It’s a month past the solstice and the days are relentlessly hot and
sweaty. The monsoon arrived with its customary atmospheric lottery and I
watched soft quick rain showers barely cover the deck of our house while
other parts of town got bucketfuls. We need more. I water the plants
every day and still they lose ground. My last vacation – two weeks in
Kauai over the winter holiday season – seems like it was in another
lifetime. With so many days in a row where the temperature exceeds 100
-- perhaps a preview of things to come -- with politics getting so ugly
because of Iraq and immigration, with everybody I know seemingly
stressed, pressed, and oppressed, the armature of time has become a
wheel on a rack where we are stretched beyond reason, simply, I suspect,
because God was able to get away on vacation and leave his idiot
assistant in charge.
Just out of curiosity, where the Hell would God take a vacation?
Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain
La de da de de, la de da de da
It is 130 degrees in Baghdad during the month of August. I know because
I saw Tony Snow say that on TV. He used that to justify the Iraqi
parliament taking off the entire month of August, a bone-headed
utterance he later had to swallow. Most Americans realize that our
soldiers are wearing backpacks and protective armor in that same heat
and, unlike the members of parliament, they aren’t permitted to confine
their suffering to air conditioned accommodations in the Green Zone. I
count myself among the outraged Americans, yet I realize that the Iraqi
parliament will accomplish the same thing, whether they are on vacation
or in session. Not unlike our Congress.
I suggest a compromise. Let the Iraqi parliament take its vacation, but
leave life-size cardboard cutouts of each member within the chamber,
just as though they were really there. Train cameras on the cut-out
parliamentarians and report on them as though they were the real thing.
Maybe the members of parliament will begin to take their cardboard
cutouts seriously. Maybe they will even turn to shooting up their
enemies’ cardboard cutouts instead of the markets and mosques. If so,
they should take more vacations.
Charleston was once the rage, uh huh
History has turned the page, uh huh
History will eventually turn the page on America’s invasion and
occupation of Iraq. The present course is obviously unsustainable, for
political, military, and financial reasons. The military commitment has
always been insufficient and the public has abandoned the war. The
bigger concern is not how we will get out of Iraq, but what will be on
the next page. Will we leave behind a unified, stable Iraqi with a
democratic government? Will we leave a balkanized former Iraq, carved
into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd states? Whatever we leave behind will have
little or nothing to do with us. The Iraqis will fight it out among
themselves. All we did for them was to rid them of Saddam and unleash
their local demons.
And men still keep on marching off to war
The Democrats kept the Senate up all night to debate the war, and good
for them. That showed solidarity with protesters outside the capitol who
were also pulling an all-nighter. The other side, of course, denounced
the episode as a “publicity stunt,” which describes every deed in
Congress. It was brilliant of the Dems to put the Senate through that
kind of inconvenience because it was a semi-subtle reminder that most
Americans have not sacrificed a nanosecond of inconvenience during the
war. To most Americans, the war is just pictures on television (although
not of the returning dead and wounded). A reality show. So, the Senate
Democrats gave them another reality show, in real time, on live TV.
The beat goes on, the beat goes on
The Middle East has been an enigma since before the ink was dry on the
Old Testament. Early shoots in that region spawned vines that stretched
over continents and centuries, twisting and entwining, tearing, dying,
rotting, blooming, reaching, killing and teaching. Western civilization
poured from the Middle Eastern crucible like grain from a barrel. During
the Crusades, Mesopotamia pulled western Europe back into its maw. Now
it has reached across the ocean to lure in America. Our nation has
blundered into a trap that was baited more than nine centuries ago.
In the Middle East, we Americans are altar boys, and the priests are
really, really evil.
