...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Monday, April 05, 2004
      ( 2:15 PM )
 
Humpty Dumpty

All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty back together again.

I'm beginning to sense a metaphor here. I don' t like feeling so pessimistic, but I can't imagine how things can get better in Iraq. In the classic novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, you get the sense as the reader that the total destruction of a culture is completely out of anyone's hands - despite wanting the situation to be controlled, there is no way to get a handle on it. That's how I feel as the news rolls out of Iraq. There is no putting it back together again. I feel a sense of desperate fear for all the soldiers over there, and a sense of complete and utter helplessness at the thought of the destruction our government will rain upon the people of Iraq.

Students of chaos theory must be having some good brain exercises right about now as they watch the news coming out of Basra and Fallujah. Chaos theory tells us that all things really do fall apart. So once the chaotic thread is begun, there is virtually no stopping it. The thing is, the thread didn't begin this weekend with the new uprisings by the Shi'ites. The thread began in December 2000 -- it unravelled from the laps of the Supreme Court and is now entangling the world.

On the bright side, Billmon has some happy news.

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