What they cover up, from a Damascene school
There are many official postings on the walls of this Damascene kindergarten, primary, and secondary school, containing gems (or, at least, we are supposed to assume they are gems because they are on the wall) from aqwal so-and-so. I have always been suspicious of such postings, especially ones that assert positive aspects of a thing: I’m reminded here of the BlueStarPR posters around San Francisco that address many things about Israel, except the occupation. Even the new oil company advertisements, which never refer to oil production, but always to some environmental program or humanitarian assistance that the company in question claims to be responsible for, come to mind. It would not be necessary to desecrate our sensory landscape with these things, unless the points they made were not, at the very least, questionable.
But along with all these official items, are the unofficial and unauthorized ones that pop-up uncontrollably and unpredictably, and which official administrators no matter the setting are often tempted to paint over. So it is that the graffiti photographed above in this particular school, written on there by some daring child, from a more authentic collection of aqwal, will probably be erased some day, or maybe the perpetrator punished. Maybe if they cannot remove it they will simply cover it up with a cartoon telling the students how to think, or a periodic table.
Such an example makes the act of painting over seem innocent, or the unauthorized script whimsical: but something happened in Damascus last week, and it too, is being painted over. It is a classical official information control strategy to produce stories about a topic dealing with everything but the issue at stake: so rather than cover the slaughter of prisoners at Seydnaya Prison last week, the official Syrian news sources reported on a conference of Orthodox Assyrian Christian leaders in Seydnaya.
The truth, these days, it seems, can only be shared in whispers.
One Response to “What they cover up, from a Damascene school”
By saint on Jul 10, 2008
It is this way for ages, times goes and interviews with the smiling figures and the visits of dignitaries and the cover up by even the enemies of the State is all a play keep playing in front of people without faces and prisoners without heads. I wonder if this technological age will help in changing these pictures, all I can say, I hope.
On a funny note, they may be need some Pepsi to wake up, “ wake up people”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJEVxfWpm7c