Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Around the World with Oprah: Women at 30

from Baghdad Burning
So where does the valium fit in? Imagine through all of this commotion, an elderly aunt who is terrified of bombing. She was so afraid, she couldn't, and wouldn't, sit still. She stood pacing the hallway, cursing Bush, Blair and anyone involved with the war- and that was during her calmer moments. When she was feeling especially terrified, the curses and rampage would turn into a storm of weeping and desolation (during which she imagines she can't breathe)- we were all going to die. They would have to remove us from the rubble of our home. We'd burn alive. And so on. And so forth.

During those fits of hysteria, my cousin would quietly, but firmly, hand her a valium and a glass of water. The aunt would accept both and in a matter of minutes, she'd grow calmer and a little bit more sane. This aunt wasn't addicted to valium, but it certainly came in handy during the more hectic moments of the war.

8 comments:

Sheryl said...

Hey Ryan,

I don't want to sound cynical, but how do you know that blogs like this are actually legit?

When I was looking at the government pages in Iraq, they had a bunch of newspaper links. I only found them by experimenting (clinking the link to see where it took me--it was all in arabic.) Anyway, I found a list of newspaper links. Al-Jazeera was not even listed, and yet that is the only arab newspaper she mentions.

I'm not saying it's not an important arab newspaper, but all her links are things that americans already know about, but there seems to be a lot more to the iraqi web that americans don't know about, and I don't see any of those links.

I'm just skeptical.....it's such a weird time.

J.R. Boyd said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
J.R. Boyd said...

You're right to be skeptical, and ask some good questions. So why not ask her?

J.R. Boyd said...

I mean:

riverbend@velocall.com

Sheryl said...

I have a different idea, because I don't like unnecessary confrontation, and I don't know enough about Iraq to see through a scam anyway. How about bringing some definite Iraqis to her site, and see if she can handle the discussion?

Here's an Iraqi guestbook from a university there. The entries are in english. That would be one source where we can be fairly sure they are legitimately Iraqis, because they are not trying to persuade anyone of anything. Most just seem to be former grads saying hi to their friends.
http://www.htmlgear.tripod.com/guest/control.guest?u=almansourcollege&i=2&a=viewI'll post more in a bit.

gecko said...

Since I'm on the wrong side of the issue, I certainly can be discounted, however i researched Velocall and it turned up as an IT company in Thailand. I searched for "velocall -riverbend +Iraq and only got discussions of Iraq by people outside of Iraq. I checked the company's website and found no connection to Iraqi customers. And the lamest point I can make is that thir e-mail service doesn't list Iraq in the country field! Just my two cents...

Sheryl said...

Ha! I found the same thing when I did the whois. :)

I didn't discount it though, because it looked like maybe you could get free account there, in which case it would be like Yahoo where your server might be SW Bell, but you log in to that for email.

It's just that having lived abroad, I always wanted to foreigners to know about things that I thought were special about my own culture that no one would know in other places, whereas what I saw here seemed to be her trying to convince us that they are the same.

When I took belly dancing from an iraqi, she was like me in that she was interested in telling us about her culture, not about Madonna.Or things we would already know about.

Also, I know people in the peace groups I have attended who say anything if they thought it would stop this war. People are just weird. It's a weird, weird time.

Once Bush is out, maybe things will start to get sane again.

Anonymous said...

Yeah here's a heads up...I can't reveal sources, sorry, but this Baghdad Burning blog is a fake.