Thursday, June 26, 2003
The Rhetoric Channel
Salam Pax's friend G. in Baghdad is testing out the "rhetoric channel" against the "reality channel" in the streets and homes of Baghdad. Something we, in the West, don't know so much about is the mind-set that can occur under a totalitarian regime:
...every one of us here in Iraq has this small plug in police officer back in his mined which will monitor all our movements an talking even now almost 3 month after the American tanks roared into Baghdad.
...how to liberate our selves from the secret police mechanisms nesting in our brains, this liberation will not be achieve by American tanks, nor by a self-denial flagellation process
Its not that we r desperately waiting to indulge our selves in the global world of Starbucks and MacDonald's--which I think we are--but for most of the people they just want to live properly without fear, hunger, or secret police [June 25]
That is a hell of a lot of healing that the Iraqi people are doing. Think of the effects on hostages or kidnap victims. There are reams of literature and studies on the process of adjustment the human psyche goes through to cope with sudden or severe loss of control over one's own life. A goodly portion of the population has known no other way of being. Even those who remember how it was before have adjusted intolerably far just to be able to keep going every day; to eat and feed their family. Considering all that was, and all that must be done to recreate a whole country, a whole society, I think they're doing a damn good job not running in circles and barking at the moon. Sure there are conspiracy theories [you should hear some of my neighbors...] and the people from the Ministry of Information demonstrated last week demanding to return to their old jobs [a little vagueness on some concepts] but the antiquities are being returned to the Museums, there is an Art Exhibit open in Baghdad, and life is becoming more self-directed.
If we were in Beirut, grozny or Tehran with the same set of events we just had in Baghdad, We would have half of the politicians around us assassinated by rival factions, at least 10 suicide bombers, half of the American journalists here taken as hostages and sectarian /ethnic fighting's in the streets. Instead of that what we see around us, is a city going back to life some times grudgingly but othe times with fast speed. [June 11]
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