The Horror, The Horror

Off to Windsor this afternoon to pay bills and mail letters. The DHS loves it when Canadians working in the US keep a Canadian address, just in case our visa gets pulled and we can be sent packing as soon as possible. Suits me. One of the things I'm mailing off is the tot's application for a Canadian passport. The application allows you to NOT list "place of birth", very handy considering he was born in the United States. When push comes to shove years down the road as he is backpacking through Europe, he can creatively fill in the blank, depending on circumstances.

Alas, there's no getting around the fact he is a US citizen as well. Rep. Charles Rangel is advocating a return to the draft, a noble albeit farfetched suggestion that cuts right to the heart of Iraq fiasco - chickenhawk presidents and their acolytes might be less trigger happy if they know their kin and kind could find themselves on the front line. And those of us who have tried to turn a blind eye to the daily carnage and skullduggery might be more inclined to take to the streets in protest.

The fact that there isn't more protest, more outrage is evidence that a) Bush managed to keep the war off in the distance for the vast majority of the American public and b) the public has at long last taken a closer look at the mayhem but is so tired from the strain of 9/11 and Katrina and a thousand other indignities of incompetence that they have little energy left. Voting in the toothless Democrats hardly constitutes a radical move to protest.

Still some have gone mad. In "Apocalype Now", Colonel Kurtz went insane not because his methods were unsound but because the whole premise and the execution of the war were unsound. The toxic energy flowed fast and furious through him and he arrived at a dark place emblematic of the psychological nightmare that was the Vietnam War for the collective American psyche. Coppola was a genius to use The Doors' "The End" as a sonic representation of Kurtz's drift into the terminally unwell.

The Colonel Kurtz of this war is Cindy Sheehan. Her boy was killed. For what? Oil? WMD? Saddam's scalp? Revenge for Bush's daddy? An Emerald City in the pious dust of the Middle East? Who will answer for it? Like Banquo's ghost, she haunts Bush. If she is a pathetic figure that the left has adopted for its own advantage, as Christopher Hitchens and others have suggested, it's beside the point. She is pathetic because she's been driven mad by naive dreams all gotten up in messianic and jingoistic bunting. Her insanity is all-American and the halls of the asylum ring with her nattering and Kurtz's whispering. That's the song, the only song, that can do justice to Iraq.

Friends, climb aboard the Blue Bus, strap on the headphones and after a couple of stiff drinks, read The Iraq Report.