Salam Pax. And Inshallah - I just might. I sent him an email a few days ago and amazingly among the no-doubt endless list of messages he gets, I got a reply......
I've had a tiny taste of how hard it is to articulate this madness, of trying to find clarity when everything is a mess, of daily challenging the uncertainties of erratic electricity and death machines to get some words out that might give people even a glimmer of what it's like here. My respect for THE Blogger of Baghdad is bigger than the AK47 of Christ.
Anyone who could maintain lucidity in all this and far far worse, with missiles detonating all around them and a regime still nominally in charge that might hang you or worse for treason if you got caught saying some of the stuff he said, that's courage. When so much crap was coming out of CNN and the official pentagon news channels, the simple act of walking out into the streets and describing what he saw with his own eyes, and giving his own take on it straight from the hip, got him a worldwide audience. And in the process, we all got to know someone who was an "iraqi civilian," which rips the protective anonymity of that term right off. He became a human being for millions, and the thought that this living, breathing person writing all this wonderful stuff could fall silent in a moment put the lie to the easy notion the Pentagon was pumping out that you can call the loss of a human life "collateral damage."
We're all glad he wasn't among the 7000 or so people labelled as such who died in this war. But it makes you wonder how many of those thousands were equally bright lights of human spirit whom we might have liked to have listened to, or had a coffee with, or come to call a friend...
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