Lughnasa College Moon
War is a terrible act. It marshals the forces and treasure and precious lives of foes into a bloody knuckle, don’t stop till the last soldier is down fog. Intentions, plans and often nations disappear in that fog and sometimes never re-emerge. Yet Barak Obama, the get-us-out of Iraq and Afghanistan president, is about to have his Woodrow Wilson moment.
My wife is a pacifist, my son a manager of war planes in battle. I’m an anti-Vietnam war era foreign policy realist who recognizes the anarchy existing at the level of nation-states. The always combustible atmosphere of geo-politics is even more flammable in the Middle East where oil and playing with matches has become the third millennial Great Game.
Add to that a world-defining struggle between Enlightenment rationalists and those who inhabit the caves which still project a dead God’s shadow (see post below) and we may be living during a world historical turning point. The irony, of course, is huge. We fight those inflamed by their commitment to a desert storm god not only because they harass us with bombings and public beheadings, but because their god’s realm includes the very fuel we need to continue poisoning the climate in which we all have to live.
This is a struggle between the god-drunk and those who live the dangerous life in which “knowledge (has) finally (stretched) out her hand for that which belongs to her: she means to rule and possess, and you with her!” We are out-numbered and out-flanked as the Chinese dragon grows stronger every day. What could possibly be more dangerous than this life? And, if we follow Nietzsche, “the most fruitful and enjoyable.”
As this blog says in its tagline, Welcome to the journey.
