“Inception” in Afghanistan

Among the two or three ideas which the recent American movie “Inception” ponderously expounds is what you might call the increasing speed of consciousness of dreams within dreams.

While only a minute passes in reality, the dreamer experiences hours in a dream, and maybe months in the dream within that dream, and so on until the most embedded dream extends forever, in one heartbeat of the sleeping body which hosts the dreams.

This is exactly the opposite order of so many nightmares within nightmares which compose the American occupation of Afghanistan.

A village which somehow endured for a thousand years is destroyed in one second by American bombers, and at the next level of reality in some miserable refugee camp, opium-addicted mothers pass their addiction along to their children, and at the next level of reality those same children appear in an even more miserable orphanage, “with no doors or windows, and no food,” and at the next level…

Then, just as winter was coming, the gov­ern­ment closed the or­phan­age. By the spring, only 160 kids re­turned. “They started working as la­bor­ers and slaves and couldn’t come back,” said Farid. “This winter the gov­ern­ment wanted to send them back to the com­mu­ni­ty, that means nowhere, then they don’t have food or some­where to stay.” One boy was dis­cov­ered in the market. He was covered in scabies, sleep­ing under the stalls, raped re­peat­ed­ly.

And while those children descended month after month and year after year through so many levels of the infinite misery of ordinary reality in Afghanistan…

Meanwhile the American public snoozed peacefully in its idiotic delusions about the Global War on Terror, and President Obama has recently re-authorized the abject Patriot Act, as if nothing had happened and as if no time had passed since September 11, 2001.