Nip/Tuck - Baghdad Edition

The world just keeps getting more and more surreal.

I woke this morning to an NPR piece on the plastic surgery boom in Baghdad. Way to go, W.! Not only have you succeeded in exporting democracy, you have also succeeded in exporting our national obsession with superficial beauty, and our willingness to slice (mostly women's) bodies to conform with that ideal. A woman spoke very freely about how her husband, after getting an eyeful of the new wave of perfectly-formed Middle Eastern pop starts, decided that his wife needed to look different. So off she went to the local plastic surgeon, who is performing 100% more procedures per day than he was in pre-US invasion Iraq.

Freedom is on the march, indeed.