(And by the way, sir, have you ever noticed that after we insert a block quotation disguised as a table for one, Google spaces the lines of the main text closer together ever after?)
| The wall is being built round the biggest remaining Sunni enclave on the east bank, at Adhamiya. Referred to by US troops as the Great Wall of Adhamiya, it is surrounded on three sides by Shia neighbourhoods and has been the scene of some of the city's worst violence. |
What was it that North of Boston versifier scribbled, "Bad fences make good pictures"? Something like that.
Poetry aside, erecting hedges and fences and walls has rather a bad reputation as a practical tool for statepersons and violence professionals. The Chinese monstrosity seems never to have kept any "barbarians" out. Amortized over the centuries, it has no doubt proved well worth building for aesthetic and touristical reasons alone, but for defensive purposes its masterminds might as well have rearranged the same construction material in scattered pyramids. If Hadrian's most ambitious mural project had really worked, you and I would not be here keyboarding in our West Germanic language of invasion. (Since nothing comparable was attempted in the imperial southeast, however, wall-building can not have been a major reason why Hadrian's preferred solution of the Palestine Puzzle has not endured.)
Wishful thinking springs eternal, though, and "our" valiant Sassenach ancestors succumbed to it too, comparatively local and recent failures notwithstanding. Wat and Offa were not up to proper walls, technologically, but they did what they could with dykes. Perhaps the militant Republicans should consider emulating that Big Dig example, for one must admit that the Welsh never did get their Heimatland back, unless Mr. David Lloyd George counts. Skipping over the Danevirke and other less illustrious but equally ineffectual specimens, we arrive at modern times and M. Maginot, whose surname has, rather unfairly, become in itself a sort of verbal cartoon for this particular department of the Edifice Complex.
Observe that Edifice Complex side of teichomania[1] is logically distinct from the military, though. King Ozymandias may chiefly intend to create a geistlich state of Shock-'n'-Awe rather than crude practical advantage when he summons his contractors and subcontractors, as if to say "Behold, O wretched indigs! WE are a militant Republican, and therefore to establish such mighty works as these falls easily within Our alone superpower and far beyond yours! So if you know what's good for you, . . . ." - and so forth, and so on.
But let's get on to the cartoons. The glory of it is that, except for possibly a pair of scissors, a fence or wall is the easiest and best conceivable comic hieroglyph for the words divide et impera. As that distinguished critic, Mr. Badger of the Daily and Sunni Mystic Lynx, keeps advising us, implicity if not expressly, when it comes to cartoons, simplest and best are one and the same thing. Comic hieroglyphs ought to be instantly and unmistakably and unambiguously recognizable.
NB: simplicity is, as usual, not quite so simple a concept, another theme that Mr. B. dilates on admirably. The "simplicity" of a comic hieroglyph is not that of a Chinese ideogram that can be counted in brush strokes. Perhaps no better qualified aesthete than we has ever defined this notion rigorously, yet to do so seems not difficult: that comic hieroglyph is "simplest" which the newspaper customer comprehends the verbal equivalent of in the smallest number of milliseconds. (Empirical investigation will, of course, be required to establish particular quantities of milliseconds: que la recherche commence!)
One individual comic hieroglyph is not usually the whole cartoon, to be sure. In evaluating the work of polemic as a whole, other considerations come into play. In this case, it is obviously a boon to the graphic editorializer that there is (potentially) a wall on the ground in the neocolony as well as a wall in her cartoon, whereas to imagine that Bechtel and Halliburton are now to create a gigantic scissors for the use of King Ozymandias in his neo-Iraqi occupation policy would be just plain silliness, or at best a mildly recondite Eng. Lit. Dept. allusion to Our Man in Havana.
So this recent news ought in principle to be what they call "a gift" to the cartoon community. Whether they make anything much of it is another question. We shall see.
