So, I read today in the Wall Street Journal about Vice-President Dick Cheney getting pissed with the Iraqi members of parliament because they were planning to take a two month vacation.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s surprise trip to Baghdad today was meant to deliver a tough message to the Iraqi government – put off your vacation plans and get back to work.

This reminded me of the time when a friend of mine expressed to me his frustration with his new girlfriend. My friend is Caucasian, his girlfriend was African-American (was? still is as far as I know). Apparently, during a discussion on some African-American topic, my friend’s girlfriend displayed a little too much ignorance on the topic at hand and he was quite displaced by this. He told her, “You should learn more about your culture.” Uh-ohhh. At this point, his girlfriend did a Krakatoa and pretty much spewed red hot invective all over my friend’s shocked face. She told him he no right to tell her what she should or should not know when it came to her culture. Dismayed, my friend asked me what he had done wrong.

My explanation went something like this: “You don’t go into someone’s home, vandalize it beyond recognition, then, after you are done, tell the person you just vandalized, ‘You know, you really need to do something about this place. It’s quite an eyesore.” Because the African culture was basically ransacked by a lot of different cultures, but most identifiably by Europeans, having someone who is historically if not directly connected to that culture tell someone who is historically connected to the culture of Africans that they need to learn more about their culture is doubly insulting.

And this is what I thought of when I read this piece about Dick Cheney. Basically, Vice-President Cheney is telling the Iraqi parliament, “Hey, we’re not going to be here forever. We’re trying to help you people out…even if you didn’t ask us to. Um, but that’s neither here nor there. We knew what was best for you, and more importantly, what is best for the American people. Now, it may seem like things are bad now. There is a lot of social upheaval, quite a bit of anarchy. A lot of people have died and the amount of progress so far is…nominal, but it is always darkest right before dawn. So just because we pretty much rumbled in and ransacked your house and acted like we own this town, we don’t. We don’t own it. It’s yours. So…clean all this shit up and get your asses in gear. This is ridiculous! Don’t you people have any pride in yourselves?”

Hell, maybe the people of parliament know that they are royally $%&@#* and they figure, “What’s point? Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em”

Personally, if someone were to come into my home and wreck it without compunction (or permission), then tell me to help them clean it up, I’d go on vacation too.