vertigo

Many have tried to write about the Mediterranean, but few have succeeded.

There's a melancholy about this old coast and these islands, like a base note of musk in a perfume that would otherwise be too sweet to bear. Is it the bitter ghosts of all those dead empires? Or was there always a sting in the honey? A thorn in the lion's paw? (For there were lions here, once). Perhaps it's the daemon of this land itself that inspired the Greeks to tragedy and sent first the Alexandrians, and then the Romans, out to conquer the known world.

The impossibly clear water is alive with tiny fishes. Intoxicated, you dive down deeper and deeper, until the current of your passing billows the sand, half-revealing ancient mosaic. The fish flash silver, and your blue-and-white mood shifts to slanting vertigo at the depths of time concealed here.

The veil slips. The beautiful olive-skinned dancing boy becomes an old man wasted by years. But within the grotto of his eyes glows the same fire that blooms in the blood-red geraniums and the crow-black cypresses down by the port, where men have been fishing for millenia.
The jasmine-scented afternoon smells like heaven, the evening air is delicious, and in the soft night everyone's eyes are olive-black and filled with the slow smile of love. The magic is irresistible, like a flower to a fly, and in you slip, reveling in bright yellow.

war crimes in Iraq

TIKRIT, Iraq - U.S. investigators have asked Iraqi authorities to help them navigate cultural sensitivities to exhume the body of a teenager allegedly raped and murdered with her family by American soldiers, a military official said Saturday.
Full story at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060708/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_rape_investigation

Incredible. The level of disrespect in this is extraordinary. I am not Muslim but my reaction was, for god's sake, they have to violate her all over again now she's dead? And always with the ideology of justice.

The soldier charged with the rape received an honourable discharge on the basis of personality disorder. Which of course suggests a failed attempt at a cover-up. But question of responsibility has to go much, much further than an investigation of this man's individual acts. And do read on, because the point of this post is not to vilify this man for what he did.

There's something wierd about the army righteously going after soldiers for committing atrocities. By allowing ourselves to get pulled into despising these men personally, on the basis of their individual 'disgustingness', we permit the continuation of the ridiculous ideology that the "normal" war in Iraq has proceeded, and continues to proceed, in a civilised manner. That, with the exception of this unpleasant character, who has now been removed from the game, the war is just, fair and clean.

Whereas the unpalatable truth is that these young war criminals are behaving in ways that are coherent with the situation they are living in. If they put me through what they put these young men through, prostituting their courage and their loyalty for the profit of the ruling oligarchy, I would also be a perverse remnant of myself. And that's a fact, actually, according to a study cited by James Hillman in his astounding book A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR:

"A world war 2 study determined that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 % of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties.....[A] common trait among the 2 % able to endure....was a predisposition toward 'aggressive psychopathic personalities'."

NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT. In other words, if you aren't psycho already, two months of combat will drive you nuts. Or put the other way around: two months of combat drives every single person nuts, unless they already are a psychopath.

Then, having driven you nuts, the army personalises it, saying you have a disorder, or are a war criminal. I'm not letting this particular rapist-and-murderer off the hook here (he sounds like one of the 2%), but I am asking us to consider where the blame really lies for his disorder and his war crime, as well as his opportunity. He and thousands like him, along with hundreds of thousands of civilians, are being physically and psychologically violated and maimed in and by the war.

According to a friend of mine who worked recently at the VA, after all the research based on the Vietnam Vets, the army is still just dumping the soldiers back into society exactly the same way. We will be reaping the harvest until well after I die. Hopefully peacefully, in a bed.

We must not be taken in by the ideologies of freedom, democracy and a just war. If anything needs to be exhumed, it is the truth of violent colonisation that lies beneath these shiny white words.