Hooray Hooray the First of May
Sunday, May 2, 2004 11:00 PM
The Script
Hollywood Writers, Producers
Fail to Reach Agreement
Some scripts just write themselves.
Falluja Plan in Doubt
as U.S. Deals With
Furor Over Abuse
Our Man in Baghdad
by Jon Lee Anderson
The New Yorker,
issue of 2004-05-03,
posted 2004-04-26:
“My host was a Shiite cleric, Ayad Jamaluddin…. He lives on the river, in an imposing house supplied by the Coalition Provisional Authority, to which he has close ties….
Ayad Jamaluddin dismissed the idea of the Iraqis policing themselves any time in the near future. He believed that Iraq needed shock treatment, and that it would be best administered by the Americans.
The New Yorker,
online images
‘Iraqis are sick, you know, and what they need is a psychiatrist,’ he said. ‘For thirty-five years, Saddam Hussein didn’t allow Iraqis to think. The Iraqi people are missing something: they are missing a soul. They need a dictator—that is their problem. The Shia want their dictator; the Sunnis want theirs. Unfortunately for us, the Iraqi people’s only model of a leader is Saddam Hussein.’
I remarked that his hopes for a sweeping transformation of a national psyche had few historical precedents, at least under modern American stewardship. The postwar transformations of Germany and Japan were possible only because there was a wholesale capitulation by the regimes in both countries after devastating military assaults. In Japan’s case, this had come about after the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast offering Japan’s unconditional surrender, and the admission that he was not a divine being. Jamaluddin smiled: ‘Then maybe what we need is another Hiroshima for Iraq. Maybe Fallujah will be our Hiroshima. Inshallah.’ ”
“Lovely.
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See, too, The New Yorker‘s press release for
on the legal career of presidential candidate John Kerry:
“Kerry says his background as a prosecutor made criminal-defense work unappealing. ‘I took a court appointment once in a criminal case,’ Kerry says, ‘and I realized I just didn’t want the guy out on the street. I knew he was guilty. It takes a certain kind of makeup as a lawyer to dedicate yourself to having someone like that out on the street. I know our system says someone has to represent everyone, but I just couldn’t do it. I went to the court and asked them to take me off the case.’ “
Recall the conclusion of Devil’s Advocate:
“Vanity is definitely my favorite sin.”
Saturday, May 1, 2004 7:00 PM
Fallen from Heaven
On today’s stories:
Recall, gentle readers, the reference to Lucifer in last midnight’s story, “The Devil and Wallace Stevens,” and the reference in yesterday’s story, “Notes,” to the film “2010” (1984). Here is a quote from a review of the story behind that film:
“If the coming of Lucifer in this story doesn’t set your pulse racing and your mind whirring, then I don’t know what will.”
For some of us — students of Stephen King and Malcolm Lowry — the coming of Lucifer is not such a surprising event. See
Saturday, May 1, 2004 7:30 AM
Readings for Law Day
Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life;
Storytelling: Passport to the 21st Century;
plus 1001 Arabian Stories!
(Google News, ca. 7 AM EDT, May Day 2004)
Saturday, May 1, 2004 12:00 AM
