| 19 June 2005 Early Education Everything I needed to know was not taught to me in kindergarten. I defy the nauseating chicken-soup books that say this is all simple. It is not. It sounds good, on the surface. Play fair. Don't hit people. It oozes politeness and the memory of what white glue tasted like. There were two kinds, I remember that vividly. One came as a sort of paste and the other was a liquid and vile. I remember the taste, and I remember "Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody." But we live in a world where there are bullies who mess things up, take things that are not theirs, and hit you unfairly. I shouldn't tee off on Robert Fulghum, who wrote the pabulum parable, and he has never taken anything of mine. But I am seething on this gentle morning about the people that appear never to have learned anything at all about conduct that permits us to get along with one another. The radio and the paper told me everything I needed to know about getting through this day. It told me about dying, and how the Hospice people attempt to insert serenity into the end of things. They talked about dignity, and mitigating pain, and of acceptance. I don't think they teach you that in kindergarten. Fulgram says that the little seeds in the Styrofoam cup and the hamsters and the goldfish which all die are the great metaphor for the little ones. But I don't recall it that way. I remember more about being told to be quiet, and to sit down and try to concentrate. But not acceptance. There was that gentle death on the radio and there was the hard-edged savage version in The Times. The situation in Iraq is evolving, morphing into something it was not before, though the shape is the same. The insurgents are increasingly and disproportionately from Africa (one in four) and Saudi Arabia . 100% of the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi. They are flooding across the Syrian border. There are many more of them in custody this year than there were last year, and the insurgency is increasingly focused on blowing Iraqi civilians to pieces, eight of them at lunch today in Baghdad . The Marines are in it again, fighting on the infiltration routes. Company K, Third Marines, Second Division, is one of the units in the fight. The paper and the radio say that they blew the wall out of a nondescript one-story building and discovered a torture center with live hostages. That is unusual, not the torture part, but finding hostages alive. It was also curious, in that the captives knew nothing of military value and were not questioned. They were not photographed or videotaped. They were simply tortured for tortures sake. Among the detritus of barbed wire and car batteries was a First Edition of "The Principles of Jihadist Philosophy," by Abdel Rahman al-Ali, 2005. It is thick, and quite informative. It has chapters on whom to kill, and how, and why it is justified in the context of Holy War, twisting the words of Prophet until white is black, and every crime is justified. Maybe we should call this the Global War on Wahhabism, the cult of Islam that rules in the desert kingdom. A.Q. Kahn, the Pakistani proliferators, is another of the stern stripe of Islam, though he has placed the atomic bomb in the arsenal of the Faithful and others. Mr. Kahn is a follower of Moudood, an Imam who declared that it was the duty of the devout to learn the Science of the West, and then use the fruits of that knowledge to destroy it. Many of the educated in Pakistan consider the Imam a man of gifted insight, and Kahn a national hero. A.Q. is under house arrest, and as such is living pretty well, certainly better than Mukhtaran Bibi,the brave young woman that General Pervez Musharraf, President Presumptive, put under house arrest for daring to protest the barbaric custom of ritual rape. Goodness knows I like the little General. There is so much riding on his ability to keep the lid on the loonies and the Moudoudis. But the ambiguity of supporting part of him and despising his harassment of a woman who stood up to culture is one of those things that they don't teach you how to deal with in school. Her story is as visceral as the mutilation of young girls, or the treatment of African women by the Arab Janjui militia in the Darfur . The council of elders in Ms Bibi's village was mad at her brother. I don't know what he did, but it must have been something pretty severe. Accordingly, his sister was sentenced to be raped by four men, the theory apparently being that she would be devalued as a commodity, and her brother's honor would be stained. After the men took turns on her, she was forced to walk from the place of her assault without the covering of a devout woman. Some of the accounts claim she was nearly naked, and the villagers hooted at her humiliation. Ms Bibi defied tradition, and she testified against her attackers. Rape is still illegal, even in rural Pakistan , and her attackers went to jail. She then used the compensation she was paid to establish a school for children. She is enrolled in the fourth grade there herself, seeking to better herself and standing her ground in her own village. It was when Westerners took up her cause, and invited her to America to speak that General Musharraf had to confiscate her passport and put her under arrest. They say the General did not want Pakistan to be placed in a bad light. He has nuclear weapons, after all, and is entitled to respect. I don't know. I forget what grade they teach you about ambiguity. It isn't kindergarten, I'm pretty sure. Maybe it is in grad school, and I missed it. Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra |