I was with a troop of soldiers -- indeed, I myself was a soldier -- who were sitting in the back of an army truck which was passing through a British town on its way to Basra in Iraq. Everyone was depressed and we were all reading different copies of the Daily Mirror. I came across a brilliant anti-war article and thought it might cheer everyone up if I read it out. While I was doing so, our sergeant major stopped the truck and told us to hand over all of the newspapers. I told him that he just didn’t want the soldiers to find out that the war was wrong but he explained that he was just collecting reading material that would be sent out to the troops in Iraq, which struck me as a sensible thing to do.
Notes for Freudian Interpretation
Why the troops in Iraq would want some tatty old tabloids, I don’t know. The sergeant major was obviously lying --what a dupe I am!
The day I had this dream, I’d read reports of a speech that Tony Blair had made on a navy warship, George Bush-style (although Blair lacked the bulge-enhancing codpiece straps of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” pilot uniform). Blair was doing his Churchill impression, saying that Britain must use its military “not only as peacemakers but as war-fighters” and that we’ll have to “fight terrorism and pay the cost of that fight wherever it may be”. I experienced the familiar feeling of biliousness that I often get when reading Blair’s bizarre pronouncements -- something similar to the feeling that might be experienced by one who has been told that the man sitting next to them has a contagious disease that he caught from molesting piglets.
I haven’t read the Daily Mirror recently, because I’m not a moron, but, during the invasion of Iraq, it had some memorably fierce anti-war front pages, usually incorporating a shouty John Pilger article.
Incidentally, I’ve noticed that this blog gets an awful lot of hits from people googling “I hate Blair”, so I thought I’d throw it in again, just to keep the traffic up.
Comments