Babylon's Burning

Each morning, when I hear of the latest bloodshed in Iraq on NPR and after all these years of car bombs, suicide bombs, death-squad-sectarian killings, I wonder how can there be anyone left standing in Baghdad to kill? Seriously. During the months of September and October, the UN has recorded over 5,000 civilian deaths in Baghdad alone (7,000 througout all of Iraq). As occupiers, that's a lot of blood on our hands.

While the White House is splitting hairs over whether or not the situation on the ground is a civil war or not (how about spending some time figuring out how to fix things, instead of managing the public's perception of the war?), here's a pretty grim assessment from CNN:

KITTY PILGRIM, CNN ANCHOR: Michael Ware reports from the Iraqi capital tonight.

And Michael, the Iraqi government and the U.S. military in Baghdad keep saying this is not a civil war. What are you seeing?

MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, firstly, let me say, perhaps it's easier to deny that this is a civil war, when essentially you live in the most heavily fortified place in the country within the Green Zone, which is true of both the prime minister, the national security adviser for Iraq and, of course, the top U.S. military commanders. However, for the people living on the streets, for Iraqis in their homes, if this is not civil war, or a form of it, then they do not want to see what one really looks like.

This is what we're talking about. We're talking about Sunni neighborhoods shelling Shia neighborhoods, and Shia neighborhoods shelling back.

We're having Sunni communities dig fighting positions to protect their streets. We're seeing Sunni extremists plunging car bombs into heavily-populated Shia marketplaces. We're seeing institutionalized Shia death squads in legitimate police and national police commando uniforms going in, systematically, to Sunni homes in the middle of the night and dragging them out, never to be seen again.

I mean, if this is not civil war, where there is, on average, 40 to 50 tortured, mutilated, executed bodies showing up on the capital streets each morning, where we have thousands of unaccounted for dead bodies mounting up every month, and where the list of those who have simply disappeared for the sake of the fact that they have the wrong name, a name that is either Sunni or Shia, so much so that we have people getting dual identity cards, where parents cannot send their children to school, because they have to cross a sectarian line, then, goodness, me, I don't want to see what a civil war looks like either if this isn't one.

Being the good Americans that we are, we don't really care about something like the carnage in Iraq unless it directly affects us (from Bob Herbert's NYT column relating to Black Friday):

Iraq burns. We shop. The Americans dying in Iraq are barely mentioned in the press anymore. They warrant maybe one sentence in a long roundup article out of Baghdad, or a passing reference — no longer than a few seconds — in a television news account of the latest political ditherings.

Since the vast majority of Americans do not want anything to do with the military or the war, the burden of fighting has fallen on a small cadre of volunteers who are being sent into the war zone again and again. Nearly 3,000 have been killed, and many thousands more have been maimed.

The war has now lasted as long as the American involvement in World War II. But there is no sense of collective sacrifice in this war, no shared burden of responsibility. The soldiers in Iraq are fighting, suffering and dying in a war in which there are no clear objectives and no end in sight, and which a majority of Americans do not support.

They are dying anonymously and pointlessly, while the rest of us are free to buckle ourselves into the family vehicle and head off to the malls and shop.

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The title of this post is from The Ruts' song of the same name.

Stop Making Sense

Even though the return of the Dems to power in Congress is a victory for reasonable and sane people everywhere, Bush still has ways to mess with people's lives.

For instance, Dubya just hired Dr. Eric Keroack--who has dedicated his life to discouraging women from using birth control--as the new deputy assistant secretary of population affairs within the Department of Health and Human Services. His primary responsiblity in this position is to oversee the Federal Title X family-planning program, which has a federal mandate to provide information and access to birth control, as well as pregnancy tests, and abortion counseling/referrals (the Feds don't pay for abortions).

File this bit of perniciousness under: War is Peace, and Work will Make You Free (Arbeit Macht Frei). Here are the shameful details.

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The lyric above is from the Talking Heads' song "Girlfriend is Better," found on "Speaking in Tongues."

Dance Like a Monkey

Woke up the other morning last weekend in a haze and was making breakfast for my daughter when I thought I saw something dart out from behind the garbage can. Considering that my eyes were barely open, I wrote it off as some sort of optical illusion, a trick of my mind. But, just in case, I looked around the corner of the stove--the direction that whatever it was went--and saw a tail hanging out from behind the back of the oven...

I've lived with roaches and mice before, though not in our current apartment and not with kids. So, I'm a little freaked out, but figure that the mouse must have come in under the service door in our kitchen and was headed out that way (the apartment below us is being renovated and there is other construction throughout the building, and that always stirs up the critters). As I'm pouring my cereal, I see the mouse dash out past the garbage can (my reaction is to jump about a foot in the air, sending raisin bran everywhere) and head for the living room. I assume that it ran under the radiator (where there must be a hole in the floor), but when I grab a flashlight and sweep the light under there I see nothing. I don't mention this to my wife.

While she's out, I take the radiator cover off, find a hole large enough for a mouse next to the radiator pipe that goes into the floor, and plug up the gap with some spackle. My daughter asks me what's going on and I tell her, and she's not phased by this in the least. She knows that mice poop everywhere and belong in cages if they're inside, so she thinks this is a good idea.

I also decide to check the under the radiator cover in the kids room--and find a gi-normous hole in the wood floor, as well as a few mouse poops. Damn! I drag the kids out to the grocery store for steel wool and mouse traps, and then stuff the Brillo into the hole, seal it up, and set out the traps (the nasty glue kind--I know, they're horrible and less humane than the snappy ones, but I hate setting them).

In the our first post-college apartment that we shared with two other friends--a crappy railroad on the top floor of a nasty tenement--we were away for the weekend and came back to learn that our roomies had caught something like 13 mice (!) while we were gone. The landlord had begun fixing up the apartment beneath us and those suckers came pouring out of the walls. Once the renovations were done, things weren't too bad (we also patched up every hole we could find), but we all bailed out of that apartment when the lease was up. After that, anytime we moved somewhere new, I plugged up any holes under sinks, etc., and pretty much never had any problems with bugs or mice (apart from the odd waterbug that would wander in under the front door during summer heat waves). Yes, the bugs and vermin are still in the walls and always will be with us, but this way they have their space and we have ours.

Knock on wood, I haven't seen any evidence that the mice have visited us again (and nothing has turned up in the traps). And I told my wife about the sighting and finding the holes after I fixed the problem. It minimized the freakout (if you gotta deliver bad news, at least tell someone about it after you've taken action to make things better). My wife, though, is the real pest control master...she actually stepped on and killed a mouse (by accident) at our friend's house earlier in the week!

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"Dance Like a Monkey" is from the latest New York Dolls record, "One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This."

Don't You Forget About Me

Kids,

Sorry that I haven't posted much here in November. I started a new job (yay!) and have been busy with this and that. I do have lots of things to write about and promise to have new content up soon, very soon!

Thanks for your understanding and love.

Familyman