Undone.

See any good speeches this week? In point of fact, I did watch Obama's all the way through, though I didn't bother with Jindal's response, and now I'm kind of sorry, frankly. The excerpts I've seen were pretty hilarious. I'm not sure where they were going with that entrance... it just looked strange. In any case, the content was probably the most ridiculous part - an apparently apocryphal story about intervening during Hurricane Katrina to get those rescue boats through all that bureaucratic red tape so they could start saving people. Then there's the laundry list of wasteful projects in the stimulus plan, like monitoring volcanoes (goodness, what a bad idea... especially from the standpoint of the governor of Louisiana!) and mag-lev trains from "Disneyland" to Las Vegas. Interesting side note - the day after his speech, Governor Jindal reportedly went to Disneyworld. (Apparently it's all about how you get there.) Pretty goofy shit... but then what do the Republicans have to talk about except taxes, the deficit (something they've apparently just determined is a bad thing), and wacky Democrat projects? With Jindal, Palin, Gingrich, and Joe "The Plumber" their headliners, they're going to need more substance.

There are times when I think Americans, in spite of their news media, will be able to get their minds around the fact that this economic crisis is serious and needs addressing in ways that go beyond merely cutting taxes and interest rates. I'm not certain they grasp the seriousness of some of the other problems we face, not wholly unrelated to economics. The Iraq war is certainly front and center in this category. Through the tireless efforts of politicians, commentators, and news reporters (the kind who pass along lightly altered press releases to their copy editors), we have been given to understand that things are a whole lot better in Iraq now, and that aside from an explosion here and there, it's really a very normal place. This is pretty sad. It's like the smoldering remains of a house we burned down - the fire may be out, but the house is still destroyed. Hundreds of thousands have been killed there, millions displaced. This is a severely traumatized society that may never recover, and we can't simply act as though our work is done there and our "mistakes" can merely be forgotten.

There was a particularly good article on Iraqi refugees in last week's Nation Magazine. The author talked to families in Jordan and Syria about their experiences, and the stories are pretty universally bad. An example: an Iraqi man who was a member of the Baath party as part of the terms of his employment (it was a requirement for certain kinds of non-security related jobs); at some point he was kidnapped by unknown assailants, held and tortured for many weeks, such that he was partially paralyzed. During that time, gunmen invade his house and killed his 16-year-old son. His 8-year-old daughter's school was attacked by assailants, who kidnapped her and other girls, assaulted them heinously and left them for dead (she survived, somehow). Then someone burned their house to the ground. Now they live in a one-room apartment in Syria where they have no means, no possessions, no hope, and no wish to ever return. Multiply that story by about a million and you've got a pretty good idea of the kind of disaster this war represents.

We need to leave Iraq, probably faster and more completely than Obama wants to. But we also have to address the septic problem of all of these battered people exiled in penury. And we have to start yesterday.

luv u,

jp