No words.

I've been remiss in keeping this blog up to date. For weeks it was that I was just too damn busy.

But now that I have a little time on my hands, events in Iraq have become so disturbing, so depressing, so out of control, that I can't really comment. I lack the skill with words, or at least the time to hone my words to write something meaningful. The image of that woman, cigarette dangling, doing the thumbs-up while an Iraqi prisoner is forced to masturbate in front of her has haunted me since I saw it.

I have no words to explain why.

And even though I am increasingly convinced that Kerry will win in a landslide in November (barring the imposition of marshall law or voting machine irregularities), that conviction doesn't help me.

What do we do between now and then? What the fuck can we do between now and then? This is human, not political. It is torture, not a public relations nightmare. And I fear that people on the right and the left will be prone to reducing it to a referendum on freedom, or on Bush, or on our will to fight, when in fact it is primarily a referendum on the souls of the people who did this, and on our collective soul as a country.