An obscure, neonate and splenetic blogger, found via comments at the Unholy Sepulchre, makes the following observation on the Iraqi elections,which I quote without comment (yes, that old trick):
One of many grim ironies - that the Iraqi elections are being used by some as retroactive justification for invasion and occupation, given the elections are the last thing intended by the invasion. The occupation is lent credence by what arose in its spite. If the elections were a triumph, they were a triumph for the Iraqi people in spite of the US government, who did not want them to take place and were compelled to allow them. This - the work of resistance - is misattributed to the largesse of an invading and occupying power in order to bag a few droppings of political capital. yadayada.. Cue all the unpaid scribblers and lackeys, prepared to communicate this version, or rather inversion, of events with earnest unblinking irony-free excitement. What was won in the face of US opposition is revealed to have been the secret telos of the whole thing. Fucking ingenious little ruse of history.
Our spenetic friend might have also pointed out the clever little trick whereby the occupation is vindicated precisely by an election in which Iraqis express their opposition to it. Anyway.. Points of interest = the above blog takes its name from a fairly obscure poem by James Clarence Mangan, a fascinating and relatively neglected Irish author, and subject of an nice little essay by Joyce and an interesting if costive book length study by David Lloyd. I think Terry Eagleton may have referred to him as the Irish Baudelaire. Mangan's poem refers to an episode of the Arabian Nights, in which a series of empty dishes is served up to a hungry man to test his sense of humour by one of the Barmecides. Hence the expression 'Barmecide feast', a useful metaphor for, well, loads of things.. use your imagination.
And here's Naomi Klein looking beyond the reassuring & easy iconicity of the purple finger.
n.b A correspondent informs me that the Times's knitting expert 're-discovered' Mangan a while ago; I followed this, erm, thread and found that Joyce's Mangan essay is online here, from which:
"Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age."