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Ars gratiâ artis is us, of course, but colonialism and imperializing are fun too, so perhaps we may include a word or two about the literaliter. This latest Ozymandian project appears to be predicated on policy considerations that may be rather difficult to cartoonify. Here in the homeland of Father Zeus, Televisionland and the electorate are evidently meant to understand that Tigris River City remains "basically" or "really" one neo-liberated metropolis, indivisible, as long as there are still at least a few defensible Sunni ghettos or garrisons on the river's left or east bank.
Perhaps King Ozymandias XLIII of Crawford might have taken the view that this symbolism is supererogatory, considering that the Green Zone lies on the west or right bank. (To drag in that other and even more notorious West Bank is so easy as to be vulgar. besides, almost everybody else is bound to. Let us resist the temptation, for now, anyway.) His Majesty's aesthetic or philosophical taste is to be commended, on the unlikely hypothesis that he consciously understands what he is doin', for there is a very famous icon of unity indeed that features one small speck of yin amidst the circumambient yang and vice versa. Perfect symmetry and unity would require that al-’A‘zamiyya now become regional capital for all the Sunni neo-subjects of His Majesty, or alternatively that the GZ collaborationist pols be relocated elsewhere, perhaps to Najaf or Basra. (Whether the Taoists suppose each tiny speck to wag the corresponding large tadpole, I know not.)
An objector might object that the Free Kurds do not appear in this instantiated iconography at all. But that is as it should be, for with "Iraq" they now have as good as nothing worth mentioning to do. (To be sure, their OnePercenters are allowed to participate in the GZ quasigovernment, but is that a matter worth mentioning? I think not.)
Politics being the art of the possible, we need not expect so pretty a picture as that one. Still, apart from the minor detail that our cowpoker extremists actually intend nothing of the sort, it is, or will be, or would be, rather an impressive symbolism, perhaps even more striking as a "social construct" than any wall ever yet built of bricks or steel and concrete. It is even sort of geistlich after all, perhaps.
On the other hand, to envision a solution for Peaceful Freedumbia is one thing, no matter how exalted and elegant one's envisionalisation, and to impose it quite another. The fly in the ointment, impositionwise, remains the same as ever. Who is to police the Sunni tadpole, whether from al-’A‘zamiyya or from anyplace else? The Taoist iconography would imply that the former Sunni Ascendancy is now to police itself, but it does not and it cannot, and there is the fly. Or most of the fly, because there is a consociated lesser difficulty as well: although the natural masters of Mesopotamia are smashed to smithereens, as a "community," about everything else political, they all seem to agree that any "Iraq" not run by themselves would be eo ipso a monster and an abomination -- plus of course they take for granted that there must always be an "Iraq." Only lunatics and traitors and Ambassador Galbraith would doubt so self-evident a truth as that one!
Ozymandias XLIII is clearly not the brighest bulb that ever burned at Yale. Nevertheless, if you start with the little laddie's own axiom that it is for Big Management to settle all the affairs of its neo-Iraqi subjects before it mercifully goes away at last, fairness does require one to acknowledge that even a competent workman, one who could keep his eye on the job and not be perpetually distracted by Mr. Karl Rove's type of distractions, would find this task very challenging. "Politics is the art of the possible," no doubt about it, yet possibility depends on competence and a Bismarck can achieve wonders that mere Doctors Henry Kissinger or Masters Steven Hadley have not the slightest hope of. Yet, "on the third hand," some political tasks lie outside the perimeter of even the best statespersonship available in any given age of the world, and to settle Peaceful Freedumbia successfully on the basis of the militant GOP axiom may be one of these last. It does not look as if Sen. Edwards or Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton are likely to abandon the axiom, should he become President, so probably we may expect only "a different kind of failure," as the St. Louis versifier once phrased it.
Oh, well.
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[1] "Teichomania" as a fake-clinical term for mural madness is not itself in the NED, Mr. Bones, but at 3250b you may find "teichopsia" and "teichoscopy."
In any case, why should not we, too, feel free to augment the vernacular?
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