Baghdad Burning - A Blog

what's so badly needed in the u.s. is a better sense of the realities of day-to-day life in other countries... so many people here have either no sense of it at all or a warped and stereotyped view patched together from news stories, movies and hearsay...

to be sure, iraq is one of the central stories of our time and most of us do not have a clue about what it's really like to live there... riverbend, the 25 year-old iraqi woman behind Baghdad Burning, is based in baghdad... her insights are of the sort we can all relate to, getting up in the morning, staying in touch with friends and loved ones, trying to keep up with what's happening...

and guess what...? keeping up with what's happening is now possible through ~drum roll~ U.S. TELEVISION...! that's right, folks... the same crapola that's being shoved down our throats is now available LIVE via satellite in the living rooms of baghdad...!

Two years ago, the major part of the war in Iraq was all about bombarding us with smart bombs and high-tech missiles. Now there’s a different sort of war- or perhaps it’s just another phase of the same war. Now we’re being assailed with American media. It’s everywhere all at once.

and i thought i felt sorry for the iraqis BEFORE i read this...! but she gets down to some pretty serious stuff too...

I’ve been enchanted with the shows these last few weeks. The thing that strikes me most is the fact that the news is so… clean. It’s like hospital food. It’s all organized and disinfected. Everything is partitioned and you can feel how it has been doled out carefully with extreme attention to the portions- 2 minutes on women’s rights in Afghanistan, 1 minute on training troops in Iraq and 20 minutes on Terri Schiavo! All the reportages are upbeat and somewhat cheerful, and the anchor person manages to look properly concerned and completely uncaring all at once.

About a month ago, we were treated to an interview on 20/20 with Sabrina Harman- the witch in some of the Abu Ghraib pictures. You know- the one smiling over faceless, naked Iraqis piled up to make a human pyramid. Elizabeth Vargus was doing the interview and the whole show was revolting. They were trying to portray Sabrina as an innocent who was caught up in military orders and fear of higher ranking officers. The show went on and on about how American troops never really got seminars on Geneva Conventions (like one needs to be taught humanity) and how poor Sabrina was being made a scapegoat. They showed the restaurant where she worked before the war and how everyone thought she was “such a nice person” who couldn’t hurt a fly!

and, if fox wants to do a focus group on ideas for new shows, they gotta be sure to include riverbend...

I have a suggestion of my own for a reality show. Take 15 Bush supporters and throw them in a house in the suburbs of, say, Falloojeh for at least 14 days. We could watch them cope with the water problems, the lack of electricity, the check points, the raids, the Iraqi National Guard, the bombings, and- oh yeah- the ‘insurgents’. We could watch their house bombed to the ground and their few belongings crushed under the weight of cement and brick or simply burned or riddled with bullets. We could see them try to rebuild their life with their bare hands (and the equivalent of $150)…

I’d not only watch *that* reality show, I’d tape every episode.

i'd get tivo for that alone...

she's well worth checking out...

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