–A brief note: as of March 1, 2005, excerpts and photos from this piece can be found in the current print edition of Maisonneuve Magazine. Use the store locator to find a copy near you.–

Unlike all those other Iraqis, I lost my freaking notebook. What follows is a true-as-I-can-remember account of our afternoon, with approximated quotes and absolutely no hope of recalling the names. Should you or anyone you know these people, please have them contact me…

I’ve had a guilty taste in my mouth since the inaugural protest’s cocktail of adrenaline and pepper gas wore off. I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that while the right is wrong, the left might not be right either. I looked around those protests and saw legitimately angry people who were well-fed and intentionally scruffy. Not to be presumptuous, but I didn’t detect sadness and suffering ringing the eyes of most protestors. People were angry, loudly vocal, and legitimate in the depth of their feeling…but I didn’t see anyone from the middle East. While I would guess that many people there had traveled, I doubt any of them had an Iraqi stamp in their passports.

This is not to discount the suffering felt by thousand of families and friends connected to those lost in the war.

Ever since I got ready to leave America, I’ve felt the country wobbling out of balance, like world events have been spinning out of control and America is right there at the center pulling the levers. I’ve needed the comfort that comes from answers and been really jealous of the righteous sense of stability that the religious right and Bush supporters and other stupid white people seemed to have. I took refuge in a knee-jerk liberal identity for a long time, but now it’s threadbare and not as comfortable as it once was.

Tash and I are both terrifically loudmouthed critics of the Bush administration, she from an Australian perspective and me from a disgruntled American’s p.o.v. We are also both white, young, healthy, and from lands that enjoy a vast degree of privilege, thousands of miles away from true suffering. We knew we didn’t have the full story so we went out to the Iraqi Out-Of Country Voting poll on Sunday to get another truth and see ground-level democracy for ourselves.

This man has lived in America on and off for the past seven years. Three of his uncles were murdered by Hussein’s regime. He has been back and forth between Iraq and the U.S. during this war, helping as a translator and contractor to the U.S. military. His most recent project was to build a high school in Fallujah. When not assisting the United States military he works for the Republican party.

He is sort of smiling in this photo, but only because I told him to. He spoke carefully and slowly, in very subdued tones as I interviewed him, like someone emerging from shock. The skin around his eyes was a hundred years old, like the trauma that had passing through his retinas had burnt the skin around them and somehow weakened the strength of the tissue itself.

In his words,

“The insurgents and the people fighting the United States are the ones who were favored under Hussein’s regime. They had land and houses when nobody else had anything. Now that Saddam is captured, they are fighting violently to cling to what is already gone. They do not represent Iraq. They are the chosen people of an evil, evil man and they have benefited for too long from everyone else’s suffering. Older people in Iraq, poor people and the uneducated are confused right now because there is no order and the old ways are gone. But we all are hopeful,and we know that things will get better.”

“Almost all Iraqis in America will vote Republican for the rest of their lives, as will their children and their children’s children. George Bush has freed us and we are grateful forever for this. America has more power than anyone else in the world, and it is their responsibility to end the type of suffering that Iraq has endured. It is a terrible shame, the loss of life and suffering on both sides. Many good people have die. What Americans at home must remember is that this is war, and war is what it took to free us. When you go to war…when you go fishing, your pants will get wet. This is the way things are.”

“Maybe Bush did not do it the way that the world wanted him to, but he has done a wonderful thing, and I think that the rest of the world will look to Iraq and America as a model. Syria, maybe Iran will hopefully do as Libya has and change their ways.”

This woman is the man above’s aunt. She has four living children, two of whom are under eighteen and were extremely disappointed to learn that they could not come and vote. The daughter who is no longer living was brutally murdered when Hussein’s army bombed her house. Her husband died after the family moved to the U.S. While she has no plans to ever return to Iraq, she was bursting with nothing more complicated than sheer joy when she spoke to Tash and I about voting today. She thanked me repeatedly for photographing her and caring enough about her and her people to tell their story.

Having lived in Richmond, VA long enough to really stunt my career, I can tell you that a lot of Americans are obsessed with appearing tough. Tattoos, wallet chains, and pit bulls are all fashion accessories that Americans adopt to try and look real bad-ass. But you know who’s tougher than like fifteen pop-punk fans with really expensive tattoos all wrapped up with wallet chains like some sort of weird Voltron?

