Secretary of State RICE: "
What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the birth pangs of a new Middle East."
"birth pangs," indeed.
i am reminded of Mary Shelley's novel: "
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus"...
=> http://en.wikipedia.org/...
...where Frankenstein = the creator, not the creature; and, Prometheus being the mythic, forever cursed bringer of the immortals' Fire to mortal mankind.
The novel (~1831) is almost entirely obscured by 20th Century films' re-interpretation of Shelley's original intent and inherent ironies, including: our modern re-naming, and henceforth false association of "the creature" after its creator, Victor Frankenstein; and the "birth pangs" process of creation, written, perhaps as only a woman could ~ interpreted, as somehow "horrible" beyond imagination; the creature, "grotesque" to behold (to the male/father's psyche?)
"...the creature was not an "evil creation". It was born an innocent blank slate; it was father Frankenstein's REJECTION of the creature that taught it to be evil."
We could apply Shelley's allegory to either "the creature" of Judaism, ISRAEL, or the latest "creatures" of ISLAM ~ with equal facility: both of these creations are Fundamentalist Theocracies; both REJECTED as "evil", thus...
...the latter, most recent "creatures" being those Islamo-Fundamentalist offspring of Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice's "democracy," unwanted progenies that they now reject as grotesque, evil inherent ~ and seek to destroy...
...the delicious irony (Mary Shelley would have approved) is that Mr. and Mrs. Frankenstein's infanticide of democratically elected "creatures" Hamas and Hezbollah ~ was initiated in the same week that Andrea Yates, convicted of murdering her own children in a bathtub, is found "Not Guilty: By Reason of Insanity."
(^_^)