John-Jahn's Prayer Beads & Universal Heartstrings

(M)an: Dude! This morning Rod Nordland reported in the New York Times that the Shiite cleric and leader of 170 million Shiites in the world, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, had one of his representatives in the Shiite Holy City of Karbala, Iraq, Ahmed Al-Safi, convey the Ayatollah’s message of encouragement for an inclusive government in Iraq that would accept the diverse political parties in Iraq and understand that he, the Ayatollah, did not mean to convey a message of sectarian strife and armament in his earlier statement calling for volunteers to unite against extremism.  

(D)ude: Man! I hope Civil Rights leaders from and following the era of Kennedy and LBJ can look inside their heart and own struggles and be able and willing to see how George Walker Bush’s Administration and the Republican Tea GOP since have carefully constructed to destroy the Middle East by handing power to a Shiite leader like Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki after invading Iraq and dismantling the Sunni leadership stronghold of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party’s Iraqi Regional Branch that spilt up in 1966 in middle of Lyndon Johnson’s Admin, although I stress President Eisenhower’s and then-Vice President Richard Nixon’s meddling within the Middle East with 1957’s Eisenhower Doctrine.   

M: Dude! The 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine was a failure because the United States of America’s Republican Party leadership in the White House at the time could not politely accept sharing world power with Russia who had interests in being able to use the Suez Canal in Egypt, which led to the rise and success of Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s meddling with both US and the Soviets under the guise of quote unquote positive neutrality that allowed Nasser to accept assistance from the Soviets, an action interpreted as a provocation by US.   

D: Man! What should the United States do today in response to Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani’s plea for inclusive government during Friday Prayers?

M: Dude! The American Press Corps needs to comprehend with sincerity the history of US and not do what the neoconservative branches of leadership in the United States are in the position and power to abuse for the sake of trying to come across as an obnoxious unparalleled superpower with no tolerance for the over fifty million refugees trapped inside slums on the outskirts of nations that have compassionately agreed to open their borders. We have slums inside the United States too, granted. However, the plight of the poor and working classers in the United States and the refugees abroad must bring American Voters to the voting booths this Election Day Tuesday, November 4, 2014, hence our entire nation towards the forefront of human consciousness in the new millennium.  

D: Man! Let’s not forget the Maronite Christians and the Muslims in Lebanon configuring a civil war between themselves due to the divide between pro-Western sentiments on the side of the Christian Lebanese President Camille Chamoun during the Suez Canal Crisis and the pro-United Arab Republic Sunni Muslim Lebanese Prime Minister Rashid Karami who aligned himself with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

M: Dude! The Maronite Church is named after Saint Maroun, a monastic priest and, later, hermit who practiced a lifestyle very similar to how Tibetan Buddhist monks attain enlightenment or Buddhahood for the sake of assisting and teaching sentient beings such as ourselves to achieve enlightenment despite the spiritual plaque within us that has accumulated due to our own past negative actions. But hope awaits us, for the Buddhist teacher doesn’t have this particular karmic hang-up himself or herself, making their end of the spiritual encounter totally free of fickleness.

D: Man! A read through of the 1958 Lebanon crisis on Wikipedia made my head spin and release epiphanies of many sorts, primarily that there are no failures in foreign policies in the new millennium, only challenges and frustrations that need to be addressed with the utmost sincerity and ill will towards none. The tragedies that result from a lack of seeing the similarities across cultures and peoples’ interests beyond the physical constraints like rank and race and gender, upset me a lot.     

M: Dude! Even after knowing our parishioner friend John-Jahn for over a- how long has it been since we’ve seen him anyways? What’s John-Jahn up to these days? Still traveling in circles around the globe and collecting prayer beads from religious shrines? It’s been four years since his lotto win and over four months since we’ve seen him.    

D: Man! Johnny’s choosing to call himself “John” in the Judeo-Christian spheres and “Jahn” in the predominantly Muslim spheres makes me wonder why the Congressional Republicans cannot be as accepting of diversity and goodhearted as John-Jahn. I still cannot get over how Johnny managed to pick up the word Jahn, or life that only differs by one vowel from John.

