Seven Oaks Magazine.

If the renewable resource crowd ever gets its way – if Jack Layton speckles the continent with the wind turbines he keeps talking about, if we all hop onto the hybrid bandwagon as per Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon – then the Texas tea which has brought the Middle East so much warfare, wealth and attention in the last seventy-odd years may one day lose its luster. Though that day is far from looming on the horizon, this past week Middle Eastern leaders (of the U.S.-client bent) unveiled another resource in which they were swimming, which might be set to one day outstrip oil and melancholy as the region’s top exports: satire. Self-parody seemed, indeed, to be the phrase that paid from Jerusalem to Baghdad.

In what can only possibly be fathomed as a post-modernist attempt to head anti-war satirists off at the pass, the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) – one of the few U.S. government programs not cut drastically by the Bush regime – showed the world its new flag; a blue and white number that is sure to produce countless jobs for Iraqi matchstick makers and Israeli historians of plagiarism. Just kidding – I think the new Iraqi flag looks nothing like the Israeli standard. I mean, one is a white flag with parallel blue lines and a blue religious symbol, and the other is…um, wait.

Regardless of how anyone feels about the new flag design, one must admit that it is a masterful satirical coup. In a sly, knowing wink to the wild conspiracy theory which suggests that the U.S. is clumsily attempting, in Iraq, to build a state which, like Israel, will serve Washington’s strategic interests in the region, the IGC has designed a flag which would seem to suggest that exact thing! There’s only one word for that: Totally brilliant. Plus, to take down a flag marked with the words “God is great,” then introduce a be-crescented flag so ham-fistedly is an action so loaded with religious irony, that conceptual artists all around Greenwich Village must be packing up their fecal statues of Jesus in envy and surrender.

Later in the week, not to be outdone and determined to retain the title of the “Levantine’s most blood-stained surrealist,” Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon posed for photographs with none other than Nazi progeny, action star and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This is interesting. In a lot of the literature about the “New Anti-Semitism,” the treachery of the Left – who, in the mythology, are said to have spurned their traditional Jewish allies in favour of terroristic Palestinians – is much bemoaned. Canada’s own Jewish Western Bulletin recently ran just such an editorial, lambasting the wildly-radical New Democratic Party for having abandoned its traditional base of support amongst Jews (in this literature, “Jewish” and “Zionist” are virtually interchangeable) in order to court the Muslim vote. Leftists have argued that the same universal humanism that led Canadian socialists to demand that Ottawa open its doors to Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 40s now compels us to join the world in condemning the apartheid policies meted out against the Palestinians by Israel.

If we don’t buy that explanation, of course, we can at least console ourselves in knowing that Ariel Sharon is maintaining healthy relations with another constituency known historically for its support of the Jewish people: wealthy, right-wing Austrian ubermenschen. The decision to pose for photographs with the Jingle All the Way star seemed to send a message to Sharon’s Iraqi rivals in the race for satirical supremacy in West Asia: “Bring it on.”

With gas prices soaring to record highs (with the general population realizing that unlike, say, internet stocks, these numbers aren’t guaranteed to plummet back down) and the ascendance of “green” politicians like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the world may be on the verge of a social and environmental sea change that could permanently render “black gold” obsolete. But that doesn’t mean you’ve heard the last of a troubled region. If this past week is any indication, the Mid-East’s burgeoning satire industry seems poised to take the world by storm. Quoth the Holy Land absurdist: “I’ll be back.”