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Date:         Tue, 1 Sep 1992 08:46:43 -0500
From:         ANTHLAL@UMNACVX.BITNET
Subject:      cutting off one's nose to spite one's face

hi-ho, another elitist, insensitive message coming your way from the
beautiful etoile du nord.  kerry, if you hate us all so damn much, why put
yourself through it?  when *i* hate you all that much, i just sign off the list.
    it'll do you a world of good.  when you can bear the thought of turning on
the terminal without throwing up, that means it's time to log back on.
easy.  and good for the complexion.
gilbert, before i get to your question about iraq and bosnia, i'd just like to
hypothesize that robert or whomever it was was making a joke.  no such
message came through from linda.  it's, you know, subtle humor?  we do that
when we aren't trying to show each other how stupid we can possibly be, or when
   we aren't proselytizing.
but on to the question at hand.
okay, i would agree that oil is definitely a factor in the iraq conflict.  howev
   er, it goes a little further than that, i think.  first of all, there is some

degree of confusion as to which "side" in the bosnian conflict is doing what.
the latest news flash is that people over there are saying that each side
is killing its own people in order to stir up world sympathy...the attack on
the people in that graveyard was, in fact, carried out by croatians.  blood
looks real good on tv.  furthermore, there is evidence that would indicate
that moslems themselves staged the attack on those 16 people in the breadline
yesterday.  this whole thing is absolutely stomach-turning.  according to
reuters, at the latest peace meeting, the british officials were saying
things like "if you all would quit killing yourselves in order to make good
press, this thing might be resolved."  yeesh.  glad i'm not on assignment over
there.  there's a bounty on journalists.  ('course, maybe that would clear
up the 'liberal media bias' thing if we instated that sort of thing here...
i dibs geraldo rivera.)
now here comes the really bitter and cynical part * * *
the reason we had no hesitation to go to iraq (or have none to return, for that
   matter) has to do with white, western european perceptions of the moslem
world.  for those of you with elitist and insensitive backgrounds, you might
want to try reading (gasp) edward said's essay _orientalism_ to get a
background feel for this idea.  serbs and bosnians don't look quite as
foreign and strange.  they actually look quite a little bit like your
next-door neighbors, which is why we are so horrified to see them being gunned
down like so many cattle.  "god, that's horrible!  do something!", we cry.
meanwhile, back at cnn headquarters in atlanta, the ten-minute film of
black africans starving to death in somalia is cut to two minutes:  what,
another famine in africa?  don't those people plan ahead?  didn't they just
*have* a famine in africa?  over at abc, shots of the kurds, facedown on
the ground, get deleted from a newscast.  they dress weird anyway, and
maybe they're just prostrate with grief or something.
look at it this way:  we don't mind killing people who are extremely foreign
and incomprehensible.  the propaganda machine can easily create a "good side"
and a "bad side" in the iraq situation.  not so with the serbs and croats.
nobody wins, everyone loses.
same old stuff, different day, as i believe i said, um, yesterday.

and, of course, oil is important, too;  our allies are important, too;
the fact that most people in this country now have some idea where the heck
iraq even *is* by now is important, too;  and anyway turner stock is down,
and that's important, too.

hey, gotta go.  hoping to go make fun of people who haven't read _ulysses_.

                       * * *anneliese "whaddaya mean, you can't work
                            differential equations?" l.
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