Home, home on history’s ranch of monkey wrenches
You know the expression, A little bird told me… Well, this little bird told president Bush once and for all how popular Double Duh is with all Gods creatures, big and small. (It’s a shame though that the wrong bird delivered the message. There would have been more appropriate candidates.)
Talking of birds, isn’t it amazing that a country that is so obsessed with firearms can’t seem to get this star wars stuff right? Now they couldn’t get their pigeons to work properly, for crying out loud.
Ah well, maybe it’s not so surprising after all. When the US army finds it more important to go after gays than after the people placing all those bombs beside Iraq’s roads, it is no wonder that they haven’t had much success fighting anything but budget cuts lately.
Mind you, the army hasn’t been particularly well-served by other government branches. First, the CIA let itself be bullied by the White House into lying about everything that had to do with Iraq.
Now, with that scary Rumsfeld safely gone and most of the country and the political establishment no longer believing or caring what the White House says about Iraq, now the CIA has the temerity to suggest that they’d knew all along that starting a war to remove Saddam could lead to all kinds of problems - like, war.
Duh. Thanks guys, for this worthwhile and, above all, so very well-timed contribution.
Not that domestically things are much better. Of course, no-one but the regular army of conspiracy cranks really believes that the attack on the Twin Towers could have been easily avoided if only the combined Intelligence Services had been talking to their colleagues instead of waging territorial and bureaucratic war on each other.
You cannot stop madmen from planning and carrying out atrocities, however well-prepared any country or organisation is. Still, it would be nice if the various domestic agencies would do a little bit more than harass librarians and obsess about the kind of websites the general public visits.
The question is though, will we ever be prepared for any future threat? Are we able to learn from past events and past mistakes and use whatever insights we come up with? The signs are not promising.
Talking of which: if your sole contribution to this learning process is to simply replace old street names with politically correct new ones, you’re not exactly helping:
Move along now, folks, nothing to see here. This is the Nelson Mandela square now. Apartheid? No, look, there: the Desmond Tutu opera house! See: all is fine now.
Denial is a power tool. So, the Chinese contribution to the Cannes film festival is a moving tribute to the victims of the massacre the Japanese army inflicted on them in 1937.
Great, So, maybe, around 2059, we might expect a movie about Tianaman Square?
Another extremely popular (if not very helpful) way of dealing with the past is by way of mythologising persons and events. We make angels out of pinheads and sell their relics on E-bay. We take spiteful, meaningless squabbles and reshape them into patriotic tales of heroism, pride and virtue.
On the whole, the only way we tend to pay tribute to history is through lies, damned lies and Hollywood blockbusters.
Still, even if we would pay attention to history’s lessons, there is no way that we could ever be totally prepared for what tomorrow will throw at us:
I will take all your Old Testament prophets and raise them with a handful of Rasputins and a jumbo bag of Nostradamuses and still I’m sure the whole bunch of them could never have predicted, some sixty-two years ago, the kind of Nazi offspring that is moving through parts of Europe right now.
Ah well, you know that other expression, Out of the mouth of babes…
In a way life - past, present & future - is a bit like what comes out of George Bush’s mouth. It will be quite predictable, of course but you’ll never quite know in what exact form the usual lunacy, aggression, ugliness, day-to-day stupidity and, yes, unintended humour will come.
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