Greetings from Marrakech!

I'm currently sitting in the new Morroccan internet cafe that just recently opened in my neighborhood. So far, I love the place. Their Morroccan coffee is delicious; bitter without being painful. Very smooth on the tongue. And their Internet is really and truly free, which always makes me happy. If they had hookahs to smoke here, I think I would be in heaven.

Ever since I disconnected my apartment from the Web, I've enjoyed the experience of communal Internet. It isn't fundamentally different going to a cafe and checking my e-mail on a computer than it was when I could check it at home, but there are subtle differences. It gets me out of the house more, for starters, which is the largest part of what I like about it.

The other day I met Bonnie for lunch and she handed me a copy of Fuck the South. I have to say, I found it very apt, but as someone who lived in the South for five years, I also feel a need to defend the people there. The South is a strange place; they never entirely have gotten over what happened after the Civil War (as evidenced by the fact that it's called the War of Northern Agression down there), and I can't honestly say I blame them. A thriving economy was destroyed by the war, and the North did near nothing afterward to help repair it and bring them into an economy that worked for them. And the Northern attitude that the South is just populated by a bunch of hicks doesn't really help to make them feel as though what we say is good for them. We are, in a lot of ways, a very divided country. Yeah, the North is arrogant. Yeah, we have a right to be, but that doesn't really mean that our arrogance is going to do anything other than further divide our country.

In the week and a half after the election, I was party to a series of e-mail conversations between a group of my former professors. One of them made the point that the Liberal attitude that everyone who isn't Liberal is an idiot and that we're morally and intellectually superior to them is just going to force the nation further to the right. No matter the fact that this attitude is correct--I will happily and loudly call anyone who believes that they have the right to make laws that will take away the freedom of everyone but themselves my moral inferior, and I will be right to do so--it does nothing to root out the problem of why they have a worldview that focuses on bigotted things. Instead, we condemn them, and in doing so we further divide the country.

I have no idea what the answer to this problem is. More listening on both sides would be my suggestion. More willingness to accept that bigots aren't created in a vacuum and that it is just as ignorant when one of us refuses to listen to them as it is when one of them refuses to listen to us. More humanism, less other isms. Man, I'm a hippy.


My continually failed efforts with the laptop hunt have finally come to a close with the purchase of a new IBM T20. It's a very nice computer, faster and smarter than my desktop, with a DVD drive that I can watch movies on. Well...I will be able to, anyway. I'm currently downloading a DVD codec for this very purpose. Hopefully, if all goes well, I'll be able to watch Eternal Sunshine... by the end of the night.

That's it. And happy Thanksgiving, one and all. In a few days, I'll fly home and celebrate the yearly ritual slaying of man's only natural predator: the turkey.