[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent April 2003]
Lots has happened.
I’m still in Edinburgh – tonight. Tomorrow I’m on a plane, to Prague no less. I have arranged to meet my family there.
I am meeting my family in Prague. It feels terribly, pleasingly bourgeois.
Family! Travel! Motion! The obvious fun. Stay tuned.
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Londoners: I am coming back through London, crashing with the Leon monster (still looking for his little dog), and would like to see people! Thus I call to order the TRIPLE ONE LUNCH WITH MORGUE!
When: Sunday April 13 at ONE pm
Where: All Bar ONE in Leicester Square (“L square” and lower case “l” looks like ONE)
Why: Because I am fresh-faced and pure of body.
I know some people don’t like awful chain bar things. Suck it up and come along.
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I have quit my video-store job – purpose served. An interesting experience, tending vid, watching couples split up over the man’s poor taste in movies, watching the dubious rise of DJ Qualls as leading man, watching time and again as people who shouldn’t know better choose good films over bad, and subtitles be damned. I have yet hope for humanity. And now I have evenings free, and material for the long-in-development short play about people taking forever to choose their vid! Onwards!
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And after Prague, Budapest! And Vienna! I am like unto a god!
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I attended/helped out at my ‘landlady’ Fiona Campbell’s games convention, Conpulsion. It went well. I have surprisingly little to say on the matter. A good time was had by all, and I got to use bad language an awful lot and then spend the rest of the weekend convincing people I didn’t really talk like that.
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And I’ve been on a couple of protest marches.
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(The following was written a week ago. I can’t be bothered editing it.)
The war. I can’t figure out how to get away without talking about this at least once.
War dominates. I think about the war all the time. I think about reasons for and against military action. I question the media coverage and the coverage of the media coverage. The edges of my life are merging with the edges of the war.
Bombs are dropping. Precision bombs – Baghdad’s infrastructure has survived. This is good. Yet when I read a sceptic say it survives so the US can have a working city when they seize it to control its oil, I have to admit that this is what will happen. Can something be both right and wrong at the same time? The very notion of right and wrong start to collapse. Realpolitik, Clausewitzian total war, politics as war by other means. B52s take off from Scotland and unload bombs on Iraq and people die. And the precision still brings death to innocents, it must do, but – so far – it is not as bad as I feared. The civilian dead number in the hundreds, not the thousands. Good. Is this a victory for the peace movement? Forcing a more conscientious form of destruction? Doesn’t it just make the case against any war even harder to make? There is a sick feeling in me still, that all this precision bombing has achieved nothing for the coalition military other than a public relations display, because the targets they are precision-bombing are dead and gone but the war in Baghdad has yet to begin. Destroying Saddam’s palaces will not destroy the regime and will not win the war. Tony Blair is on the television, reiterating his position, that there is a real and pressing danger, that the war is justified. Public opinion is shifting. I can feel it, I can see it in the polls. The momentum of the peace movement has stalled and I can’t see why, but I can feel it. The war has come and fewer people care than before. The fears of war without the UN have been realised, and yet Blair’s cause is slowly gaining in support.
The peace movement. I become frustrated with a peace movement compromised by inappropriate ‘radicalism’. I wonder if an uncompromised peace movement is even possible. I went on a march on Saturday, ten thousand people marching on the main streets of Edinburgh. It felt weakened. It felt confused. Sometimes the message came through, the slogan, not in our name, more real than ever. This war is not in our name. We do not condone.
Read this blog written by an Iraqi in Baghdad: http://dearraed.blogspot.com/
Follow links to the large number of determined bloggers who post views I disagree with so vehemently. I wonder how it can be that we both think each other is the politically naïve, the deluded, the misled. How can there be a way forward? I want to simplify, simplify, simplify. There are wrong premises at the root of all disputes. Why does the media shy away from auditing the talk of the powerful?
This is a war of liberation now? Then why should disarming have stopped the war? The ground was always shifting, is it any wonder we are cynical?
The argument goes in circles. Those for the war say the Iraqis are suffering, that Saddam is a tyrant. Those for the peace agree, because that is not the argument. And yet it is. Saddam is a tyrant so whatever we do
is justified. I feel pity for the soldiers, locked in propaganda, trying to do the right thing, as if the world was as simple as their government portrays it. A kind of ignorance, a kind of madness. I felt ill last night, physically nauseated, unable to concentrate, unable to relax, riddled with emotions. And it is hard to see a way forward.
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Further to the above:
Salam Pax’s blog has not been updated for a week. Internet access in the capital is cut off. I hate myself for wanting the Iraqis to fight, because I want the US and UK governments to understand the weakness of their propaganda. But I hate myself for wanting it, because the more they fight, the more they die, written off as fanatics brainwashed by a tyrant.
We must always be mindful.
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the road moose is going to prague. The road moose always has a good time.
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morgue (looking for the peace)