Question

Here's a joke: What do you call an eight-year-old Iraqi kid with no arms, surviving family members, or unblackened skin below his waist? I don't know. I was shouting at the TV and I didn't catch his name. Don't worry if you don't get it. We'll no doubt be telling it again in another dozen years or so. And still not getting it.

-So begins Alan Moore's Rolling Commentary, an essay originally published in Arthur No. 5 (July 2003)
and recently re-printed in Yuggoth Cultures.

In this furious but rigorously precise run-down of the historical interaction between the Western and Islamic worlds, Moore lays out the thuggery, deception and slaughter that has been the two cultures preferred means of conversing with each other. Its as good a run down of the whole sorry mess as you'll find anywhere and only months after the 'shock and awe' Moore predicts the pinned down insurgency war of years and decades the 'serious' thinkers among western policy makers insisted couldn't happen.

He also wrote a Swamp Thing comic back in the mid-eighties that featured an evil corporation made up of damned souls who had escaped from the bowels of Hell called, wait for it, Blackwater.

Appropo of nothing:

The rest of Yuggoth Cultures is some previously under-collected short works by Moore, some interviews and some visual adaptations of Moore prose that was never intended to be so adapted, but fair warning: More than half the thick trade paperback volume is a competent but uninspired Lovecraft pastiche written by someone named Antony Johnston. Competent but uninspired work really doesn't belong between the same covers with the work of Mr Moore. It can only suffer by comparison.

Still worth getting the book though.