Your Tax Dollars at Work

Once there was a way to get back homeward
Once there was a way to get back home

Boy you're gonna carry that weight,
carry that weight a long time

--Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight, The Beatles
___________

Premise: Women cause problems. Look at how much ink Britney's wasted. And Hillary, gobs of problems emanate from her very existence, so they say. It's unsure whether the problem is getting too much of women, or too little, but whatever, clearly they are causative in a multitude of the world's sins.

Oh, o.k., occasionally the shoe's on the other foot -- your John Belushi, or Phil Specter or Stalin or Mel Gibson. Even then, you usually find a woman preceding the problem. Save in the case of Mr. Gibson. But in the main, the men's problems arise when they have partaken of too much drink or too many illicit substances. Otherwise, they tend to keep their boorish behavior under wraps.

Women, however, are not content generally to "just sit there and look pretty." The concept of power enters their thinking, and this is an unharnessable tragedy for men. So the only solution if men are to coexist peaceably is to shut them down.

In our new Democratic Islamic Republic of Iraq, the solution is putting them back under a bushel, and they have taken up the project with gusto. Dozens of women were murdered in the southern Iraq city of Basra this year for failure to wear the anonymizing hijab. The number is likely much higher, but families fear reprisal and so the crimes go unreported.

Iraqi Maj. Gen. Jalil Khalaf attributes the "honor" killings to roaming sectarian vigilante groups. The mutilated and bullet-riddled bodies are found with warnings regarding the women's dishabille (Basra Women Fear Militants Behind Wave of Killing).

Reuters said, "During the long rule of Saddam Hussein, who suppressed Islamists, Iraqi women in urban areas enjoyed some of the most casual dress codes in the Middle East." Basra was a secular, cosmopolitan city "with a vibrant nightlife" before the U.S. invasion.

Something about democracy and freedom is getting lost in translation. The price tag for riding shotgun on this emergent misogynistic vehicle: mere trillions of hard-earned U.S. dollars. And we thought palletized bundles of shrink-wrapped dollars were a strange image early on. Think Weimar Germany and pushing wheelbarrows full of the stuff to buy your daily loaf one day soon.

It's a great deal, though, if you wear a burka.

--Jim and Lisa