This lady:

Even her little girl looks like she could jump out of that pink coat and show Mike Tyson a thing or two.

Here’s another photo of the same woman, another proud Iraqi expat voter:

No matter how tough anyone on earth is, there’s no way they can fuck with these guys:

The guy on the left came to America from as a refugee, shifting from camp to camp until finally granted resident status. He was nearly killed in a 1998 uprising. His friend, in the green, was an officer in Saddam Hussein’s army until he defected and joined the opposition in the late 90’s. I asked him if the change was difficult, to which he responded,

“well, nothing in this life is easy. But if something is worth doing, and you have it as a goal, you see that it gets done, no matter how hard.”

Why do I think that this statement applies a little more broadly than just losing ten pounds for bikini season? Because when he said it, I could feel the pain this guy has been through to do what he believes is right. I told him that I was no supporter of the Bush administration, but knew that I did not have the full story. I asked if there was anything he wanted to communicate to the world at large. His response, as I recall, went like this:

“What you see on the television is not the news It is nothing. The Arab media and the Arab world hates Iraq as well, and they portray us very unfairly. While we know that American news is still somewhat distorted, it is not run by dictators. We just want our voices to be heard. Saddam Hussein was a brutal, evil man who cared nothing for humans. I wish that I could tell all those protestors I see booing Bush to stay at home because he has done such a fantastic thing for my people. I know that I cannot because everyone can be heard in a democracy, but that is my wish.”

You may think that you have felt dumb before, but let me tell you something: until you have stood in front of a man who knows real pain and told him that you are against your country’s alleviation of his country’s state-sponsored murderous suffering, you have not felt truly, deeply, like a total moron.

I still am no Bush fan, and I believe that America got lied to. I don’t believe we should have gone into Iraq the way we did, and I think Rove is as evil as they come. But through all this deception and lying, through all this dismemberment and pain, America has wrought a beautiful, fantastic side effect: joy, freedom and a hope for peace. Does it take lies and misdirection to do this?? Is this what the other side of justice is? I feel like such a whiner and I don’t know what to think anymore. Ultimately, in total defiance of my mother and grandmother’s teachings, two wrongs have made a right and my moral compass is tired and busted.

I can’t tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, and I want a clear cut mandate, some lines to believe along. But there aren’t any. There’s just right and wrong and following your heart of hearts. And for the first time in my life, I can say that I was wrong to be compulsively critical of the current administration without seeking my own truth.

Some clear wrongs rise from this morass like an evil swamp monster, reeking of decay and crawling with filthy insect larvae. Puppeting a belief for social or financial gain, without seeking the truth within one’s heart is real, real wrong. The level of discourse in America has plummeted to a name-calling ping-pong match with a turd for a ball. It doesn’t matter how wicked the serve is, both sides are still smacking a bunch of shit around. Just like Ann Coulter and the Protest Warriors, those “Fuck Bush” signs hurt America and all that it stands for. Even though I don’t know what it stands for anymore…but I am so glad those people can vote.

All you can really say is “ooOOoo…FACE!”

Ever since the gallery of protest signs got linked to Gawker, my traffic has gone through the freaking roof…like, 300 times as many people visited in the past few days.

It’s fulfilled my ego a little bit, making me think that I can reach people with my brand of wit and insight and maybe make somebody’s day better. As long as I forget to remember that the reason everyone is looking os so they can spend five second laughing at the “Brad and Jen We Miss You” sign, I feel like the king of the world.

Back to banking research…

At the risk of running old news, here’s some more signs from last week’s inaugural protest…

You have probably not heard of the group Protest Warrior. They are a small, confused bunch of young loudmouths who are idealogically in line with Fred Phelps and his army of gibbering retards and tactically aligned with the sort of green haired trust-fund boys that smash car windows during supposedly peaceful gatherings.

These confused souls entertain themselves by creating inflammatory, far-right signs and crashing left-leaning protests in order to draw attention to themselves. You can see one of their signs in one of my earlier posts…

Their mission statement, as excerpted from the FAQ section of their website, includes this passage:

We must admit we get a certain high from puncturing the moral self-righteousness of leftists. These people claim to have a monopoly on what is good, their entire self-esteem depends on it.

On January 20th, a small party of these self-sacrificing retards crashed DC’s massive inaugural protest. You can read a much better written, more factual story here, but the upshot of it is this: these bozos came to a large gathering of angry, disaffected liberals with intentionally inflammatory radical right-wing rhetoric posted on signs and shouted through megaphones.

