And the man without patience has no trousers.

This from Tony Kushner's HOMEBODY/KABUL, which I saw in Brooklyn the other day. It's a Pashtun saying offered to the audience by a Western character who admits her Pashto is limited so her translation may be wrong. It's also my way of finally saying something here about Iraq and the entire middle east. Because of course our translation has always been wrong, and it's getting worse. I'm not going to go back through the last 2,000 years, but I am going to go to pre-9/11. The reason, if you ask me, that our so-called intelligence agencies didn't take Al Qaeda seriously was that they were, after all, just a bunch of A-rab towelheads living in caves: not the Worthy Opponent, meaning European, meaning white. We were looking to the remnants of the Evil Empire for threats, and scoffing at these unsophisticated -- well, hell, uncivilized! -- muttering guys with garlic breath and beards. We weren't afraid of them because we despised them. Now we ARE afraid of them, and we still despise them. So it's okay to torture them, because they're not quite as good as we are, are they? Not quite as human. And they might have some useful information we can beat out of them. And if not, our troops have been over there under a lot of stress for much too long; let the boys and girls get their rocks off.

I have more to say but I'm too mad to go on. Maybe tomorrow.