LAYING WASTE

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

I’ve been reading ‘The Middle Sea’ by John Julius Norwich, touted as a lay introduction to 3,000 years of Mediterranean history. It finally sidelined me with its endless chronicle of attacks, sieges, glorious triumphs/tragic defeats, lootings & pillagings, massacres, streets-ran-red-with-blood, etc. For sure there were fascinating titbits—did you know the Trojan War and the Exodus from Egypt were roughly contemporary events? But the overall impact was too depressing to keep me going past the 1500s.

Watching George (‘we’re kicking ass!’) Bush cut his own swath through the facts and set us on course for more years of war reminded me of this unintentional 600-page condemnation of human civilization. Among us humanoids, the war party will always have an advantage over the skeptics, even when disaster looms. Once the gears of conquest and slaughter are set in motion, only catastrophic defeat will bring the machine to a halt as the Athenians realized to their dismay 2,400 years ago in the Peloponnesian Wars. Seems as though each generation since has had to relearn the lesson with depressing regularity.

The current reiteration is no exception. Every so often we are assured that something (anything!) will stop the Bush crowd, that we will step away from the ongoing carnage. Bush is weakened, we hear, the ‘wise men’ will get him under control any day now. You mean the ones who put him in power?

It is fascinating to see the long-disdained Vietnam parallels popping up again, now with a new twist. Iraq’s not a ‘quagmire’ because Vietnam wasn’t one either! The problem wasn’t defeat, but weakness, cutting and running, giving in too soon! Marvellous! This should signal us to what is coming in the Middle East: more of the same only moreso. We’ve now been warned.