[I perform an experiment and the subject is me. Metaphor.]
I just hung a new poster up on my wall- we don’t have cubicles, but I got the corner of the office and thus some extra space: a couple of maps, some phone rosters, wire diagrams of various governmental offices and a satellite photo of Baghdad and now my new poster- which I found on the street outside of the Karkh DAC, which means nothing to you, I know. That’s the government office for the Karkh neighborhood, and it is sort of in the Green Zone, and sort of not. It’s that ‘sort of’ that we’ll just gloss over as I tell the rest of the story which involves my inadvertent support for the political aspirations of Muqtada al-Sadr. [Irony.] If you don’t know who that is, well, well- maybe it’s not such a big deal- I don’t know what you people know- actually, it is a big deal- you should know who this guy is and what he represents. To get into it now would be a diversion from my main narrative so I’ll just move along now and if I decide to come back then so be it, but if not I have one suggestion for you: Google. It’s not like my main narrative could conceivably be more significant than explaining current strands of Iraqi politics, but I spent 47 blissfully jet-lagged hours to distance myself from that topic, so forgive me if I’m skittish about dipping my toe back into that teapot. I thought 47 sounded good; I have no idea. I eventually made it to Sydney. Some of you received several poorly misspelled emails from me that first evening I was at the InterContinental (yes… harbour-view, thank you); obviously I was just so giddy about being that close to vegemite; or people who sing about vegemite that I had to tell 22 of my closest friends. In alphabetical order. Or I may have been just a little bit drunk. What do we call this phenomenon?
Drunk-mail?
Alk-email?
In-eb-ree-mail?
Booze buzz beer keg glass smashed lit
Drunk mouseclicking typing sending message barbiturate yahoo hotmail
Shotmail?
[This is where I approximate my (limited) attempts at being clever.]
Slinging those mini-bar bottles back I must have looked like King Kong on a binge. In a fuzzy white hotel robe. Scaling the entertainment cabinet with my paw wrapped around a midget Jack Daniels and growling “WHooooh!Whooooh!”. They could save so much effort if they just started making those bottles in the shape of a shot glass with a plastic pop-off top. At one point I considered attempting to write a blog about my arrival Down Under. My mammoth gorilla fists were starting to have trouble with the keyboard. I think blogging while intoxicated would be sort of like… drunk-dialing THE WORLD. I picked up some books while I was traveling. [Segue.] Some philosophy and Classics- or I should say: books about philosophy and Classics- they are SO much easier to read than the real thing and so much easier to give up if they start to suck. I say this after finishing an advanced degree- there’s so much guilt and animosity built up around the Western heritage that we forget what an impressive lineage of human experience that it encompasses. Regardless of whether or not you even call it ‘Western’ or not- and apply all the baggage that that term has accumulated. I was reminded of the original concept of ‘hedonism’. The pursuit of pleasure in life. It’s a word that carries an amount of baggage now itself, but it was conceived to describe a philosophy of moral life. Of all the things that might direct one’s morality: fear of punishment, desire to act justly, the search for heavenly reward—the one thing that was ‘true’- in a sense, that it was able to be directly experienced and could add ‘value’ to one’s understanding of reality- was pleasure. Of course the philosophy has a bunch of tenets and all that and yada yada yada; I just wanted to get to the part where Plato was refuted and Aristotle- the empiricist- was introduced. I’ve always found more kinship with Aristotle and his ilk- in later days, the British moderns like Hume; opposed to Plato those who followed like Kant and the continental rationalists. I think therefore I am; but I am, therefore I do. The experience defines all for me; I do not trust my mind’s constructions as much as the vivid tastes and smells and sights that I am able to pluck from the world. I understand by doing. So I was playing darts in Tasmania with an ex-pat Canadian Native American (Native Canadian?) when he tells me about fleeing Quebec after getting shot by a Mountie in a political protest and driving through Michigan looking for a hospital and that’s when he realizes “Man…Western Civilization is fucked.” He buys me another beer because I’m the only ‘real person’ he’s been able to talk to in three years. “It’s a simple life here, man- and these are simple people… No, I’m serious- that fucker can’t even read… but we make do, you know.”
The preservation of human knowledge is no longer about space; it’s about the search engine.
So hours later (Did I experience them, or did my mind create them?) I’m caught up on the drama here. Back with Ali; Mohammed; Ali the ex-governor; Chairman Mazin; humvees, helmets and Yossra. John and I go out to the Karkh DAC to meet ex-governor Ali and we have a reunion of sorts and our typical conversation that always seems to veer towards incomprehensible discomfort before returning to jovial camaraderie. We agree whole-heartedly that the local councils need to work better with the provincial government. We nod politely when he informs us (pedantically) that Baghdadians (his word) are better than those ‘Southern Shia’. And we shift uncomfortably when he’s pretty lackadaisical about the recent discovery of torture cells under the MOI. "Ehh," he waves in dismissal of our objections, one hand bringing the straw protruding from the Pepsi can closer to his plump moustache-wearing lip, "We need to be tough on those terrorists." They’ve changed the route of the barrier wall around the building, so John and I actually have to walk about a block and a half through what is technically ‘red zone’ before we’re back inside one of the main gates of the IZ. I walk over an election poster that has fallen off the concrete barrier. It’s sort of a cool image- I imagine kids in a high school art class wearing black trench coats also thinking it was cool- like a forearm with bulging veins emerging from the ground with a fist clenching a scroll and surrounded by Arabic slogans. The best thing about this election campaign is that very few Iraqis have mastered Photoshop. The posters just reinforce the sense that this whole enterprise is so amateur. Like it really is the ‘birth of a democracy’- in a bunch of different ways; and the way I mean it is like it is so naïve and so devastatingly crucial at the same time—like if you don’t get elected to Student Council this year, you’re like… so gonna die!
[And this is where I reminisce on my first major political defeat. Jon Black defeated me for 9th Grade Class Vice President. 8 votes.]
I brought back treats of Kangaroo jerky for my office mates. They all wanted stories. I told them some. I have some more. I’m no Ancient Mariner, but I’ve been across the sea. Ali walked into the office and looked at my new poster. “That’s a Sadrist poster.” And I was like…that’s so cool.
