For some reason, I find the following to be both comforting and disturbing:
In a city where few people drink, Baghdad's sealed-off green zone counts at least seven bars, including a Thursday night disco, a sports bar, a British pub, a rooftop bar run by General Electric, and a bare-bones trai ler-tavern operated by the contractor Bechtel.. . . .
On a typical evening, one can see U.S. soldiers smoking from 4-foot-tall hookahs and security contractors guffawing over beer, their machine guns by their sides. The CPA's would-be strategists can sometimes be seen in their ubiquitous military desert boots and dress shirts and slacks, playing Risk, the board game of global domination.
The line between tragedy and farce is thin; the only line that's thinner is the line between each and reality. There's a book to be written here -- though I think that Bowles' The Spider's House, not Burroughs' Naked Lunch, is the model. All you need is a scrap from Amazon's summary to know why:
The dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures, recurrent themes of Paul Bowles's writings, are dramatized with brutal honesty in this novel set in Fez, Morocco, during that country's 1954 nationalist uprising.
IMHO, it is Bowles' best novel -- superior to his better-read (but still not well read) The Sheltering Sky. Written decades ago and, yet, still relevant. The more things change . . . .
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