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*** Aside from the lame role-playing, the actual "killing" in this video looks kind of fun.

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Oh, uh, I mean, uh, if you're, uh, a dork or something.

(Via Ace)

*** A Portugese poet ponders America in 99 points:

1. The duty of every American is to make America grow. And every one who makes America grow is American. In Europe, it doesn’t make sense for a citizen of a country to immigrate to Germany, for instance, and become German, but to come to America and become American makes total sense. Coming to America is in itself already being American. To come is not to visit; those who come don’t go. America is not a natural country. It’s a created country; an invention of human beings. Since World War I, the story of the world is to come to America.
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8. One can be American never having been to America. To be American is to wish well for America. Whoever wishes well for America makes it grow? To want to go to America is what there is more of in the world; this craving is an overwhelming good. To wish well for America is to make the world grow.

(Via SMASH)

*** Tom Friedman is misusing poker analogies. Intrepid CITIZEN JOURNALIST Stephen Green is on the case!

*** The Washington Post recaps a series of interviews with a Baghdad bookseller:

In interviews every few months, beginning before the U.S. invasion in March 2003, Hayawi, now 41, has watched the fate of his country unfold with fear that turned to anger, and resentment that melted into resignation, bound together by a resilience that is perhaps this country's defining trait. Resilience can mean many things -- fatalism, endurance, persistent hope and an ability to make the unusual normal.

Hayawi's story is neither stirring nor tragic, but rather quiet -- the conflicted reflections of one man, a prominent bookseller in Baghdad on a journey through tumult in a country that he, like his fellow citizens, struggles even now to understand.
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Hayawi is an Iraqi who resents the U.S. occupation but voted in the election the United States backed. He is a devout Muslim, but fears the rise of religion in politics. He is a Sunni who resists identifying himself as such, even as he is forced to do so more and more. And from behind his desk, over cups of excessively sweet tea, cigarettes that never stop burning and a water pipe that is delivered every day after lunch, he watches the very complexion of his country transform -- in books, conversations and politics, sometimes in the most subtle of ways. Iraq changes even as the rhythm of its life remains the same.

In streets more tattered than ever, there is the inspirational: posters of voters with their ink-stained fingers, a testament to their courage in defying insurgent threats to disrupt the election. And there is the grim: rubble crafted by the bombs of the U.S. invasion that mixes with the birds' nests of steel rods, concrete slabs and twisted girders left by the more recent destructiveness of car bombs.

Outside Hayawi's bookstore are the lasting scars of looting that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Inside, he celebrates an inventory in which "the prohibited has become permitted." He points to celebrated freedoms that Iraqis will probably never surrender. And in the same breath, he glumly asks any customer who will listen, "Can Iraqis live on freedom alone?"

An interesting read.

(Via Spartacus)

Posted by Bill at April 1, 2005 08:22 AM | TrackBack (0)

Comments

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