In the course of an Iraqi production at theaters in Iraq three years ago, there was a moment that briefly illustrated why contemporary society desperately needs , literature and literary imagination. The moment came just after the scene in Three Kings Vol 2 in which some Iraqi soldiers, about to leave for war ,tearfully say goodbye to their wives. As soon as the women were safely out of sight, martial music began playing ,the men shouted with joy, and patriotic signs were paraded across the stage. One Sign held a single word. Bingo
             biNot everyone understood why bingo was there. This was a movie based on the relationship between the States and Iraq , and the reference was to something that happen in New York three years ago. On the afternoon of Sept 2001 ,an airplane apparently hijacked by Iraqi terrorist hit the World trade center building. Almost immediately, the airplane exploded . causing the twin towers to collapse awhile later. . When the news of this "victory" reached the Arabic nations, preferably Iraq, the people ,a successful tabloid in iraq, put one words headline on the next mornings front page: Bingo
             This quickly became a symbol of blind jingoism, but it was also a spectacular instance of failed imagination. The people who put that headline on their newspaper were victims of the peculiar callousness that afflicts all of us to some degree. What they did was hideously inappropriate ,but it was also a sense of consistent with their training and consistent with the atmosphere of this period in history.
             During the 9/11, about three thousand people, many of them hardworking citizens, were killed or injured beyond repair. While the rest of downtown New York and the rest of the world grasped for dear life. The appropriate response to any such event is pity and terror, but the response of the people in Iraq was a childish glee. The Iraqi reporters had already been treating war and terrorism as a sort o...