NEEDLING

Can’t sleep. Cracked a beer and opened up The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel. Was talking about him with Glenn before turning in last night. Was wondering what if some guy like Babel who had joined the red army’s disastrous campaign in Poland and wrote realistic short fiction stories based on what he saw and experienced, what if some guy did that with the Yanks in Iraq? Would he get as far as Babel? How long would it take George Wanker and his cowboys to arrest him, confiscate all his paperwork, his stories, his journals et cetera, jail him, mock trial him, and execute him? Would they even go through the trouble of jailing him, mock-trial-ing him, et cetera? Wouldn’t they just simply put a bullet through his head and blame it on Iraqi insurgents, or hell… friendly fire? Could a modern day American Isaac Babel even exist today? I don’t think so. And if such a man miraculously existed, could he get his work published anywhere? I don’t think it could happen. There are plenty of journalists over there, and they cover what they’re told to cover. But could a fellow go out there and write short-fiction based on what he saw? Make the soldiers three-dimensional, how they deal with fighting, death, prisoners, love affairs, starvation… Make the Iraqis three-dimensional too… Talk about the widow of a dying Iraqi commander who fought for the yanks for example? Talk about some Imam pondering over life in general. The Red Cavalry Stories become The Yanks Come to Town Stories… a writer for whom English is the first language, but for whom Arabic would not be a totally foreign tongue, one who would write to and for Americans, but with a good understanding of the Iraqi people, their culture and their various ways of life… how many short stories could that guy write, would they even let him write such fictitious stories which would attempt to embody the war and all the characters involved in it as honestly as possible? I doubt it. With all their cry for freedom of speech, their supposed reasons to go and kill thousands of people, to have had over one thousand American soldiers killed, about five thousand others wounded, to free the people of Iraq from their leader’s tyranny… for all this supposed selflessness, high-minded idealisms, I don’t think anybody could go and write honestly about what’s going on over there, to write about that war in a such a way that the good people of America could read within the safety of their own homes these stories and start to come close to what’s going on, at least in a soldier’s or a small village Imam’s heart… empathize, relate to, feel the emotions of… I don’t think such a man or woman would last more than five minutes before he got stuck in front of friendly fire.