e-Claire

Is It Art or Is It Virtual Mirroring?

Or: How I Learned to Stop Checking Under the Bed and Love Pinoccio.

Boy! Talk about a projective test; the flummery about Salam Pax rages on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

I remember clearly first running across Where is Raed? I was struck first by the dark nature of the life this man/boy was living - not feeling his work to be significant, longing for something, and trying to find it in friends and night life. He reminded me of friends I had when I was twenty-something and urban; that leaving-home-yet-seeking-home feeling. Genuine. I began to dig thru his archives and found references to the loss of someone very important to him, but could find no further details of this person's disappearance. Then I began to get clues that it was a *disappearance.* Oh.

I read on and found very few references to women other than his Mother and relatives - normal in a segregated society. Then I *got* the other key - that other piece that had rung so familiar to me; he's gay. Ah. That explained the sense of not fitting, of loss, of going nowhere-you-know.

I began to marvel at how alike he is to the young men I used to know who were in similar situations. Even though the culture is so different... Wait a minute... Are *urban*, *twenty-something*, *gay* all really so universal as to cross such disparate cultures? I doubt there would such a familiar feel from a rural writer who had never left the country, but Salam shares an apartment in Vienna with someone whose email address he gives. (Update: and who has interviewed him for an Austrian mag.) He has significant urban european in his cultural background. And in urban-euro, American pop culture and lingo is *hip*.

David Warren seems to have an investment in his premise that Salam is some sort of plant job on the side of Saddam's regime (see title) and set out to find data to support it. He did poorly. This para is the only bit I could find that is sort of on target: "[Salam] refers casually to pseudonymous friends, who are also children of the deposed Baathist elect. They all know their way around but, unlike their parents, have never carried the weight of responsibility. They were of a class, but not yet fully in it -- products of a very luxurious bubble." The snarky tone is not indicative of an objective reporter. Obviously, Salam is from a well placed family and he still lives at home - the custom in Iraq until, and often after, marriage. He has a satellite phone, Thuraya which gives us some insight into his geek-abilities. Salam is a hi-tech, well educated, westernized fella from a good family. Warren seems to be a twit with an ax to grind. I wonder what it is...

The long and the short of it is that I fail to see what the nefarious sting of this purported con could be. Perhaps Salam has not told us all, or has told us some outright BS. So what? He has never purported to be the Baghdad Insider. Seems to me to be another case of setting up an icon only for the pleasure of knocking it down again. Same ol', same ol'.

I still think the important facts and feel hang together sufficiently for me to say that Salam Pax is a *real boy*.

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