Back in the pre-Tina Brown days, the New Yorker was stuffed with general knowledge sorts of articles, geology and true crime essays that wouldn’t fade in relevance for a couple of years, if then. And so I kept my New Yorkers in the kitchen, where they were always available while I waited for water to boil or washed dishes in the sink.
Yes, the kitchen is where I learned more about the Middle East than W’s neocon coterie seems to have figured out with all the nation’s spy resources at their beck and call. When I recommended Milton Viorst’s travel pieces to a friend, she said, “Ah, yes. Judith’s husband,” but I don’t know much more about poetry than what I was forcefed. Poetry’s short on plot lines.
(For Cheney in an apron with Shia, see below the fold.)
Anyway, Milton Viorst would travel to a faraway country, sometimes armed with introductions to some powers that be and sometimes not, and then write in the New Yorker about what he saw. He visited Iraq quite a bit, and I learned that, just like Christianity, Islam has “denominations” that historically haven’t played well together. Like Yugoslavia’s Orthodox and Catholic Christians, Sunni and Shia got along because a powerful secular state forced them to, and also forced them, in not nice ways, to play nice with the million Christians and dwindling number of Jews within the borders.
Iraq was a very secular country. Ba’athists had aimed to revivify a backward region by dragging its people kicking and screaming through modernity, I’m assuming under the influence of the Young Turks after World War I, who broke lots of eggs to make their omelette. In this regime, individuals had no “rights” to vote or criticize government’s stupid actions or carry guns unless authorized by the bosses, but they also had no right to enforce their conservative concepts of propriety on women who wanted to go to medical school or to execute women who embarrassed their menfolk by getting themselves raped.
I saw, I guess because Viorst saw, that all hell would break loose if the Ba’athist lid ever came off the melting pot of Iraq, or at least that the hissing steam would scald everyone nearby and the boiling gravy would spurt all over the stovetop like blood from an artery.
If only Lynn had made Dick wash dishes in the sink, maybe all this death and destruction wouldn’t have happened.
Posted by Joyful Alternative at February 27, 2006 11:32 AM