Poster boys

By now you've probably seen this poster in some newspaper or on a TV news broadcast somewhere (this picture is from nytimes.com). It depicts Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah - three men who President Bush has not invited to Thanksgiving dinner.

When I was in Damascus in July, this poster was for sale in roughly a million store windows, and during the war in Lebanon it came to symbolize the unity of the Arab world against the U.S.-Israeli alliance.

I took home one of these posters as a gift from a colleague I worked with in Lebanon. It had been sitting under a pile of junk in my office for months, and this week I finally had it properly mounted - politics aside, I think it's a great souvenir. I picked it up today from an art shop, and there was an American (or maybe Canadian) couple there looking at paintings of Maasai warriors.

I had my back to them as I collected the poster, but suddenly I could tell they weren't looking at Maasai anymore. I heard one whispering to the other.

"Where did you get that?" the woman asked me.

"Uh, from a friend," I said. "In Lebanon."

"Oh." Pause. "Where are you from?"

"Uh, California."

"Oh." Longer pause. The man looked concerned. The woman looked slightly disgusted.

I didn't feel like getting into a discussion with these vacationing strangers about irony. I kind of smiled at them, got my change and left the shop. After some thought I elected not to bring it to my office in town, and instead I've put it next to my desk at home, where very few people will probably see it. Probably better that way. I still think it's a great souvenir.

Yes, I'm strapped. Don't worry about it.

An unsettling number of buildings in downtown Nairobi employ guards with metal-detecting wands who give you the once-over before you can enter. (I know that's supposed to make me feel safer inside the building, but as Chris Rock said, "what about all those [individuals] waiting outside with guns? They know you ain't got one.")

 

More unsettling is the fact that most of these guards don't really seem to understand the purpose of the metal detector. Every time I walk into the Barclays Plaza building next to my office, I get wanded, and it always goes off. The first time this happened, I went to take my keys and cell phone out of my pockets, but the guard had already moved on to the guy behind me. He didn't seem to care that I might be carrying. Soon I got the routine - walk up, get the wand, listen for two loud beeps to ensure the batteries are working, then proceed inside with your semiautomatic weapon.

 

I doubt anyone is going to go postal inside the Barclays Plaza building - although it's one of the busiest commercial blocks in town and houses a major Kenya Airways office, so perhaps I shouldn't be so sure. But as I went through the metal-detector charade for the hundredth time this afternoon, it reminded me of the warning issued last week by the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi of "extremist elements" targeting public places in Kenya and Ethiopia. (This was supposed to have something to do with new threats from the Islamic hardliners now running Somalia, but a lot of Somalia-watchers in Kenya didn't give it a lot of credence - some thought it was a bit of fear-mongering to "radicalize" the Islamists.)

 

Whatever the impetus for the warning, there are days when it's easy to remember that downtown Nairobi was the site of a terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy only a few short years ago. Despite the presence of known radicals inside the country, porous borders and the bad neighborhood Kenya lives in, the government hasn't done anything to convince its residents or the outside world that it's serious about extremist violence.

 

Seeing this takes just one trip to the domestic airport, where planes and passengers come and go with seemingly no oversight. Last month, when I flew back from a trip to the Somalia border, I wore a purposeful look and marched from the airplane to my waiting taxi in two minutes flat.

 

It's easy enough to feel secure in this country if you're a rich person living behind high walls and electric fences with 24-hour armed guards. But if you pay even a little attention, that feeling doesn't extend very far.

Vote today

I hope everyone reading this in the U.S. is able to go out and vote today. I've covered a couple of elections this year in a couple of desperately poor countries, Uganda and Congo. In both countries, turnout easily topped 50 percent. In Congo last month, some people walked miles barefoot in the rain to vote, babies strapped to their backs, having not eaten a decent meal in days or weeks. Maybe you can't compare. But Americans really have no excuse.

 

I say this, and yet I must admit - I didn't vote in this election. I kind of have an excuse, but basically I didn't get my act together in time and by the time I started hunting around online to get an absentee ballot mailed here, it was too late. I don't take much consolation in the fact that my Congressional district is "safe" (how many of them really aren't?). But I'm signing up now for 2008 - not gonna miss that one.

 

Dan Rather is apparently lending his election night wit and wisdom to Jon Stewart on Comedy Central - which is a great bit of casting and sounds like the most entertaining and informative way possible to ring in the new Congress.