Shortly after they were noticed, a small army of black-clad “anarchists” encircled the group and violently escorted them from the park, ripping signs and kicking these poor little protest protestors as a crowd chanted a good old-fashioned “na-na-na-na hey hey hey gooood-bye…”

I am usually not a fan of people that call themselves anarchists. Nearly 100 percent of America anarchists never had to sleep in the woods and eat crickets as children because warlords had their parents killed in a tribal feud. However, I totally support that beatdown.

Here’s a picture of the “protest warriors” shortly after their ejection:

While they may appear to be frowning, these people are actually very, very happy. In fact, they may be as fulfilled as they can have been in their brief, joyless lives. Here’s why: they got the reaction they wanted. Someone paid enough attention to them for long enough to actually touch them, to hold their hands and frustrated bodies to escort them somewhere. Then, someone else took their pictures. That someone was me.

When I started talking to Gil Knobrin, the self-described organizer for this chapter of the Protest Warriors, his birdlike chest puffed up two sizes larger as the pride swelled in his tiny, misshapen heart. I was talking to him, taking his picture and writing things down and taking him seriously. This was big stuff.

His eyes behind his cheap late-80’s sunglasses as he gleefully described how the left are a bunch of hypocrites, launching into a carefully planned tirade about how he and his group were just a bunch of innocents. Have a look:

He couldn’t tell that I was just some blogger, and even if he could have, he wouldn’t have cared. I was paying attention.

He told me that he and his group have a constitutional right to attend any protest they want and wave any sign that they like. That is true. It is also true that college kids in Manhattan had the constitutional right to dress like Osama Bin Laden on Halloween, 2001. I also have a constitutional right to swim in a shark tank in a wetsuit crafted entirely oout of ground beef. The American constitution protects all manner of assholery.

If Knobrin and his ilk read this right now, it’s going to make their weeks…I am a liberal who is paying them attention, giving them some desperately needed cred. They have angered me and I have paid them some mind and it’s going to make them chipper and angry all at one time, happily outraged with a newly validated sense of purpose.

It will totally cancel out the deflated frustration they must have felt when the cops they called after their well-earned beatdown totally ignored them while an entire parade of protestors marched by, once angry and now over it, moving in a large, throbbing party that welcomed everyone but those bozos.

Now I am getting the same infectious sense of puffed-up self-righteous happiness just writing this, and it is making me feel like I ate too much pizza and too much ice cream. I am experiencing the moral/ideological equivalent of a trip to Chuck E. Cheese. I need to go lie down and dream of an America that knows the difference between having rights and doing what is right while all this idealistic birthday food dribbles out of my head through my mouth, into a crusty puddle I can wash off the pillowcase.

australia.looks.like.this
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

The West Australian sun is a silent nuclear scream that can burn unprotected skin right through a car’s windshield. It can tan a man through a thin layer of concrete and quietly flay the flesh off of unprotected tourists.

Kevin and I had been hammering over the highway with the A/C cranking since dawn. I imagined the sun blasting its way through the windshield and my massive pair of Blue-Blockers, tanning the surface of my actual retinas. Kevin wasn’t sweating it. A sixty year-old man raised in the bush, he had trained as a kangaroo shooter and roof carpenter since the age of eight. Apparently he had never worn a shirt to work, either– the man looked like a crocodile hide stretched over a human frame, a frustrated expression by a taxidermist who went to art school.

We were driving ten hours each way to a million acre plot of red sand and sun-blasted rock to slaughter four and a half tons of kangaroos. I was there as a hired hand, working on a story for Vice magazine. I’d come to Australia for all kinds of adventure, and this trip was it. Today was just another day for Kevin.

Kevin had already played both his Elvis tapes by eleven and was saving the Jerry Lee Lewis ones for the all-night drive back. On the way back from a shooting trip you’ve gotta drive all night so the meat doesn’t spoil. It takes all the novelty you can muster to stay awake on a drive like that. We ended up eating fifteen sausages apiece and drinking enough water to make our straining bladders keep us awake, but that’s later.

“Mate, let’s pull off for a piddle here, then have a stretch up in Geraldton when we check the tires at the petrol station, ay,” Kevin barked.

“Why don’t we just use the bathroom at the gas station? It’s only like 3k away.”

