refeshingly depression

I highly recommend watching this video. I almost never follow the news, let alone on Iraq. I guess lately I've been looking for distraction on my thesis, but what I have been finding instead is perspective.

There's something really cathartic about hearing these words spoken on a screen (if only my tiny glowing blue computer):

"The Americans in Iraq are like a virus, like a disease. And for us we need to get rid of the Americans, because the Americans just don`t know what they`re doing."

and

"it's a crime after five years that electricity is not back to prewar levels, because Saddam Hussein, who was a dictator I detested, was able to have electricity back in 45 days. So, why is the United States not having achieved that in five years? It's not just miscalculations. The priority was, you know, to make sure that the oil flows. Sorry, but that is true. The only sector that`s working well right now is the oil sector. It`s not the schools, not the hospitals, not the reconstruction. The oil sector is working.

What a mess. It's telling that this makes me think of my thesis, specifically the relationship between truth and fiction. I was reading excerpts from Ricardo Piglia's "Critica y Ficcion" today. He's an Argentine writer and was my advisor's advisor at Princeton, and has provided me with a good quote on the relationship between truth and fiction:

"Me interesa trabajar esa zona indeterminada donde se cruzan la ficción y la verdad. Antes que nada porque no hay un campo propio de la ficción. De hecho, todo se puede ficcionalizar. La ficción trabaja con creencia y en este sentido conduce a la ideologia, a los modelos convencionales de realidad y por supuesto también a las convenciones que hacen verdadero (o ficticio) a un texto. La realidad está tejido de ficciones."

Reality is woven out of fictions. Hmm.