What am I looking at?

It’s dangerous hard work to dig around in the ash piles of Baghdad to find out what was really going on the day they drove old Saddam down. For one thing, I’m getting tunnel vision.

While the war rages on around me, I’m only looking at that nearly empty park with its US tanks, chains, ropes, sledgehammers, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t flags, and milling paparazzi. I know about the remorseful hit man who supposedly started the action, the Asian American soldier who made the fatal gaffe, where the American flag came from, and what GWB said as he watched the event on TV. Oh, yeah, I’m filling in gaps and coming close to a minute by minute account of the symbolic obliteration of the dictator in bronze. I even know the theories and counter-theories about the whole fantastic plot- straight out of John Wayne meets Lawrence of Arabia.

Problem is, there’s a whole world around that square I’m missing. I just came away from months of reconstructing ancient Greece to understand what was up with the Herm whackers, and here I am ignoring the same thing in my effort to get to the nut of the Saddam smackers. I need to widen the net, so to speak, before I leave the toppling fields.

More as things develop…