Today we stand on a precipice, gazing out over the Middle Eastern landscapes as dark new horizons of a global century envelop the desert in a wild, pulsating post-modern critique and listless faces drag their heels through the streets of Cairo and Tripoli in Yesterday's funeral procession. All the while, bad men dressed as soldiers exchange sweaty glances in the bowels of tomorrow as they plot their next move. As always, the great white hope looms in the background, reluctantly looking on as a self-parody of Kipling's half-hearted beacon of justice. What does the future hold for this troubled region in a world in which borders are nothing more than faded, black lines on dusty yellow papers stacked in the corner of the basement of what was?
It was Aime Cesaire who first said that "a civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization," and though his words have echoed through the empty halls of the Pentagon and Guantanamo for decades, business as usual carries on in the shadow of the Imperial Phallus of our nation's capital. No sooner had the "crests of foam" been carried out on history's strong molten back than a few measured mumbles trickled out of the side of Obama's trembling lips marking a new era. Will no one stand for property? Are we all transfixed in this moment of embarrassing ecstasy as everything we ever worked for slips through our fingers like grains of bitter sand? Now is not the time for romanticism. The sun is crowning on the banks of a new Euphrates and the new global century yawns in the distance.
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