Trying to Extract a Drama From the Blog of an Iraqi- [NYT Favorable Review for Ba'athist Blogger]

New York Times ^ | 3/18/05 | Jason Zinoman

[TastyManatees]

Trying to Extract a Drama From the Blog of an Iraqi By JASON ZINOMAN

"Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq" is not a very good play, but it's worth your attention for two reasons. It's the only political drama in New York written from the point of view of an Iraqi who lived through the American invasion, and, for better or worse, it inaugurates an entirely new (and seemingly inevitable) theatrical genre - the blog play.

Melding two chic cultural forms, the documentary drama and the blog, the Six Figures Theater Company has turned the online writings of Riverbend, the pseudonym of a 25-year-old Baghdad woman who has become something of an Internet celebrity, into a dramatically awkward series of readings.

Riverbend (www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com) is a thoughtful writer whose articulate, even poetic, prose packs an emotional punch while exhibiting a journalist's eye for detail. She is decidedly antiwar and critical of the Bush administration, but not polemical. Judging from the play, the tone of her writing about the war is one of exasperated disappointment.

The most interesting passages are those about the minutiae of daily life in Iraq and those that suggest the kind of chatty political discussions that take place around a kitchen table. For Americans interested in the human effect of their country's foreign policy, it's a valuable chronicle: a mix of the mundane (apparently even Iraqis listen to Britney Spears) and the horrifying (her uncle was abducted, though he was later ransomed).

[TastyManatees]

As most of you know, Riverbend is a Ba'athist. Her family members were Ba'athists, and she herself owed her high-paying (relatively) job working for Saddam's government to her party allegiance. Praising her as a reliable source of info is sort of like citing to a recently unemployed German Nazi bureaucrat in 1946.

Sorry, I guess I shouldn't be so surprised to see NYT writers lavish such praise on the enemy's propagandists. No one should expect any better from them by now. Still, I guess we have to keep calling them on it, no matter how tedious.

[Rakkasan1]

BTTT

[Gunrunner2]

Yup. . .and we all know she would have unrestricted access to the internet and able to post whatever thoughts and opinions she wished while under Saddam's rule.

[lowbridge]

bump