Unqualified Offerings

                    ”I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man“

According to the Associated Press, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi can’t go home again. I wonder if the tribes’ fellow Jordanians will be heartened or consider it too long in coming. I wonder how I feel about it myself. When he was blowing up American soldiers and Iraqi kids and sawing the heads off of European relief workers, what was the clan thinking then? Maybe this will all blow over? The truth is, I have no idea, and that’s actually the important part. I never heard of the Bani Hassan tribe until this article. I doubt many Americans outside of a stray academic and the personnel in the Amman CIA station (one hopes) have. Very possibly the anonymous AP reporter only heard of the tribe when the ads came out in the Jordanian newspapers and some stringer laid them on a desk. So I can’t demand, Why didn’t they say X before now? because I have no idea what they said or didn’t say before now. Nor do almost any of us. It’s just another small measure of everything we don’t know about the world we’re trying to run.

I love the quoted part from Frost more than the more famous part that precedes it, by the by - the part about home being the place where, “when you go there, they have to take you in.” That part is the husband speaking; the part that kicks off this entry, the wife. Frost lived in England while he wrote those poems, but he wrote very little about England despite having lived there. He knew what he knew and what he didn’t know.