Baghdad Burning says "Things are deteriorating swiftly"--and that's still before the video of an American soldier shooting a wounded Iraqi in a mosque. And yet there they are, having dinner and watching tv.
The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and yet most of the time I am thinking about the books I am teaching and the committee I'm on and the courses I'm planning and the people I talk with and quotidian life as though people weren't being shot in the head, bombed, buried under rubble or pierced with shrapnel or . . . you get the idea. Not to mention the constitution being gutted. Not to mention tens of thousands of children dying of curable diseases, of people starving to death.
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Her face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, she sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of her feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm . . . . irresistibly propels her into the future to which her back is turned, while the pile of debris before her grows skyward. (Walter Benjamin, revised)