“Shit, I know, I just hate going to the toilets at a petrol station if I’m not buying anything. It just feels fuckin’ wrong, mate.”

I had nothing to say to that one. I’d been doing it all my life, but I saw his point. For a lifelong kangaroo slaughterer and a heavy user of the word “cunt,” Kevin had a unique sense of honor.

“Ah, shit, what do I know, though, you’re the guest,” Kevin said. Let’s sort these tires out and celebrate with an indoor piddle, hey? Fancy an ice cream while I’m in there?”

“Nah, I’m cool,” I said.

“Bullshit you’re cool, we’ve been driving all morning and we’ve got five hours to go yet. This is the last fuckin’ store you’re gonna see for a week, mate. That’s it, you’re having an ice cream and put your purse down.” Kevin’s face split into a massive, crooked grin. “I told you, while you work for me, I buy the food, and last I checked, ice cream was fuckin’ food.”

You couldn’t help but smile at that, and I must have beamed. It was the last time I smiled for several days.

Five hours passed with nothing much to report. The red dust and spinefex all ran together into one long ribbon of alien terrain under a Technicolor blue sky. The only event of note was when we turned off the paved road into the dirt tracks that led us deep into the bush. Kevin navigated on pure instinct, muttering to himself “must’ve had rain up there, that bit’s all washed out from floods, there’s some green, have to remember that.” The cab filled with the roaring tires on bumpy corrugated roads, Kevin’s muttering and the two metal barrels full of petrol sloshing around in the back of the Ute.

Camp was in a stretch of bush more godforsaken than all the rest. Cans rattled aimlessly across the landscape and tatters of newspaper flapped from sticks in a silent, manic greeting propelled by the desert wind. We pulled up to a long shack, like a corrugated tin tube sliced in half and graced with a concrete slab porch. Two giant refrigerators sat out front like fat metal marshmallows dotted with mysterious reddish stains.

“Go on, pick your room, mate, just not the one with me cooler in it,” Kevin ordered. “I brung that up special.”

My bedroom was a segment of tube with a low metal cot and an extremely suspicious looking foam mattress. Everything was covered with a thin layer of red dust: my bed, the table, the toothbrush and wadded-up tissue the last guy left behind. A table scarred with the cuts from a million knives, stained with oil and old, clotted blood sat next to a forlorn, dusty generator out on the front porch. Our camp was like an abandoned prospector’s cabin on Mars, or an axe murderer’s holiday home.

“Whoa, Kevin, this is so cool,” I shouted cheerfully. “It’s the most godforsaken place I’ve ever seen in my life!”

I meant it with the sort of joyful, artificial exuberance that my friends back home use to describe roller-skating, duckpin bowling or their supposed love for Journey. You know the tone, it’s ironic detachment in a cheap mask of sincerity, meant to say, “Hey, friends, dig me digging this lame experience!”

Kevin grunted. “Call it what you want, mate, but it’s me fuckin’ life, and I like it.”

Embarrassment shot through my veins and I stuttered out an unnecessary apology. I later learned that it’s impossible to hurt a ‘roo shooter’s feelings with a bunch of tiny words. And as I would discover when I chopped the paws off of my first kangaroo, its blood spraying into my eyes and open mouth, our lives were more different than anyone could hope to imagine.

I took a lot of photos of a lot of signs at yesterday’s inaugural protest/peace march…got so much material that it’s completely distracted me from working on my story about shooting kangaroos…

Here are some of the best:

Not really a sign, but clever…Richmond residents, doesn’t this remind you of the guy that sits on the corner of Broad and Lombardy with the sign saying “Bush is Hitler?”

This is just baiting the bitter at its best:

These made me laugh out loud…

And this was just the lamest sign I’ve ever seen:

More inaugural protest photos here…

There was pepper gas, cuss words, funky music and a lot of cool signs at yesterday’s inaugural anti-war protest.

But this woman summed it all up…

link goes to video, hosted and remixed by Andrew Morgan aka DJ Pantyraid.

We are heading out just now into frozen D.C to participate in the inaugural madness. I’m taking my camera, pen, paper and my big fat mouth. My girlfriend is bringing her big fat mouth and two middle fingers.

Watch this space and I’ll have inauguration day photos and my classic, well-thought-out side-of-the-neck commentary this evening.

As long as America is going right down the toilet, we may as well go watch the water swirl.