are convinced he's planning one last birthday surprise before he goes down in flames.

In the past, his birthday was a week-long celebration of his "great achievements" with parades, poems and more portraits and statues erected for the occasion all around Iraq. Bureaucrats were forced to celebrate with cakes and balloons. Schools had the week off. Iraqi TV had round the clock coverage of the celebrations.... I remember a few months before the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, a friend of mine was enthralled by the whole spectacle and would force us to sit through the ceremonies. I used to yell at him to turn it off and that this lunatic had killed and tortured thousands of Iraqis and that we were probably next!

Couldn't access Blogger Pro all day today for some reason.... Anyway, NY Times arts critic Frank Rich has a sobering article about the loss of Iraqi heritage in the looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. Many have downplayed the importance of this tragedy and tried to pass the blame to wherever it might stick, but lost amidst all the finger-pointing is the fact that many of Bush's religious buddies will have lots to cry over. "Most of the early chapters of Genesis are believed to have been set in what only recently has been known as Iraq".

That'll go down well at the next White House Bible study...

I'm repeating this entry from Joe Conason, in full:
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"In the continuing absence of Saddam Hussein and his sons, Tariq Aziz is an important symbol of the defeated regime and a potential scapegoat for its worst crimes (despite his low rank in the army's card deck). It is also conceivable, if unlikely, that he knows where his old boss might be hiding -- although Saddam didn't survive this long by ignoring the problem of a squealer being captured.

But the evil dictator may not be the only figure worried by what the suddenly retired foreign minister could blab. If his memory is as good as his English, the cigar-chomping Aziz will recall events and personalities from the regime's long courtship with the West. For example, he may remember the day in March 1984 when Donald Rumsfeld dropped by as an envoy from the Reagan administration. At the time, Rummy's stated agenda was the Iran-Iraq war (in which our government armed and encouraged both sides), as well as "bilateral relations and the Middle East situation," according to the Associated Press. But researchers at the Institute for Policy Studies have uncovered a cache of documents that suggest his real aim was to convince Saddam to approve a new oil pipeline -- to be constructed by Bechtel! -- between Iraq and Jordan.

Once Aziz gets started about the good old days, he may also remember the time when an associate of Henry Kissinger visited with Saddam himself -- as part of a corporate delegation sponsored by the U.S.-Iraq Business Forum -- to figure out ways to reschedule the regime's debt and arrange more imports. The forum was actually a thinly veiled lobbying outfit, sponsored and operated by the Iraqi foreign ministry through its embassy in Washington.

No doubt Aziz knows about matters embarrassing to the French, Germans, Russian and British, too. There will probably be no reporter embedded deeply enough to speak with him for a long while."
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This like something out of a bad movie... next thing you know, he'll die in an "accident".

I always thought the "pack of cards" approach to capturing Saddam and his cronies was a bit silly, but it seems to be working. Now when they're done, they should start with this new pack. And it looks like like the search for lost treasures can start everywhere but in Iraq!

By the way, for those of you visiting from overseas, our weekends in Kuwait are on Thursday and Friday, with Friday being our "Sabbath". That's why you'll notice a slowdown in my blogging and it will just get "worse" as summer creeps in and I spend my weekends outdoors... Which brings me to the question of how long I should continue with this blog.. As you may recall, I started it on the eve of the war and there was so much going on that I wanted to write about. Otherwise, I never thought I had it in me to write everyday - a mixture of apathy and a fairly normal life, certainly not worth writing about.

There are still many Iraq-related issues to discuss, but I feel that we've now entered the "cerebral" phase, i.e. "thinking" about Iraq's present and future which - frankly - I'm not equipped to do! So expect this blog to continue until I run out of steam ;-)

So I took a day off yesterday... it was too nice and I had a party at home. When word came in that Tareq Aziz had given himself up, a buzz went through the crowd and it was even more reason to party and have fun. We'll wait to see how his story unfolds. It's interesting that he surrendered instead of getting caught, and I bet he'll have valuable information on Saddam's whereabouts... then again, maybe not

Here's an article that is causing a great amount of hair pulling and vein popping among America's more extreme right wing media figures (Savage, O'Reilly..etc.). It calls on all those who opposed the war to lay down their misgivings and celebrate the freedom of an oppressed nation, finally rid of a great evil. Yet the writer also confesses to feelings of guilt over wishing things would go wrong just to vindicate his pessimism. It's a very well-written article that presents a compelling argument, even if I don't fully agree with it.

Please take the time to read it carefully and S-L-O-W-L-Y. If you find yourself scratching your head, go back and read it again. Oh, and please spare me the commentary if you have no interest in reading it.