DESERT OF THE REAL: Ehhh, I was all gearing up to write a response to the half–cocked paranoia of some of the recent slams on Salam Pax, but I see Jesse Walker and Needlenose have done it for me. (And, more ambivalently still, BuzzMachine.) I’ll just say a couple things: a) Now is a good time to re-post my “how you guys heard about Salam Pax in the first place” story. Tell me if this sounds like the Mukhabarat, my fine feathered friends.

b) I tend to think the more baroque speculations here (Salam is a Baathist agent… Salam only meets ordinary Iraqis when he’s interrogating them… Salam never criticizes Saddam Hussein except when he criticizes Saddam Hussein in order to win credibility with his foreign readers… Salam is really heterosexual [yes!]…the Mukhabarat are the Agent Smiths of the Eastern world and can do ‘most anything…) are a result of the human tendency to want the world to be more rational and more novelistic than it is. In novels, every gesture has a meaning, every word and every detail are full of discernable intent. We prefer evil to randomness, malevolence to incompetence, when we’re trying to figure out how to explain the world.

On the broad metaphysical level I think this tendency of ours is accurate–things in the world do have meaning; reason is not merely the will to power seeking to smooth out the rough edges of an utterly random world; novels are distillations of real life, not utter falsifications or mere “beautiful lies.” But in particular cases, hello, sometimes people are just weird. Sometimes people are conflicted, risk-averse in geopolitics but risk-taking in their personal lives, irrational, intermittently insightful and wilfully blind, and a bit random. Welcome to the world of the unreliable narrator.

If nothing else, you’d think you could learn that from blogs.