Double Flee A

Well, a guy named Nick Berg bet his life against a fat paycheck and lost. That's the cold way of saying what happened. A guy I work with, the guy who had his eyes re-opened by the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre, couldn't stop talking about the Nick Berg beheading video. He watched it on the internet.

I've seen a beheading video on the internet and have no desire to repeat that.I know how shocking it is. Well, war is shocking. I feel like a heartless jerk for my opinion, but these Iraqis see us as evil.

Our president sees people as evil, too, and trying to figure out the visions that will reveal themselves to him and direct our foreign policy like the hand of god is the only way to try to figure out what escapade America's soldiers will be going on next. Actually, that's not true. Factor in the guys who stand to profit, and that'll help predict the future, too.

We're in a war with invisible enemies that could go on forever. But no war can go on forever, so the question I ponder as I think of all the things that are "evil" in president Bush's world is, how will it end? What will be the straw that breaks America's sense of entitlement? Will it be when the economy sags and we have to pay as much for gas as the rest of the world? Will it be the next depression? How will the generations who weren't around cope with having nothing? My guess is, we're in for a heapin' dollop of humility, the ultimate Christian virtue.

That humility might start with the family of Nick Berg. I'll bet we don't hear much from those guys in the press. I wonder if his family thinks our occupation of Iraq is a good idea. Our mythologies are wild-west in this country, and I'm thinking of the scene in the film Tombstone when Wyatt Earp nd his brother are riding out of town with thier other brother's corpse in the wagon. Some wise guy makes a crack about how bad it smells, and Wyatt rides off with his tail between his legs. After that, of course, Wyatt jumps off the departing train, goes back to Tombstone, and raises total hell, kicking everybody's ass for revenge. The line he says is "You tell them the law is coming! You tell them I'm coming . . . and Hell's coming with me! You hear?! Hell's coming with me!"

I don't know what took place in the actual town of Tombstone, but I'll bet you all the zinfandel in California it wasn't like the movie. Will the family of Nick Berg want the fiery-eyed revenge they saw in Kurt Russell, actor, who got his start in the action genre in the unwatchable "Escape from New York", or can grief help them re-orient themselves with reality, in which some of the time even big bad America just has to cut its losses and hit the dusty trail.

If the lesson of Nick Berg can be "mind your own business, America", he will be memorialized as a hero, in a kind of hero mythology less like the one we currently celebrate, and more like the one that is inevitable.

posted by dale @ 2:33 PM