Gallows Humor

This past winter, to my increasing consternation Riverbend didn't post on her "Baghdad Burning" site for two whole weeks. When she finally reappeared, she said that she hadn't touched her computer because she and her family had been put through some severe changes by a type of incident that has become a big part of the Iraqi scene ever since GWBush became their lord and savior.

After a family get-together the husband of one of her cousins was kidnapped, and a ransom of $15,000 was demanded. He is a small businessman

For the next two days his business partner and the family scrambled around like crazy until finally they came up with the 15 big ones. Still several more days of silence passed after the ransom had been paid. Finally, to the intense relief of River and the rest of her family, the relative showed up at home, a little banged up but otherwise okay.

He said that the kidnappers had originally wanted only $5,000, and, insulted that he would be valued so low, he had told them that he was worth five times that much. Finally they had arrived at the figure of 15 grand.

--Or at least I THOUGHT that that was what Riverbend wrote.

My reasoning has never been tied tight to the way other people think (therefore the name of this weblog), and time has loosened those moorings even more. That story grabbed me, and questions about what the released man had said kept bouncing around in my mind throughout the several months afterward.

First of all, after this man's family had rushed back and forth and deprived themselves digging up his ransom, I wanted to know from where did he get the chutzpah to tell them that he had actually hiked up the amount of the ransom, and three times over no less? I also wanted to know if anyone in his family criticized him for this.

--All right, all right. I know that sometimes I'm on the naive side, though that's not surprising in a person who has never placed much value on being sophisticated. But wait. One should never pass up a free meal of food-for-thought. I had seen an interesting possibility here, an out of the ordinary plotline!

So-o-o ...most of all I kept returning to the big point that would naturally occur to any real American such as myself, who has seen too many movies and who has tried to cook up a few diabolical scenarios himself for stage, screen, and TV.

Could it have been that the kidnapping was all a big scam that this guy and his business partner played on his family, most likely because their business was in trouble and they needed to scare up some serious cash in a hurry? They could've rationalized that his loving family would have seen the need and would have forgiven him in time.

That intriguing and desperate scenario was the only one in which, in my mind, all the pieces of this incident fell into any kind of logical pattern. But, aware of how Iraq has a very different culture from ours, that deeply cynical conjecture was as far as my thinking could go.

With putting a post here in mind, a few days ago I went back to "Baghdad Burning" to make sure that I recalled everything correctly.

Imagine my huge consternation when I saw that Riverbend had actually said that her relative had only spoken of upping the ransom as a part of his "cracking jokes," in his sheer relief that he was back at home safely. The ransom bravado had never happened. (Click the title of this post above and scroll down to Riverbend's post for 13 Feb 2004, "Family Crisis.")

And to think that, having taken his joke as good coin -- I don't put anything past macho pride, in Iraq or in Texas -- I had written her an email -- never answered, of course -- asking her about it, and I had also mentioned it in a comment on "Dohiyi Mir!"

In my intense embarrassment I wondered what had happened there. Had I completely overlooked her statement that her relative was only cracking a joke? Or had her normally impeccable grasp of the English language momentarily failed, causing her to state that jocularity in such a way that it read as fact, before, seeing her error, she had come back later and cleaned it up?

Because the latter possibility is very unlikely, I can only blame my grievous misperception on sloppy reading on my part.

Still, something of use can often be salvaged from even the worse of fiascoes. So this shows the great importance of careful reading .

Yet I'm wondering if this doesn't also say something about the perils of humor. I'm wondering if a joke like that was appropriate, after all that this man's kinfolk had endured while trying to extricate him from that mess. Riverbend made it clear that she and the rest of the family were really, really in the worst kind of anxiety about his kidnapping for days on end, on top of the numerous other aggravations that the occupation has brought them. In that light I'm trying to understand how funny that "joke" really was.

--Corr! (As the British would say.)

Just as I was about to post the above, I received a heavy jolt for the third time in this matter!

It suddenly occurred to me that I've already written another item, still unposted, in which I tell of how a very beloved member of my own family flung exactly the same kind of gallows humor into the face of adversity, though of a kind a million times less dire, and I had thought -- and still think --that it was admirable.

Stay tuned for my "Julius" bit.