Matrimonial Warfare

Contrary to my expectations, that "daring" leap that I made into the Angry Arab arena a few days ago was noticed, yet it resulted in no sort of an attack on me.

I should've known.

For one thing, I wasn't completely toxic. I just asked if what appeared to be the several people all using the name "Anonymous" could use a more courageous handle, to make it easier to distinguish the combatants.

I also mentioned the most vitriolic of the combatants, one Barabie, saying that she was "stricken," intended as a half-hidden allusion to a certain undesirable mental state. Also I said that she at least was easily recognizable because of her brand of invective.

Though she was there, Barabie didn't react. Maybe she realized that I was someone from somewhere far, far off and therefore entirely non-apropos, as evidenced by my failure to use one of the hot terms of the day, such as "safavids," whoever they are.

Someone else said that Barabie is actually a man. But I don't believe that, and I think his comment was just another oblique attack that he was trying to make on her. On the Internet I have often confused people's genders, but I have noticed that men who are taken for women seem only to be silently amused, but if you take a woman to be a man, you will definitely hear about it.

I had also forgotten a lesson that I learned long ago.

When I was young I was, at different times, close to two couples in whose cases the partners, shortly after they married, developed extreme hostility toward each other. Right in my presence, as if I was no more than a picture on the wall, they would go at each other hammer and tong. Sometimes I would say something. Though it was clearly interference in their affairs, they would duly note my remarks, but they would only gently nudge me aside and resume clawing full force at each other's jugulars.

That and other situations indicated to me that couples and groups who have turned marriage into open warfare become locked in this peculiar state in which they get so absorbed in hitting out at each other that they can see and hear nothing else. That particular thread on Angry Arab, which had been prompted by a post on different approaches to waging war, eventually rang up 179 comments, more than the average on that site by a factor of six or seven.

So I am emboldened, and I am tempted, at some later date, to post on another thread there the following comment. Naturally it would have less effect than dropping a pebble into the Mindanao Deep, but that's not what matters.

Because anger is usually accompanied and followed by stupidity in thought and in actions, and because stupidity tosses aside clear communication, and because garbled communication results in terrible misunderstandings, all you warriors in here would do well to lighten up on the anger, in spite of the apt but pitiful name of this site. That would go far toward helping you to resolve all these battles being waged daily in the Angry Arab world. And it would also help an ignorant American like me to understand just what all this screaming at each other, about so many different countries, is about. That would help you, too, since it is the American behemoth that, knowingly or not, and to varying degrees, is keeping its big clumsy feet on the neck of so many of your sacred entities -- that is, if it is your perception that that is so.