COMMENTS UPON COMMENTS

The comments in the past two entries are becoming more interesting than the entries.  And the dialogue between Lisa's journal entry, A Parable, and my entries is also pretty interesting.  So, what I'm going to do right now is post an email I received from Lisa - commenting on my comment to A Parable. 

         "The Man is not Saddam...the bad heart is Sadaam. The Man is Iraq. The Warrior (the US) has cut out and thrown away the old heart (Saddam) and tried to put a new one in its place, one that is not big enough to do the job. AND the Warrior completely discounted the ants (all the disparate splinter groups that make up the region) when he decided he was the one to do the job on the Man. (BTW, the People From the Faraway Land, though perhaps acquainted with the "bad heart," did NOT know the Man--the actual nation, history, and people of Iraq.)

My point is not so much the intricate details of the relationship between the bad heart and the Warrior, but that the Warrior undertook a task of his own free will, without investing the proper forethought or research. Now he is in the fix he is in, and he has a choice to make. What should the Warrior do?"

Thank you, Lisa.  And now I'm going to post here my comment on her journal, which never got posted there because it was too long for the character limits.

         "yes, Lisa - I had meditated more on the story, after reading it a couple of times, and did realize that The Man was the country of Iraq - you may agree, or not, that there is some confusion in the second paragraph. it was not the country of Iraq that began to act strangely and aggressively, it was The Leader, that is to say - in your version, the heart of The Man.

well, anyway - leaving the parable aside, and speaking in real terms about this situation: i, no more than anyone else, have no idea what "we," which is to say, the government of this country, should do now. That is the real horror of this situation. This war was started with no idea of what it would turn into - although whynot? plenty of people prophesied that just exactly what has happened would happen. they were not listened to. This war is only part, although a huge part, of the years of lies, deceptions, wrong-headed policies of an administration guided by neo-conservative wonks, the oil industry, and religious maniacs.

the countries of the middle-east are so complicated, their thinking so different from ours, that to hurl billions of dollars and the lives and futures of thousands of american troops into this war because the Project for a New American Century thinks the only way of the future is for the USA to be in total control and domination of the entire area - is in and of itself grounds, and then some, for impeachment of this president, vice president, and most of congress.

i feel so impotent, so full of rage, so full of pity and horror for what we have done to the country that was the Cradle of Civilization. I have no idea what The Warrior should do now. Stop viewing himself as a Warrior, for perhaps a beginning. View himself as merely another citizen of this vast and complicated world. Stop pouring the billions and billions of dollars into war and the machinery of war, and start trying to understand the rest of the world, not dominate it, help the millions of people who languish in poverty and wretchedness into some semblance of a decent life. Bring the troops home, put in a peace-keeping force, with members from other countries, send in the NGO's (not Halliburton) to help rebuild the society that has been so devastated."

And I wonder, what do others have to say in answer to Lisa's anguished question:  "What should the Warrior do?"  We already know what Mark (from his ferocious comment on one of the two previous posts) thinks.  So, that's okay Mark, you don't need to weigh in again.