Laylah Anwar

Americans are noticing a blog from Iraq called An Arab Woman Blues, written by one Laylah Anwar. Not much is known about her. She is obviously well-educated and erudite, a member of Baghdad's bohemian sector. (The map of Bohemia includes a small piece of every major city on Earth.)

And she is very angry at Americans -- all Americans, including you and me. It's a righteous anger, a well-earned anger, the kind that reminds one of Malcolm X at his finest. I picture her as a woman who could ignite a fire just by staring.

Here are some excerpts from her recent posts on Americans who complain of stress:

They uphold and constantly re-create the same system that makes them stressful...

And if you listen to them close enough,you will realize they are nothing but a bunch of spoiled brats...They are stressed because they have valued "work", above everything else...

They are stressed because they complicate their lives with stupidities and more things to manage...

They are stressed because they have been led to believe that Life owes it to them, that they are entitled simply because they are who they are...

Is the accusation well-founded? Yes and no. I can't expect Anwar to understand that American culture teaches both arrogance and self-hatred.

When the Great Depression hit, a quarter of the country had no work, and each person in line at the soup kitchen blamed himself. Today, the shelters cannot accommodate the growing number of homeless, and each person living in the streets blames himself. Nobody, not even the most wretched amongst us, wants to blame a system in which virtue equals money.

Anwar visualizes all Americans as effete whiners forever rushing off to yoga class to relieve imaginary angst. That ain't what's going on, Laylah -- certainly not after George Bush ran up massive debts, made housing unaffordable, transferred public monies to his corrupt cronies and tossed our jobs overseas. That occupation soldier you face every day, the "pimpled stinking american who has not even finished high school," isn't going to do the yoga-and-chablis thing when he returns home. Trust me on that.

Our culture is built on a hierarchy of sadism. For every Condescending Bastard, there is a Poor Schlub who has to bear the brunt of that condescension. He longs to take out his frustration on someone else. He wants his chance to play the role of Condescending Bastard.

Since people with nothing else to be proud of take pride in accidents of birth, these Schlubs find solace in nationalism and fundamentalist religion. They constitute the 30% of the American population who still support Dubya, and who still think Iraq was behind 9/11. They are the ones who rushed to take up arms against what they consider the A-rab threat.

Many of the Good Ol' Boys in uniform who treat Iraqis as subhumans are themselves treated as subhumans back home. Many of them have nothing waiting for them stateside, aside from a crummy room in a single-wide mobile home and a low-paid, go-nowhere job at Wal-Mart.

The military offers such people a temporary hallucination of power. They'll never know power again.

I cannot expect anyone living under occupation in Iraq to care about why the Schlubs are the way they are. The Iraqis have their own problems:

Well I will tell you what real stress is all about you motherfuckers.

Stress is when you have been no with water and no electricity for over 5 years. That is stress.

Stress is when you have no job because some fucking backward retard came and occupied your country, pillaged it and stripped you of your livelihood. That is stress.

Stress is when you run from hospital ward to hospital ward, from prison to prison, from militia to militia looking for your loved one only to recognize them from their teeth fillings in some morgue...That is stress alright.

Laylah, I like your style. If anything, you're too kind when speaking of your occupiers.

However, she loses her clarity when she pulls back for the wider view. When speaking of Iran, she sounds like Michael Ledeen:

You know very well Iran is AS guilty as America in the destruction of Iraq.

You know very well that Iran's militias are still fully operational in Iraq alongside the Americans.

You know very well that Iran has been AS instrumental as the USA in shaping the new Iraqi frontiers and in changing its flag.

It's true that the same people calling for nuclear war against Iran were instrumental in putting a pro-Iranian government in power in Iraq. I don't pretend to understand how or why this happened. Even the dolts who formulated this policy may not understand how or why it happened.

When George W. Bush assumed the presidency, he did not know the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite.

Let that sink in. A man who had been to our finest schools did not know that Islam had Sunni and Shi'ite factions. A man who was of adult age during the Iranian revolution -- a time when every single American news periodical carried an article which carefully explained the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite -- somehow managed to ignore that lesson. Even the Schlubs got it. But not the Shrub.

Can you get your mind around that, Laylah?

Me neither.

By the way: Laylah Anwar's blog posts feature works by Iraqi artists. I'm particularly impressed by this piece by Kathem Al-Dakheel, which I've taken the liberty of reproducing here.

Artists in the Middle East and Asia are producing some incredible works, which deserve much more attention in the United States. Whenever I see the crap infesting the New York galleries, and whenever I think of the good artists who don't receive sufficient critical attention, the veins start popping in my forehead.