Mission Accomplished: U.S. occupation leaves cultural legacy in Iraq

[IDemo]

From tattoos of Metallica to bellybutton piercings, the war has left its mark

By Anthony Shadid
updated 2:38 a.m. MT, Sun., May 31, 2009

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Across the street from the tidy rows of tombstones in the British cemetery, mute testimony to the soldiers of an earlier occupation, Mustafa Muwaffaq bears witness to the quieter side of the United States' six-year-old presence in Iraq.

In wraparound sunglasses, shorts and shoes without socks, the burly 20-year-old student waxes eloquent about his love for heavy metal of all kinds: death, thrash, black. But none of it compares, he says, to the honky-tonk of Alan Jackson, whose tunes he strums on his acoustic guitar at night, pining for a life as far away as a passport will take him.

"You know, I wanna go to Texas and be a country boy," he said, as he stood in the sweltering shade of Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts. "I wanna be a cowboy, and I wanna sing like one."

All occupations eventually end. When this one does, history's narratives will be shaped by the cacophony it wrought — the carnage unleashed by the U.S.-led invasion that threatened Iraq's notion of itself as a country and that will haunt generations to come.


:wtf:

[spanone]

1. i saw that article....made me sick

[madeline_con]

2. Actually, the cowboy myth is one of the independent drifter

who cannot live by society's genteel rules, and choses a life away from society where he can roam free, FWIW.

[Karenina]

3. Identification with the oppressor OR

a send-up!