Trembling Stranger

The Iraq War officially ended today.

I vividly remember being a senior in high school when the Iraq War began.  In my US government class, the students were evenly split on whether the weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda were sufficient to invade without a lack of international support.

I’m actually surprised at how few people remember what the justification for the war actually was.  

Not too long ago, I was speaking with a relatively informed adult who believed that the initial rationale for the war was to bring democracy to Iraq, that weapons of mass destruction had been found, and that al-Qaeda existed in Iraq prior to 2003—all things that were found to not be true.  It’s amazing how our memories of events and rationales change over time if we’re not paying attention.

I also remember in college watching television late at night with some of my friends, one of whom happened to have grown up in Iraqi Kurdistan.  The breaking news report indicated something big was happening, and a press conference was about to begin.  

The first half of the press conference didn’t even have an English translation, so my friend who grew up in Kurdistan had to translate the Arabic for us.  To share in the news of Saddam Hussein’s capture with her was truly amazing as Saddam had been very cruel to the Kurds, and many people she knew had been harmed by him.

In all, more than $800,000,000,000 were spent along with the loss of nearly 5,000 coalition soldiers and at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians to bring down one cruel dictator and to create one new democracy.

Here is a moving collection of photographs from throughout the war.

My wife couldn’t stop laughing at this video from Coldplay’s Prospekt’s March EP.

This is why men and women can’t be friends.

Douglas Adams, author of the excellent Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series has some witty and apt comments on democracy in this excerpt in which the character Ford Prefect explains to Arthur Dent why a robot said the phrase “take me to your lizards”:

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”

“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”

“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”

“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”

“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”

“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”

“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”

“What?”

“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”

“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”

Ford shrugged again.

“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”

My good friend Donovan Richards curates the excellent site, Where Pen Meets Paper, which is a collection of reviews of music, books, films, and other cultural content.  

I was recently invited to post my review of director Andrew Niccol’s In Time (starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried), which is one of the more intriguing sci-fi films to be released this year.  You can read the review here.

Adam Davidson for the New York Times:

One of the greatest changes is that a college degree is no longer the guarantor of a middle-class existence. Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill — charm, by the way, counts — that employers value. But there’s also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.

The cost to go to university is rising 8% per year, doubling about every 9 years, but is becoming less and less a guarantee of a comfortable middle class income.  Unfortunately, not going to college is almost a guarantee not to have a middle class income.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place.