M: Dude! His physical endurance trip after trip is unbelievable! Where and how is he?  

D: Man! Johnny’s visiting Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and made the pilgrimage to see Christ the Redeemer, the statue of course, and wrote that the soccer match between the USA and Portugal will be this Sunday in Manaus, the city capital of the Northern Brazil state of Amazonas, but that he was planning too to attend Saturday’s soccer match between Argentina and Iran in the close by capital city of Belo Horizonte in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.   

M: Dude! He was planning too to attend? He was planning too to attend?  

D: Man! Jahn’s not a spendthrift. You’re certainly aware of the countless invites he’s sent which included travel and lodging accommodations. Remember Jahn’s pilgrimages to Karbala, Iraq and Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and the prayer beads from both he brought back?

M: Dude! Didn’t Jahn tell us how Muslim American Families depart the United States for Iraq so they can pray at the Karbala before departing for Saudi Arabia in order to carry out the Fifth Pillar of Islam that is Hajj, or the pilgrimage to Mecca, if  and when they are financially capable of making the journey?

D: Man! Yes. Jahn spoke of the way Sunni and Shiite Muslims coexist peacefully on the journeying. In fact, upon first traveling to Iraq and then Saudi Arabia, Jahn listened to a diversified collection of stories from fellow passengers and pilgrims on the way over and back, all of whom were concerned that Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Herbert Walker Bush, and Walker Bush had strategically setup militias and the militants in order to wipe out entire cultures. One passenger handed Jahn the 2005 classic entitled Strange Times, My Dear: The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature in which the editors and writers all spoke of how unknown and cruel the foreign policies of the George Walker Bush Admin had been up until then.     

M: Dude! I read two stories from that anthology too!

D: Man! I only read the introduction to the prose section by Nahid Mozaffari and was absolutely terrified of President George Walker Bush’s lies and censoring of the arts from Iranian literary powerhouses from 2001 onwards.

M: Dude! The Mirror by Mahmud Dowlatabadi, I’m suspecting, gave the Republican Tea GOP the strategy of voter fraud and suppression when it was published in 1999. That’s the way the Republican Tea GOP operates. First, pick up on injustices from the peoples you want to terrorize abroad, and secondly, import those injustices into, essentially, American Anarchy at home.

D: Man! In Nahid Mozaffari’s introduction, Iranian philosophers and activists actually express the shock of having a declared and celebrated democracy and superpower such as the United States of America inflicting so much damage onto comparatively much smaller nations in the Middle East. In fact, the social discourse throughout the history of Iranian literature has been amongst youth and the Iranian youth circa 2005 were hurt that a nation with a constitution like the United States of America and its Constitution could respond and react so undemocratically and violate the Iranian people’s humanity and integrity by not applying the Bill of Rights to all people around the globe.

M: Dude! That’s a perspective that I’ve overlooked, I am ashamed to admit. I guess I’m not as enlightened as I thought myself to have been. I felt the same way reading The Victory Chronicle of the Magi by Hushang Golshiri because the writer takes the reader  on a first hand trip through the making of a ghost town with what I can only describe as the living dead. It is essentially the days and nights of the living dead, people who are so torn by the unrest and violence of politics and war that they abandon their humanity in exchange for raw survival instincts where each must condition oneself to look past the tears of victims, the pleas of whom are saturated with a rich past of love and feeling between them and their now-perpetrating neighbors and friends.

D: Man! There are pleas in the anthology for US to open our hearts to healing and rebuilding, instead of selfishly demolishing and killing randomly abroad and then keeping the American public unaware of the facts like Vice President Dick Cheney and President George Walker Bush chose to do at the time this anthology was released.

M: Dude! What about the first amendment rights of Iranian and Iraqi youth? What about the abuse of the second amendment by George Walker Bush and Dick Cheney, Herbert Walker and Dan Quayle, Ronald Reagan and Herbert Walker Bush inside Iraq and Iran?