Moyers Interview with Andrew J. Bacevich

Click here or on image above to link to video.
I know, it takes an hour to watch, and who's got an hour. But if you want as good an analysis as you're going get of the roots of America's downfall, this is it. It's not a bunch of liberal claptrap, either. Basevich is a political conservative.

The Cult of the Folded Tongue: Heavy Metal in Baghdad

Heavy metal in the land of heavy metal.
Here's a film for your Netflix queue: Heavy Metal in Baghdad, the story of an Iraqi heavy metal band and their struggle to be free to play metal in the Armageddon of war-torn Baghdad 2005-07. So what if the music's unpracticed, so what if these guys could get disappeared for playing it, so what if all the concert-goers are men, so what if the musicians end up in expatriate dead-end jobs, playing for peanuts. The story's told from the Iraqi point of view, so it's a man in the street look at the devastation Bush's war has wreaked upon them. The evening news it ain't.

Image: Heavy Metal in Baghdad (2007). Directed by Suroosh Alvi, Eddy Moretti.

Notebook

Monotonous entry. October, 2007.

There Will Come Soft Rains

by Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.