Yesterday morning, as I was jogging on a treadmill, I watched the scene of Iraqis trying to topple the statue of Saddam Hussein.  CNN's Paula Zahn comments that it looks like they are going to bring the statue down in no time.  Scanning across the bank of four stations before me, I could see all showing the same scene.

The "minders" are all gone, yet for half an hour all I saw was climbing on the statue, and sledge-hammering at the base and so on.  Nothing on what was happening elsewhere in Baghdad, other than two and half miles away where it was reported fighting continued.  What are all the other Iraqis doing (not too many at the statue scene)?  How many people need help in what form?  What needs to be done to restore immediate order?

The symbolism of yesterday's pictures are so obvious that it was utterly predictable that this morning's papers would all use the same pictures.  Today, I listened to an NPR interview with three newspaper editors, USA Today, an Arab English paper, and a French paper.  The first used the toppling of the Statue, the other two used a picture of the US flag draped over the statue.  The interviews made clear that the editors understand quite well the obviousness of these images, but operated as necessary in the vehicle of the mainstream press.

Understanding that doesn't stop me from popping off, possibly pigeon-holing myself, as I might in a conversation.  Posting it in a blog for anybody who cares to see is like saying it in a bar where I don't really care who might be in earshot?  But I aint Madonna, the whole bar isn't watching me.

Let me just pop off then:

* The statue didn't come down as fast as the initial call.  How many rounds of initial calls have been fired?

* Symbols of Saddam are being desecrated everywhere but Saddam himself is nowhere to be seen.  And what about the reality of thirty years of Saddam and three weeks of getting Saddam?

* Are acts of celebration starting to well over into gloating and I-told-you-so-ism?

* Give me some pictures of what concretely we are doing to get Iraqi back on a course ...  maybe I can accept yesterday's picture of a young Iraqi male kissing the cheek of a Marine liberator ... but, in thirty years, will we look into the eyes of
an Iraqi women accepting a Nobel prize?