A comedian, I believe Colin Quinn (formerly of "Saturday Night Live") said that bombing Iraq is just another part of Americana -- something mentioned between sports and the weather. As far as cracking wise goes, I remember during the original Gulf War (c.1991) how I lost my sense of humor completely. I represented FAIR in countless Gulf-related forums, from CNN to church basements in Baltimore, and the saturation really got to me. One night in the East Village in NY, I was with my girlfriend at a Mexican restaurant. We were at the bar waiting for our table, and the bartender, some yuppie puke, was making dead Iraqi baby jokes, and the packed bar was fairly wheezing with laughter. Now, normally, I could top this guy with dead baby jokes that would make him cry; but this night I was so sensitive to the whole slaughter, and had just dealt with a classroom of junior college students who laughed at a video I showed them of an Iraqi mother mourning her dead children (and I'd dealt with them harshly), that I snapped. "That's a good one," I said to the entire bar. "Say, do you know any good gas chamber jokes?" Stunned silence. The bartender glared at me and replied, "My grandmother could tell you about that." My girlfriend and I then got our table, ate quickly and left.
Moral: Never let the fuckers get under your skin.
DP