Lest Your Bile Subsides

What with all my Rock and Roll postings lately.

The essential cursor.org has, among many worthy overlooked news items, a couple of pieces involving Iraqi novelist and ex-Saddam prisoner, Haifa Zangana. The first is an article at the Gaurdian by Zangana herself about the assassination of educators and intellectuals in Iraq. The second is a 2002 piece by Surrealist Movement USA which heavily references Zangana.

While a piece by a group of obscure American artists/philosophers may seem like an a bit of a stretch in the legitimacy department, I like it for, well, it's absurdity. I like it for the fact that the truth of everyday Iraq has indeed become fundamentally surreal while the declarations from a Surrealist organization come across as being remarkably level-headed and reasonable. Then again, perhaps that's always been the point of the Surrealist movement. Anyway, both are pretty good, quick reads, guaranteed to get your dander up a little bit.

A clip from the Surrealist Movement USA article:

Make no mistake: The proposed "regime change" in Baghdad is solely about replacing a fractious death-squad subcontractor with a more passively compliant one... Carnage apologists, militarist demagogues, war profiteers, and their fundamentalist Christian cheerleaders charge that those who are unable or unwilling to fathom the hateful logic of their policies are plainly guilty of the terrible crime of being "unrealistic." For our part, as surrealists, we readily affirm that we despise the so-called "realism" that is based solely on the clumsy hypocrisy, swaggering boorishness, and ecocidal greed of a few cowardly billionaires along with their political/ military/ journalistic yes-men.