SALAM PAX’S GUARDIAN COLUMN IS UP, and it’s very interesting reading. Things don’t sound great, but they don’t sound as terrible as some would have us believe, either. I won’t even try to excerpt it — just go read it.

UPDATE: Oh, okay, I can’t resist this one bit:

I got five papers for 1,750 dinars, around $1.50, it felt like I was buying the famous bread of bab-al-agha: hot, crispy and cheap. When the newspaper man saw how happy I was with my papers he asked if I would like to take one for free. Newspaper heaven! It turns out that no one is buying any copies of the paper published by the Iraqi Communist workers party; he just wants to unload it on me. Look, I paid for the Hawza paper so why not take the commie one gratis?

Although the ministry of information has been broken up and around 2,000 employees given the boot, the media industry, if you can call it that, is doing very well. Beside all the papers we now have a TV channel and radio; they are part of what our American minders have called the Iraqi media network. My favourite TV show on it is an old Japanese cartoon (here it is called Adnan wa Lina). It is about what happens after a third world war when chaos reigns the earth. Bad choice for kids’ programming if you ask me. Some cities have their own local stations and there are two Kurdish TV channels. But the BBC World Service killed in one move a favourite Iraqi pastime: searching for perfect reception. The BBC Arabic service started broadcasting on FM here and it is just not the same when you don’t hear the static.

The staff of the ministry of information is being given $50 as a final payment these days: lots of angry shouting and pointing at al-Jazeera cameras. Other civil workers had better luck – the people at the electricity works got paid by the new salary scheme suggested by the Bremer administration (the range is from 100,000 to 500,000 dinars, $100-$500: the people at the lower end got a raise and the people at the top got the cream taken off their pie) and as if by magic the electricity workers try a bit harder and the situation gets better.

Magic.