In no way will I claim to be an expert on foreign affairs, but along with many others, I will claim to be the authoritative non-expert on the subject. I just can’t help but get agitated whenever my impatient channel-surfing rewards me with a reminder of what a total cluster-fuck the Middle East is right now. The only time the chaos in that sweaty part of our planet affects me directly is when I have to fly somewhere. My obsessive apprehension about an Islamic terrorist, or violent extremist, or whatever you want to call them, slipping past the TSA is admittedly a little over the top. But have you given some thought to the possibility of someone jamming a plastic pipe bomb up their ass? I have, and now I can’t get it out of my mind. I am constantly surveying passenger’s butts. It used to be just the hot babes, but now it’s everybody. If you notice me doing this, trust me I’m not interested, no matter what gender you are. It’s merely a private security thing with me. I am ever alert to anyone suspiciously shuffling along like they have a Hershey bar up their ass and don’t want it to melt. That’s the tip-off. Look for that. Go ahead and implement this trick in your own surveillance protocol. Glad I could help
Sorry. I got off topic a bit. Here’s the thing. We have no business kicking sand in the faces of all these people choosing to live where there is nothing but sand. It’s their sand. Just leave it alone. And I have two handy charts to show you exactly what happens when for some ridiculous reason we decide we want to be the big macho guy on the beach. Chart Number One below is self explanatory.
Chart Number One
As you can see it is not quite logical, but it is, as I say, self explanatory. There were people in very high decision-making positions of power in this country that decided they wanted to make the above decisions (blue lines). Now I suppose under normal circumstances, or at least how we used to perceive normal circumstances, we might have gotten away with this. There were a couple of really big wars where this kind of thinking worked out ok. But in those situations we were dealing with people that in general we understood. Brits, Germans, Italians, Poles, Dutch, Spanish. Lots of Europeans. And Russians. Those guys were involved too. But we could figure those people out, know who was friend or foe. We already had a bunch of the secret stuff about them knocked out because there were a lot of these people wandering around in our own back yard to help us out. Of course there were the Japanese. We didn’t know a whole lot about them but they made the mistake of kicking sand in our faces so we went to work and bombed the holy shit out of them. Payback can be hell. But then the next thing you know hubris got the best of us and we got all full of ourselves and our bombs and pretty soon what happened is we got a bunch of old farts doing a lot of saber-rattling who couldn’t seem to control their hegemonic personalities and we ended up in a war with people who’s culture we had no clue about. A war with the North Vietnamese was supposed to stop Communism in it’s tracts. If we had just waited it out, most truly communistic countries, we would find, impaled themselves on their own swords.
You would think we would have learned something from this, but instead, due in large part to those decisions made in Chart Number One, what we have now is what you see in Chart Number Two shown here.
Chart Number Two
Good luck figuring this out. Those in charge in our part of the world have tried to accomplish that, with absolutely no success. Teddy Roosevelt said that the most important single ingredient in the formula for success is knowing how to get along with people. Until the majority of the population in this part of the world figure that out, it seems pointless to waste our resources there.
Interestingly, the second chart is how I feel about Facebook. It’s just too confusing to me. The only reason I enrolled was to try and pump up my forthcoming book that I’m never going to publish. People just keep showing up out of nowhere. Who in the hell is Pete Shimonitz? I think that prick hacked into my computer. There’s something fishy going on. Of course there are a lot of folks that don’t like me, so it could be any one of a number of people messing with me. Get out of my computer you fucking asshole!