Cities fall

It appears that the some of the looters stripping Iraq bare of its history weren't your average thugs looking for a pretty bauble to hang in the family den. When I watched footage of the Iraq looting on Scottish and French TV, part of me hoped that some in the crowd were amateur historians, trying to stage a pre-emptive smash and grab to tuck the artifacts away in some secure U-Stor-It or basement bunker somewhere, bringing the items out only when the coast is clear and some kind of law and order emerged.

Part of me finds it ghastly that I'm so worried about the snatching of culture, the theft of items from a display case. Maybe it's because it's the only news about the outcome I'm getting. Maybe if the parade of images were switched from things to people, I'd feel more concern about the human toll if we ever get a straight answer of the civilians killed. I'm not holding my breath though, so one outrage at a time. I'm more inclined not to hold my breath after recently walking through the British Museum, packed to the rafters with ill-gotten historical gains from all over the world. After passing the zillionth Egyptian or Greek artifact, I turned to my wife and asked why don't Greece or Egypt ask for them back. I mean, both of them are stable countries perfectly capable to look after their heritages.

"They do," she dryly replied, "You just don't hear much about it."

And so, there's history for you. Finders keepers, and it looks like Iraq is going to be no exception. Just to prove the point, I found a longer article about the looting, and a hint that collectors are going to get a huge boost to their collections from the trafficking of artifacts that's in play. Also, in that article is a noteworthy piece from the Washington Post about how historians are saying the Pentagon made some allusion that troops would be in place to prevent looting.

Deeper though, I worry when order gets put back in place. If Iraq doesn’t have their anchor of history to hold a nation together, it'll have a vacuum of harder to fill than leadership, one of identity. Iraq right now is tempest of ethnicities, loyalties, crimes and confusion. Waking up to find your country robbed of its culture (the only thing for sure that survived Saddam) while the occupying army does little to protect your heritage has to be heartbreaking. Not only is your future in doubt, but someone just freely wheeled away a bit of your past in a shopping cart. It doesn't suggest stability. It suggests everything about you is disposable, and your heritage is going to the highest bidder.

Meanwhile, as America's attention is captivated by the crumbling of one nation, it's missing a slow-motion self-destruction at home of a city-state. Place your bets when the Whitney gets ransacked.

State of the SKOB update

I'm nearly over my head cold. I have a slight fogginess in my left ear, but I'm fine for the most part. I was able to sleep through to 3:30 a.m. last night, beating my previous 1 a.m. of the night before last. I hope to get to 6 a.m. tomorrow morning, a full night's sleep to charge me up for my first day back to work since my vacation. Let's hear it for the two-day workweek. Yee-hah.

Tonight, I may have pasta for dinner. Then, Mrs. Skob and I go over our vacation photos. I'll try to nab something off the discs for posting here. Maybe a picture-of-the-day/“what I did on my vacation” feature. Who knows?

Revelations/Resolutions

The extended vacation offered me an ideal chance to distant myself from my ongoing ruts, exposing what I do on a daily basis in a new light. When one has hours to kill on a layover or while driving to another cozy, cutesy village (or when your plane gets hit by lightning), one gets to thinking about all the little things done to fill up a day.

Revelation #1: It’s official: I hate my job. I'm in it for a paycheck. I'm in it as part of a Faustian bargain to keep food on the table as I carve out time to write.

Resolution #1: Start writing in the morning, before you go to work. Screw work. Just go your job like the rock star you are and go home to the important parts of your life. I'm not going to get promoted anytime soon and no matter how hard I jockey to be a copy editor, it's just not going to happen in the slow-motion sphere of office politics; and I’m tired of the Rashomon effect of other people judging my abilities, guessing when I’m “ready.”

Revelation #2: I screw around way too much surfing political chat rooms, inevitably bending my mind around a political sphere, as if I have anything important to add. As I wrote here before, I'm not a political pundit. I'm just a guy with what I can only label as a macabre "roadside accident" curiosity to the dysfunctional state of American politics. I swerve into writing about politics because it’s easy to say "Bush is an corrupt, simple-minded idiot." But really, who cares what I think?

Resolution #2: Ditch the chat rooms like Salon's Table Talk and Democratic Underground. Let's face it: We're entering a bizarro world...anarchy is peace and the war's cause may not be that important anyway. No WMD in Iraq? So what, let's hit Syria. If no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq, and Team Bush doesn't get roasted for its phony war, then don't bother to vote in 2004. The public doesn't clearly care and it isn't bright enough to pay attention. So, why should I be a pundit if no one really cares?

Incidentally, Patrick Farley at E-Sheep has put together a collection of cut-and-paste meditations on bizarro America, including wondering just where the anti-war crowd goes from here. Check it out.

Revelation #3: I'm too nervous about writing, thinking everything has been done or I suck.

Resolution #3: This is an oldie, but a goodie. It's bullshit. I'm at a point of no return with the novel. I either have to start it now or ditch it all together. During my trip, I swore I'd take some mental time off…get some distance between my nagging insecurities and myself. Ironically, I was flooded with ideas all through the trip, and I have a small black travel journal to prove it. In my time away, I felt more pieces come together and watched as the characters developed in a more natural way in a matter of days than compared to the weeks prior to the trip I spent feeling out the characters and scenes. Coming home, I never felt more ready to begin.

Apropos of hopefully nothing, I've read of dominatrices being employed to by people not for some sex play, but to get them going on their life goals, literally cracking the whip to get them hustling to make the first million by the time they are 30 or some such target. I don't know about you, but the sinister image-recipe of a leather corset, knee-high boots and a cat-o-nine tails would get me pounding out a chapter a day.

Marquis de Sade "life coaches." Yikes.