Billy Joel & Cass Dillon Performing "Christmas In Fallujah"

Stark reality interjects itself into our Christmas good cheer with this new, implicitly anti-war song recently written by Billy Joel, reminding us of the great gulf between rhetoric and reality in the United States of America, particularly amongst our rulers. But we citizens have been conditioned to this for decades through the techniques of Madison Avenue, where toxic junk can be packaged as the Mona Lisa.

While we are congratulating ourselves on being a pious Christian nation today, untold suffering is going on for the people of Iraq, nevermind all the spin about the Surge. Hundreds of thousands have been slain, many more wounded, millions displaced. Oh yes, some refugees are returning from Syria and Jordan, but that is largely because they have run out of money or been kicked out.

Worst of all is the painful reality of Fallujah, the Guernica of our times, which the American military, financed by us as taxpayers, helped decimate a month and three years ago. You have only to scroll down a few posts from this one to gauge the human carnage wrought in that assault.

So "Christmas in Fallujah" is a splash of cold water in our faces lest we grow too complacent about Iraq, inundated with endless spin doctrines obscuring the truth.