TVs in Iraq Tuned to Real-Life Horror
Welcome to Bizarro World. The worst thing that you and I likely have to worry about each day is traffic. Imagine waking up in Baghdad each day, knowing that death and destruction is all but inevitable, but not knowing where it will come from or who it will be visited upon. No, kids, this is not Smallville, USA. People in Baghdad play for keeps, and the morning commute is the least of their problems.
Of course, everyone needs a diversion, and Iraqis are no different. Well, their choices of diversons certainly are.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - In an outdoor food market under the fierce midday sun, a crowd of men and boys were watching video footage of a truck bomber seated behind the steering wheel, smiling and murmuring his last words before crashing into U.S. military vehicles on an overpass.
Elsewhere, the TV set in a coffee shop was offering customers the video of foreign hostages being beheaded.
In a city battered and traumatized by 17 months of violence that seems to grow worse by the day, real-life horror has become the viewing fare of choice, supplanting the explosion of pornography that filled the post-Saddam Hussein vacuum….
The horrifying videos on display or sold for as little as 30 cents apiece are all over Baghdad these days.
“Soon after the regime fell, porno discs were all the rage,” said Attallah Zeidan, a co-owner of a second hand bookshop in Baghdad’s Old City. “Now it’s beheadings.”
Before the suicide mission footage, the crowd in the Bab al-Moazam market watched footage of half buried human skeletons and a man using a stick to better display the skulls. The background music was a folk song praising the insurgents fighting the Americans in Fallujah.
We get SportsCenter, Iraqis get beheadings. So much for family-friendly television, eh?
