Just talking myself through the news of the day. Again. the way one does in a trauma/ triage situ. Most minds dont follow a straight path when learning the news. They veer into old memories. They look for patterns. They try to understand, so they can see, what can be done to help. Today, I’m saying to myself… Don’t go numb like it’s the farm report, pork bellies up, oats and soy down. Don’t go numb over this latest dispatch from Baghdad, I say to myself. I think we can see some of it from here… a tiny Chinese news correspondent from Xinhua wanders in the blasted Baghdad street, dirty water pours from bombed pipes, sewer water with black clots, pouring over red and black body parts, like the charred meat section of the market … knucklebones and ribs for sale scattered in the street, but covered with gray-pudding sludge, along with ladies purses and sandals, many sandals, as though for sale, and here’s a golden ring for the taking, but the theif would have to pull apart mascerated meat to steal it. I count backward then, Bloody Sunday, today, follows Bloody Wednesday… the August 19, 2009 attacks on two Iraqi ministries. Killed and wounded then: 1,300 mommies, daddies, sons, daughters, babies, grandpas and grandmas, dogs, and birds. Legs and heads, arms and eyes. Today, by first report, 132 dead and 500 wounded. People with names and house keys, shopping lists and lovers, clothes in the closet, and most all looking forward to something good today or someday, here, in this world, not in the sick vision of heaven. I grew up in a village of 600 souls. What screaming-God would land there on raptor legs, if no soul came home from field and factory ever again, all doors hanging open, no light ever lit in the rooms again, no radio playing, no children running to watch the bulldozer man, no one to receive any woman’s sweet touch, or a father’s glare or proud pat… ever again? 132 dead in Baghdad today, 500 injured. Two months ago, 1300 dead and wounded. Nuri Al-Maliki, at the carnage site today: ‘This is the work of Qaida, remnants of the dismantled old regime.’ Through Al-Maliki’s eyes, we see the sick irony… remnants of the dismantled rising up today, this Sunday, to dismember others. Old strangled Saddam. Is it he who staggers not yet alive, not yet dead, thick rope scarf still around his neck? Can he still strangle-call for hundreds of volunteers to do as he did daily: Kill someone. Kill many. Long ago, the child of a sister-friend, agreed to be initiated into a gang. The beating nearly killed this young soul. Even in the emergency room, the child wore this small wan smile of triumph, ‘I passed the gang’s test.’ She’d been ordered to be willing to die… to prove loyalty to an ill thing that spoke all glowingly of freedom and life, but under the table, its fancy black shoes covered fleshless white bones. Thus, Saddam drove the rig in Baghdad again today, sweating behind a steering wheel all loose with ten bolts missing in the rack. Saddam, cranking down the narrow road, looking for the turn to the building, the one with the bright white X on it. Someone once again, gave him the exact map. Driver Saddam sees no human, not even himself, only blocks, buildings, the bomb in his uterus, the lovely fetoid bomb with soft impact detonator. He is giving birth, the driver thinks. I am giving birth, he cries. Allah Akbar, he cries. And his carefully made progeny is immediately dashed head-first into a stone wall. Again. And later… there is only left the ill thing who speaks so proudly about freedom and ideals, while under the table, inside its socks and sandals, there is no flesh, only bones. Meanwhile, in Iraq elsewhere, the family in all its tribes and clans, moves forward making efforts to decide now, about who’s who and what belongs to whom, and who should give what to whom… that maybe there wont be another chance to decide these matters. Again. Ali al-Dabagh, the Iraqi government spokesman, said Sunday’s deadly attacks will be on the table of the Political Council for National Security meeting, confirming that the attacks were targeting the elections. On Wednesday, Iraqi parliament speaker Ayad al-Samarrai said the parliament failed to overcome differences over the amendments of the electoral law and therefore they referred the controversial bill to the Political Council of National Security, which comprises of President Jalal Talabani, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and the heads of political parliamentary blocs, in addition to Samarrai himself. Observers here say that the stumbling block to approve the proposed amendments on the electoral law is mainly differences among the parliamentary blocs over the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, some 250 km north of Baghdad. The Kurds demanded to incorporate Kirkuk in their autonomous region, while the Arab and Turkmen communities opposed the Kurdish ambitions and insisted on either staying under Baghdad control or being a separate federal region. And meanwhile, unrelated, but in some way resonant … Thousands of people crept outdoors in Los Angeles yesterday. They were doing what I would call: pretending death. They were dressed as zombies, the living-dead, with the overt intent to break a world record for dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller…” Some might say this was mere foolishness and point to it as an example of the superficiality of a nation at war in two places on the globe. But some might say, in a different and primal sense, that pretending to be dead while alive/ alive while dead, is ritual… the very least of which remembers back to a time when human beings once warded off a destructive impulse they felt, but resisted becoming themselves… They did this by pretending, in limited scope, to become that very half-born/half-dead thing, and to take the deadliness and violence out of it… by dancing it into the ground instead. _________ CODA Different people have different ways of relating to tragedy/ news/ events. Just a two cent’s worth, aside. Over the years as a shrink, I’ve noticed that the fewer memories, associations, feelings a person allows themselves about the news, particularly difficult and disastrous news, personal news, or worldwide news… the more benumbed they can become. Being numb can be healing, in the least, and sometimes the best manner, holding a person together. In another view, for some people, associations and memories pull together a picture for them, that creates a tension that holds the psyche too. Thus, broadness of scope for some, is how they understand.. and withstand. There are other ways of making sense of matters by trimming and/or shutting out some, not all… This can also coalesce and hold the psyche more or less steady.