10 17 05

The day after Iraqis voted on their constitution I passed a knot of protesters standing on three corners of a wide suburban interchange. The signs had peace symbols, and the text encouraged all to honk if we wanted peace. There was little honking. Death and fire seem to the desires of most of the minivan demographic, it seems.

I thought it was an odd thing to do, really – isn’t the move towards representative democracy in the Arab world a good thing? Not according to one Fark headline submitter: Low voter turnout, intimidation of minorities, corrupt candidates. We have exported American democracy to Iraq

There’s a thread I didn’t feel the need to read. Hipwaders at the cleaners.

On one level, you can’t be in favor of the Iraqi vote and opposed to the war. On another level, you can, but it’s a happy chocolate land where the fountains spout fudge and the bunnies are edible and Saddam relinquishes power, ashamed, because Kofi Annan drafted a stern letter promising Serious Consequences, and some Iraqi Gandhi not only showed he was morally superior to the Tikriti gang, but had a titanium-hulled body that made him impervious to torture shredders. And then the Baathists devolved and the Rotarians took over.

Perhaps in 15 years Iraq would be free under that scenario; who cares? I don’t live there. Of course, perhaps in 15 years it will be Rabid Foamy Mullah Central. We’ll see. I just like the idea of actual voting for actual constitutions in the Land of the Strong Man, and seeing all the fictions of the post WW2 Arab landscape upended and dynamited. But that’s me. What struck me was that these people standing by the shopping mall were protesting the means by which the right to vote had been secured. It seems like protesting Meals-on-Wheels because the truck broke the speed limit and had expired tags.

Then again, the Meals-on-Wheels truck didn’t kill anyone en route, right? One of the signs, of course, said “Who Would Jesus Bomb.” Never heard that before. Hmm. Well. I think the proper question is “On Whom Would Jesus Levy Porous Sanctions Undermined by Corrupt International Officials Who turned Oil-For-Food Into a Massive Payola Operation for the International Nomenklatura,” but that wouldn’t fit on a sign.


The answer would, though. Jesus, you may recall, got the moneylenders out of the temple. How? With sternly worded pamphlets, I think. Also a march, which oddly enough included people who wanted the Jews out of Palestine. Strange bedfellows and all that.

So why do they get to play the Jesus card? Everyone got highly spooked over that bogus and rebogused story about how God came down in a flaming pillar and told Bush to invade Iraq. It makes an annual appearance, because it confirms what so many wish to believe: Bushitler is a freaky nutwad who thinks he gets specific operational instructions from on high everytime his knees hit the carpet. Sometimes the message comes in a dream, sometimes it’s a bird that looks at him with a cocked head, sometimes it’s the change in the color of his urine. You have to be careful to note the augurs.

He’s batshite, in other words, because he thinks he speaks for Jeebus. But the people on the streetcorner appear certain that Jesus did not want the Iraqi Defense Ministry leveled by Tomahawks in the middle of the night, no? Probably not. It’s just a jape to needle the Red State God-botherers, just the way they used to needle The Man in the 60s by pointing out that Jesus wore long hair and sandals just like high holy hippies did. Of course, I doubt Jesus had crabs, the clap, collapsed veins from a heroin habit and the abiding conviction that monkey-headed silverfish were coming out of the kitchen sink. But otherwise, yeah, peapod mates.

Yes, I know, it’s rather tired to beat up on “Hippies” this late in the game; it’s like, oh, making the 832nd movie about the sins of the McCarthy era. And Lord knows we’ve put that one behind us.

My point? No point. Just that the day the people of Iraq went home with purple fingers, some folks in a nice safe suburb of Minneapolis reacted by standing on a streetcorner with transcribed bumperstickers urging the US to abandon Iraq tomorrow. Who would Jesus bomb? I cannot presume to speak. If you think he would have bombed Afghanistan, Iraq, AND Yugoslavia to strike at tyranny, well, you must hold the current president in contempt. He’s two for three.


(perm link.)