Friday Mishmash Extravaganza and Swap-Meet

(Full disclosure: I don't know what a swap-meet is, exactly. It just sounds good)

All sorts of goodies for you today! (and I didn't forget about the second part of Mere's question, I promise)

Up first, we've got a MentalFloss article on Yemen (if you don't occasionally read Mental_Floss, you should--check out the recurring Strange Geographies and Talking Pictures articles, for a start). If only this article had been posted a few days earlier, I could've spared myself the trouble of the all the typing I did. :-) I think this very reader-friendly article complements mine quite nicely, because Edwards focuses more on social and cultural aspects of Yemen than its political history, while still pointing out the main problems--er, "opportunities" that exist there.

Next we've got an interesting bit of journalism from Vogue. I don't typically read it because I'm a Philistine when it comes to high fashion, but several months ago I flipped through an issue at the Caswell House. And who should be the feature of a glowingly complimentary feature? Asma al-Assad--wife of Bashar. That link is to the largest excerpt of the article I could find (including an interesting one of Bashar playing with his kids). After initially defending their story, Vogue apparently took the article off their website. Reading the article for the first time, I couldn't help thinking that, in polite (though not scholarly) terms, the author had no clue what she was talking about. She talks about how Mrs. Al-Assad  wants "to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen [and] encourage them to engage in what she calls ‘active citizenship.'" Interesting. Bashar came to power in 2000. The "Damascus Spring" ended 10 years ago (link to my Syria Background post). And as this Foreign Affairs article points out, the regime has not passed "a single meaningful act of reform."* Basically, if the author would have done her homework, she'd have seen that Bashar al-Assad's regime has been spouting the same platitudes about reform for a decade, all the while jailing activists and employing a huge intelligence apparatus to spy on citizens--and now using tanks and troops to crush protests. Check out the Syrian regime's latest response to "active citizenship" here (al-Jazeera English article on today's protests).

*I don't count the repeal of the emergency law as "meaningful," since no discernible change on the ground has materialized. Intelligence officials are still operating with impunity and protests are still effectively illegal. The disbanding of the state security courts seems unlikely to prove meaningful either. The regime simply has too many means of arresting and holding people without ever bringing them to trial.

Finally (for now), a quick bit about music and the Arab Spring. I plan to write a longer piece eventually, but for now I just wanted to introduce a recent interest of mine: Arabic rap. I used to harbor ill-will toward modern rap in general, because I thought it was all materialistic, degrading to women, and serving to promote drugs and gangs. Then I dragged myself to an Omar Offendum (Syrian-American poet/rapper) concert, and I saw things completely differently. In the work of many contemporary Arab rappers, I see a return to what rap was meant to be as an art form: a medium for a meaningful (gee I'm using that word a lot today) message.  Here are some examples (NPR article with embedded Youtube videos). And here is an al-Jazeera English interview with Omar Offendum about his #Jan25 collaboration.

Also, as a matter of housekeeping, a couple of people have told me they can't post comments. I tried to fix it, but is that still the case?

More later!