In my
opinion, the sharpest political mind of my lifetime was former Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright, who died in 2022.
In 2009, she
published the book MEMO TO THE PRESIDENT ELECT, providing advice to the incoming
President, Barack Obama.
If you want
to understand the history of the Middle East and the mistakes of prior
administrations that have led to the quagmire of Donald Trump’s Iran policy, Albright’s
book is still worth a read.
Seventeen years
later, her analysis of Iran is still cogent.
“An
assault against terror that strengthened terror; a demonstration of American
power that exposes the limit of our power; a campaign conducted in the name of
democracy that undercuts democracy’s good name; a blow against extremism that
serves the agenda of radicals in Iran; above all, a grisly human tragedy.”
“We have
been told to be afraid so that we might be less protective of the Constitution,
less mindful of international law, less respectful toward allies, less discerning
in our search for facts, less rigorous in questioning what our leaders tell us;
all this to avoid of being accused of aiding our enemies.”
Albright’s
book can be purchased from thriftbooks for $5.69.I use ThriftBooks for most of my book
purchases; of course, your local library should be able to provide the book
through interlibrary loan.
I am in my late
eighties. I have lived for almost a
century, and at this time of life, I tend to look back rather than
forward.The thing that stands out the
most to me is the stupidity of a human race that considers itself intelligent.
About six million years ago, the great apes and humans had a common ancestor.We
are basically advanced apes.
We have
evolved a brain capable of functional intelligence. A majority of humans are capable
of training to perform a task and functioning in a loose society.We have not invented flight, mass
transit, and electronic technology; a tiny, small percentage of us have the advanced
intelligence of thought experiments, and have dragged the rest of us, kicking
and screaming, into the future we now live in.
Our future
should look exciting; but we are the only animals, except for chimpanzees, our
closest cousin in the animal kingdom, that regularly conduct wars and genocide against
their own kind.That propensity will be
our own destruction.
Our greatest
fear should not be AI or asteroids.The inevitability
of a theology with a nuclear weapon will be more likely to bring about the
sixth extinction.
It wasn’t
enough in Jonestown for true believers to drink the Kool-Aid; they had to bring
along all the others with them.
Religion is
a frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, mere reasoning.
Thoughts of
an old man in the wee hours of the morning
I am an old
man of nearly nine decades, and the odds against my being here are so astronomically
large as to be uncountable.
Of all the
billions of galaxies with their billions of stars, circled by all the billions of
planets: in this particular solar system of a relative minor star, the third
planet from the sun happens to be in the Goldilocks zone, which allowed the
development of life, that through the chaos of evolution and happenstance
produced a me.
My mother
worked at a defense plant in Memphis, Tennessee. My father was in the military,
stationed in Louisiana.Strictly by
chance, they both attended Mardi Gras in New Orleans in the year before my
birth.They happened to meet and ended
up having sex.She didn’t practice birth
control, he didn’t use a condom, he didn’t pull out, it wasn’t a hand job, or a
blow job, or anal intercourse. She happened to be fertile at that particular
time. He ejaculated up to three hundred million sperm, and the only one of those
three hundred million carrying my particular DNA managed to penetrate and fertilize
that egg.
What are the
odds of that happening?
I have often
wondered why I wasn’t aborted; she was a single woman, and he was a married
man.
The odds of
my existence are uncountable (like pi).
In almost
nine decades, the beauties, sunsets and sunrises I have experienced: the sting
of an Arctic blizzard; the thrill of running a wild river or transiting the
Okefenokee swamps in a canoe; the women I have known, the motorcycles I have
ridden, the pleasures I have had; and most exciting of all, I married the most stunningly
beautiful woman I had ever met, who has shared almost fifty years of adventures
with me and has made my existence on this earth pleasurable beyond description.
And I could
have lost it all!
My second
twenty years of life were spent in the military.I flew as air crew on dangerous patrols over
the North Atlantic, sometimes in blizzard conditions; I survived a crash
landing in Turkey; twice in Vietnam, our aircraft was riddled by ground fire,
and we limped back to the base leaking oil and gas; I have facial scars and a permanent
limp from a military accident…
If you lived
through the Vietnam era, you remember the daily death toll announced on the
radio and television: 28 men died today… fifteen men died today…
I don’t
believe the official total death toll announced by our government: 58,000. It was much higher.
Some vets
died much later from war-related illnesses and injuries, people who committed suicide
or drank themselves to death, or died as a result of mental breakdowns…
In Vietnam,
the men who died accomplished nothing.They were sent there at the whims of politicians playing partisan
politics, and more interested in keeping their illustrious jobs than caring for
the men and women of the military.
Where am
I going with this?
We have a
President talking about putting boots on the ground, in a war instigated by the
Israeli President, and ultimately about oil and natural resources that can make
the mega-rich more wealthy and powerful.
What a waste
it is to be young and die in a War; to squander these precious moments we have of
life; to never experience the pleasures of our brief human existence. To end up
as a name printed on some cold marble wall, as pawns of politicians who see the
military as boots, and not individual living men and women.
