the disintegration of a culture, post 9-11

I have had this article open on my computer for days now...

I am not sure what to say, except that I am embarrassed to be so ignorant,

and that I wonder how many people in the US are conscious of this,

how we have moved on so callously, and how we continue to move on so carelessly from a culture and history so rich and so complex.

And that leads me to wonder about the reconstruction of Germany and how individuals may have felt about themselves and their cultural heritage (for better and for worse) after WWII,
or Kosovo after 1999, or Syria today.

When will this change?

"My last visit was in April 2017. I flew from New York, where I now live, to Kuwait, where I was giving a lecture. An Iraqi friend and I crossed the border by land. I was going to the city of Basra, in the south of Iraq. Basra was the only major Iraqi city I had not visited before. I was going to sign my books at the Friday book market of al-Farahidi Street, a weekly gathering for bibliophiles modeled after the famous Mutanabbi Street book market in Baghdad. I was driven around by friends. I didn’t expect the beautiful Basra I’d seen on 1970s postcards. That city had long disappeared. But the Basra I saw was so exhausted and polluted. The city had suffered a great deal during the Iran-Iraq war, and its decline accelerated after 2003. Basra was pale, dilapidated and chaotic thanks to the rampant corruption. Its rivers are polluted and ebbing. Nonetheless, I made a pilgrimage to the famous statue of Iraq’s greatest poet, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab.

One of the few sources of joy for me during these short visits were the encounters with Iraqis who had read my novels and were moved by them. These were novels I had written from afar, and through them, I tried to grapple with the painful disintegration of an entire country and the destruction of its social fabric. These texts are haunted by the ghosts of the dead, just as their author is.

No one knows for certain how many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion 15 years ago. Some credible estimates put the number at more than one million. You can read that sentence again. The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a “blunder,” or even a “colossal mistake.” It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly amnesiac citizenry. (A year ago, I watched Mr. Bush on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” dancing and talking about his paintings.) The pundits and “experts” who sold us the war still go on doing what they do. I never thought that Iraq could ever be worse than it was during Saddam’s reign, but that is what America’s war achieved and bequeathed to Iraqis."

For I am a stranger
beloved Iraq
Far distant, and I here in my longing
For it, for her .. I cry out: Iraq
And from my cry a lament returns
An echo bursts forth
I feel I have crossed the expanse
To a world of decay that responds not
To my cry
If I shake the branches
Only decay will drop from them
Stones
Stones-no fruit
Even the springs
Are stones, even the fresh breeze
Stones moistened with blood
My cry a stone, my mouth a rock
My legs a wind straying in the wastes 

Badr Shakir al-Sayyab

via {ny times}