No posse of morality cops ever smashed Bob Dylan’s skull with
concrete blocks when he changed America’s music from “When the
moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore” to
” Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my
shoes, you’d know what a drag it is to see you.”
In contrast, young people in Iraq are being murdered for the
kind of music they listen to, for the way they dress or wear their
hair — and that’s after more than 6,300 American troops have been
killed and nearly 50,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan trying to
bring a semblance of sanity and human rights to the region.
That American price in killed and wounded doesn’t include the
cost of the ongoing psychological wounds to American troops or our
financial cost, with the ultimate price of these two wars estimated
at more than $3 trillion.
“At least 14 youths have been killed in Baghdad in the past
three weeks in what appears to be a campaign by Shia militants,”
reported London’s Associated Newspapers on March 27. “Militants in
Shia neighborhoods, where the stonings have taken place, circulated
lists naming more youths targeted to be killed if they do not
change the way they dress.”
The murder spree began after Iraq’s Interior Ministry defined
the “Emo” subculture among Iraqi youth as “Satanism” and called on
police to stamp it out.
A young Iraqi who managed to escape from an attacking mob
explained the encounter to Beirut-based Al-Akhbar: “First they
throw concrete blocks at the boy’s arms and legs, then the final
blow to his head, and if he’s not dead then, they start all over
again.”
What identifies Emos — short for “emotionals” — and attracts
the attention of the cops and mobs with their ever-ready baskets of
stones and concrete blocks is tight jeans, black T-shirts,
alternative music, male ponytails and any other nontraditional
style of curls or too-long tresses on young men.
More succinctly, Iraqi Emos look like the somewhat alienated
kids who gather daily here in Pittsburgh at the Beehive, an artsy
coffee house that’s more poetic, politicized and vegetarian than
the average Starbucks.
So imagine this: Some nut drives up to the Beehive and starts
throwing concrete blocks at the patrons because he sees them as too
“emotional.” And then the police and thugs from the Ministry for
the Enforcement of Morality arrive and judge the dead and wounded
kids on the sidewalk as the ones who were overly emotional, not the
assailant.
Spiky hair also can get one killed in Iraq, plus having a
preference for “Emocore” music, a genre of hard-core punk that
emerged in the United States in the late 1980s — heavy songs with
overwrought lyrics that are more about alienation than belly
dancing.
Popular with Iraqi Emos is Fall Out Boy, an American pop punk
band, with this lyric from their song “The Pros and Cons of
Breathing”: “I want to hate you half as much as I hate myself.”
Similarly, from The Smiths, a British band: “And if a
double-decker bus crashes into us, to die by your side is such a
heavenly way to die.”
Negative, yes, compared to the moon being a pizza pie, but for
the young and discouraged, it’s a stage, a not uncommon phase of
maturation and development — and hardly enough reason for
allegedly pious and balanced adults, supposed non-emotionals, to
turn themselves into raging killers.
