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The Corpse on the Gurney: The 'Success' Mantra in Iraq - by Tom Engelhardt

The Corpse on the Gurney: The 'Success' Mantra in Iraq - by Tom Engelhardt: "The other day, as we reached the first anniversary of the President's announcement of his 'surge' strategy, his 'new way forward' in Iraq, I found myself thinking about the earliest paid book-editing work I ever did. An editor at a San Francisco textbook publisher hired me to 'doctor' god-awful texts designed for audiences of captive kids. Each of these 'books' was not only in a woeful state of disrepair, but essentially D.O.A. I was nonetheless supposed to do a lively rewrite of the mess and add seductive 'sidebars'; another technician then simplified the language to 'grade level' and a designer provided a flashy layout and look. Zap! Pow! Kebang!

During the years that I freelanced for that company in the early 1970s, an image of what I was doing formed in my mind – and it suddenly came back to me this week. I used to describe it this way:

The little group of us – rewriter, grade-level reducer, designer – would be summoned to the publisher's office. There, our brave band of technicians would be ushered into a room in which there would be nothing but a gurney with a corpse on it in a state of advanced decomposition. The publisher's representative would then issue a simple request: Make it look like it can get up and walk away.

And the truth was:"

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