Fixes

There are always two sides to every political drama. At least. I've been engaging with a number of characters over the past week and have pieced together what I feel to be 'meta-narrative' of recent events. That's a term I learned in a course on transatlantic culture. We were searching for it. The meta-narrative, that is. The uber-story. I was told once that to succeed at grad school I had to use the word 'infrastructure' a lot. It worked. But 'meta-narrative' is also pretty good. The key to grad school was to pose your argument in a way that was vague enough to allow multiple interpretations of your line of reasoning, and enable you to defend any challenges to it by claiming a misunderstanding of your subtleties. And to throw in the word 'context' as often as possible. And then add a few suffixes. 'Contextualize'. 'Contextification'. 'Contextising imperatives.' Get crazy with prefixes. 'Femi- hyper-postmodernizing contextualography resistances'. But I digressify. In the course we delved in to the modern European psyche to discuss the origins of the 'dictator' moment of the inter-war era. How someone like Mussolini was heralded as a model of the 'great new leader' of the 20th century; the 'good' dictator that would step in during a time of crisis and set right the foundering ship of state. During the twenties and thirties this positive image of vigorous personal leadership would morph into the nightmare of totalitarianism, but for a time was highly regarded in both Europe and America. How far is the distance between those two? Is it a hazy gray zone or a sharp line? Of course, you know what's coming next... context. That thing that reduces most political argumentation into something akin to the three critical components of real estate valuation: location, location, location. And once you are off onto the context tangent, you're bound to stalemate your argument by eventually dividing into camps that differ on the fundamental questions of philosophy; i.e. those that believe in universal truths, or tend to be empirical, or realistic, or think the damn tree makes noise-- versus the constructivist, or those who favor the cradle as the determinizing agent of identity over the womb, or think you've got to be there to shout 'Timber!' or else it didn't happen. This was the long way around saying that there are a lot of things that are in the eye of the beholder, and the benevolence of power is certainly one of them. And this was all an even longer way of saying that politics in Baghdad hovers over this fuzzy razor and teeters on the long brink of slippery slopes at every corner. It's the strange paradox that puts this place schizophrenically between the frustration of Weimar and the fear of Hitler. In Saddam's Iraq, the gravest crime was to act without authority; now those with authority who fail to act are guilty of a different heinous crime in the eyes of the people. 'Act! Do something!' the people cry... 'but do not go too far- do not do too much, or we will call you Dictator!' So in this environment I see a lot of ends justifying a lot of means, and it may not be a long emotional journey to find sympathy for the devil, if the devil makes some pretty good promises. I've often thought that there are two types of people in the world: people who think there are two types of people, and those who don't.