Aftermath

At ‘Aftermath’, the appropriate name of a new play opening at the New York Theatre Workshop this week, the young ladies in my row couldn’t get out of their seats when the curtain fell on its Friday night preview. The play is comprised of six true stories of Iraqi refugees in Jordan, and the sheer scale of the tragedy George Bush and the rest of us imposed on those people left a lot of the audience speechless.

The dialogue is drawn directly from refugee testimony, and it has its lighter moments, even Saddam Hussein jokes. But best of all, it is about Iraqis—the invisible actor in the debates we’ve been having now for six years.

I am SO over crap films like The Hurt Locker, which continues to get positive reviews and run for months despite its rehash of every tough-guy war-movie cliché and the vast desert of moral emptiness at its heart. I walked out after the scene in which an American soldier carries a young boy’s body out of a ruined building to a chorus of swelling strings.

We bomb your cities for weeks, kill you by the tens of thousands, drive 4 million of you into exile and install death squads as your police force. Then we make films showing how badly WE feel about dead Iraqi children.

So it was a relief to see a work in which Iraqis get to speak and be human beings instead of shadowy background figures representing Danger or perhaps the Inscrutable East.

It’s a sign of our self-absorbed world-view that even six years after the invasion no one dares to offer much of a critical eye on U.S. military behavior there, nor is there a hint of the profound doubts about war-making in general that characterized the anti-Vietnam war movement.

Instead, we continue to watch movies about ourselves and weep over our lost innocence.