Here’s an article that probes that American concern, anguish really, about war, peace, and freedom, and the death of half a million Iraqis, and the flight of at least two million so far. And - impressively - it turns out that the big victims here, the real victims, are Americans. The stories of going to Europe and being victimized are just heartbreaking. People, good people, are being treated meanly! In Europe!
An excerpt:
“Jacqie Venable, a 40-year-old music producer, was wearing a beret and jeans. She said she wasn’t wearing underwear.
She said the war in Iraq was meant to happen “karmically.”
“In my spiritual picture, it has to do with karma,” she said. “Everything that happens in life, to each of us, is what we call into our space. Everything comes full circle. So right now, it’s going to work out to whatever it works out to be. It might be happy for me and not happy for you.
“The people who are there fighting—it’s their journey. This is our journey,” she continued. “People are dying all around the world. Forget Iraq—they’re dying in this country. And their parents are suffering with them, and our parents suffer for us because we’re at Bungalow. There is no separation in the trauma.”
The guy who wrote it, incidentally, George Gurley, also did the drooling piece over Ann Coulter in the Obs.
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4 comments:
Gurley's story was funny, for a bit, but turned malodorous pretty quickly. Arch yuppie contempt for contemptible, vapid yuppies has a short shelf life. They'll reliably carve out their own entrails every time, while he plays at being the detached haruspex. He's done for Jacqie Venable what he did for Ann Coulter, made her part of his aggravating, demoralizing freakshow.
Put another way, a cleverer Pantaloon snarking at the antics of the dimbulb Pantaloons is not funny. He can't play the Pierrot -- too unsympathetic -- and he looks like an idiot when he makes a public display of stuffing himself into Harlequin's costume.
Mistah Scruggs, I have to agree about Gurley's attitudinizing. Nevertheless, it is an interesting sociological example of how people in this country are surviving our long long long war, World War IV and the Cold War combined. I was heartened that - like Londoners in the Blitz - many of them are showing the stiff upper lip. I think sampling many social levels - from hot clubs to bank lines - to see how Americans are surviving has a great deal of interest. Especially, I imagine, if you are Iraqi. Wouldn't you want to compare notes with your great allies, to get all spirited about your joint journey through the horrors of conflict?
"Wouldn't you want to compare notes with your great allies, to get all spirited about your joint journey through the horrors of conflict?"
Probably not. The odds, in such circumstances, are that I'd be too busy, what with the funerals, caring for the long-term disabled and trying not to get killed by my ex-neighbors. Besides, the kidnapping ways and enema games of the private military "contractors" tell their whole story. On the other hand, as a youngish second generation exile, perhaps in Europe somewhere, facing the reality that even with a degree I'm still a "raghead" and will always be one, facing the taunts of wingnuts who think goading their victims is an essential component of "Enlightenment Values" . . . I think I'd find Pantaloon's vapid yuppies very interesting.
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