Alas Poor Yorick
Is this good news or bad news? McClatchy Newspapers reports that "as violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch".
A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that's cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds. ...
Few people have a better sense of the death rate in Iraq .
"I always think of the increasing and decreasing of the dead," said Sameer Shaaban, 23, one of more than 100 workers who specialize in ceremonially washing the corpses. "People want more and more money, and I am one of them, but most of the workers in this field don't talk frankly, because they wish for more coffins, to earn more and more."
There's one easy way to get the body count up again, and that's to follow the advice of certain political groups whose avowed aim was to get it down. And if that sounds absurd it is no less so than many of the puzzling advocacies of our enlightened age: of civil libertarians who support tyrants; feminists who support misogyny; gays who support regimes which execute homosexuals and self-described patriots who insist that helping their country's enemies is the purest form of nationalism. Today we shed a tear for the poor employment prospects of the gravediggers of Iraq. That's not comedy. It's not even irony. Just politics.
posted by wretchardthecat at 10/17/2007 05:16:00 AM
12 Comments:
Wretchard,
Good post. Not only politics, also economics.
Salaam eleikum Sir.
The only astonishing thing about this post is the opening question, whether falling violence is good news or bad news.
Teresita:
I think you miss the point: AMERICA is the bad news -- at least as long as W is in the White House and you are willing to believe what his enemies are saying. F
And if that sounds absurd it is no less so than many of the puzzling advocacies of our enlightened age: of civil libertarians who support tyrants; feminists who support misogyny; gays who support regimes which execute homosexuals and self-described patriots who insist that helping their country's enemies is the purest form of nationalism.
The "advocacies" you speak of are secondary consequences of the primary battle, lamented, if at all, with crocodile tears.
But the good war, against the close-in and insidious, must go on.
Wretchard -- there is no contradiction at all.
Civil Libertarians merely want to destroy the West (so they may wield the whip-hand). Feminists merely want to destroy middle class men (so they may be the power behind the throne in the harem). Gays merely want to restrict the sexual choices of straight men (so as in Muslim countries men are forced into gay sex). Self-described Patriots hate the nation state which empowers the ordinary person and wish to destroy it so they too can wield the whip.
To get back to the point...
Washing what remains of an islamofascist jihadi slammed by a sniper's .50cal slug must be a pretty icky job.
I'd demand more money to do it, too!
Raising wages is not part of the plan:
Coyotes are being contracted to smuggle in illegals to do the jobs Iraqis would rather not do in order to keep prices low, and promote the Globalist Agenda.
A ghoulish post 14 days early.
If this is getting into the spirit of Halloween, we have a great cast of scary characters: "civil libertarians who support tyrants; feminists who support misogyny; gays who support regimes which execute homosexuals and self-described patriots who insist that helping their country's enemies". And, as if the Left climbing into bed with Islamists isn't scary enough, the prospect of handing over leadership of the U.S. to Hillary Clinton is terrifying.
Whoever wrote that had a great time. They wove in everything a good human- interest sob story needs, but had the implied pro- war message that fewer people were dying. Absolute genius.
F: AMERICA is the bad news -- at least as long as W is in the White House and you are willing to believe what his enemies are saying.
I love America. I want to be more proud of her than I am right now.
Headline: "As America Wins the War on Terror, New York Times Stock Falls Precipitously: Layoffs Feared"
Does McClatchy accept suggestions?
Cliff May at Townhall.com observes:
That key to that strategy, known as the “surge,” is not the number of troops deployed – though a minimum force size is necessary -- but rather how they are utilized. Col. Wayne W. Grigsby, Jr., who commands a “surge” brigade based in a mixed Sunni and Shia area near Baghdad, made it simple for me in a phone conversation this week: “We do not commute to work,” he said. “We live in the towns with the people we are here to help.”
That means providing them with security – gathering intelligence from them about where the terrorists are hiding, and then eliminating them, their safe havens, their bomb factories and their weapons caches. Do that and the bloodshed begins to subside.
“The Iraqi people are fed up with the violence and with the extremists, both Sunni and Shia,” Grigsby said. Far from “resisting” the American troops in their communities, “they want to join the fight and protect their neighborhoods. They are coming to us and saying, ‘How can we help? We don’t want to live like this.’”
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/CliffMay/2007/10/18/al-qaeda_in_iraq_on_the_run
We can defeat the terrorists, it's the defeatists among us who are the danger.
It's possible that liberals are not rooting for America to LOSE in Iraq, they just don't want it to WIN.
J. R. Dunn makes the point:
A war's end has its necessary rituals. The defeated must bow their heads and acknowledge failure. The victors must have their triumph, plus the privilege of dictating the terms of peace as they see fit. If this process does not occur, then there is no closing, no climacteric. The war remains unended on the symbolic and psychological level, which means, for all practical purposes, that it hasn't ended at all.
Without a just ending, war is merely a parade of atrocities and massacres, killer apes doing what killer apes have done for three million years or more. It is the victor who gives shape to the ending, who decides whether it will be yet another episode in the long Halloween or something that partakes of the higher aspects of human nature: mercy, honor, and reconciliation.
Which is why victory is hated by antiwar types, no matter what their ideology and motivation. (This is not even to mention the agendas of the hard left and the Democrats, which we don't have space to get into.) They don't want war redeemed.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/10/buried_victories.html
In Korea, the UN brokered a "tie", which is why 30,000 American troops are still stationed on the border. In Lebanon the UN brokered a "tie" which strengthened Hamas and devastated the militarialy superior Israel's government.
I maintain that the UN, rather then brokering peace, is making conflict MORE attractive by limiting the downside to the losers.
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