Strange Currencies...

So Bush is in Baghdad on a surprise visit. He must have gone to pick up the world's most expensive photograph.

"If there was any doubt about where the contemporary art market is going, they were dispelled this morning at Christie's Baghdad, where the US Government paid a record-setting $286 billion - plus $240 for framing - for this portrait of the dead Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." (full story here).

Honestly? I can see the benefit of having a democratic country in the middle east. I can also see the benefit of draining the oceans and getting all the cool treasure that must be down there. America claims to be acting in the interest of democracy, but it sure feels like empire building to me. Fear that our hundred years of world supremacy is up.

Remember this face?






Ten years ago our country was a sleepier, more confident superpower. Our hubris was bolstered by a lack of imagination and a deep sense of irony. Ten years ago today, June 13, 1996, in a speech endorsing a national effort against teen pregnancy, Bill Clinton said this: "The other thing we have to do is to take seriously the role in this problem of older men who prey on underage women...There are consequences to decisions and...one way or the other, people always wind up being held accountable."

And ye shall reap what ye shall sow. It's a land of self-fulfilling prophecies.