\m/ in baghdad
one day after work last week jason picked me up and we went to the berkeley marina for a walk. toward the end, he asked a question to the effect of “so why do you think people care so much about what is going on in Iran?”. there are democratic atrocities happening all over the world, every day, that Americans ignore.
my answer was two part:
1. we had an election stolen from us. we know how it feels. we are still angry. there is empathy.
2. throughout the GW years there was always the threat of war with Iran, and i think even though the Obama administration is less warlike, that threat is not gone. in most American minds, it is the next war. so now that the country is imploding, if this does not come out well, if the conservatives succeed in stealing this, is it not evident that there will be a call to war on the part of those in the American government who believe that is the right action? while Amercians support “democracy” and “freedom” and human rights for everyone, everywhere, and we are all grieving for the loss of these things in Iran right now, we cannot deny that, collectively, a large part of the attention right now is selfish: we do not want ourselves another war.
.::.
last night we watched the documentary “Heavy Metal in Baghdad“, about perhaps the only heavy metal Iraqi band ever, and what happened to the members once the war started. it’s a humanitarian piece, and not even really political. a well done docu, a totally unbiased look at the effect of our war on Iraqi people just like you and me. listening to them yearn for their homeland, saying that they’d rather die in Baghdad than live in “less than zero” refugee status in Syria where they have nothing and no one, seeing them struggle to even survive, let alone be musicians and artists, as we in America have the freedom to be, is heartbreaking. i think the most popular reviewer on netflix summed it up best: “I never gave a sh!t about the war until I saw this. This documentary really shows the human condition there and not the crap you see in the news.”
metalhead or not, watching this while sh!t is going down in Iran gives it a lot of current meaning. will Iran end up like Iraq? is that where this is headed? please, gods, do not let it be so.
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