Ghosts of George Kennan

Vaya con Dios-- a pachi making up his mind

To the extent that the Korean War was a precursor to the somewhat over-simplified policy of "the domino effect," it still seems preferable that Truman would have allowed MacArthur his aggression during the dubious ignition of the original conflict; it would have had a less devastating global impact. The US military can wage any battle it puts its mind to, until the political reality of occupying foreign territory sinks in. With the possible exception of our charming war with Mexico in 1850, we don't know what to do when we win, except when it comes to Europe. The republican heir of imperialism threw its wealth back at its parent, and NATO is an anomaly in a majority populace of doves, understandably so. In this account, I am mostly either outraged that I pissed my life away in the city of my birth because of an attachment I would have never been able to maintain anyway, (discounting all the abuses my illustrious state has offered up), illegal, specious, or full of longing I cannot fulfill, but I am not attempting to be facetious this morning, and realize that throughout the course of its civilized formation, the majority of Asians suffered horribly, under their own fanaticism, or our own mercantile avarice, and North Korea has long had the stench of an outhouse attached to it. The secret footage smuggled out of Pyongyang illustrates some of the bleakest conditions of human existence outside of concentration camps, and I've seen a good diet of bleak footage. Yemen is positively lively next to the average starving North Korean female, and thus, no citizen in the North deserves a return to the desolation after the cease fire was signed in 53.

This said, it seems Kim is pushing an envelope, one in which the question isn't defeating him, but rather turns into, can Xi Jinping be cowed into submission, or do we risk a third world war with a New York real estate celebrity entrepreneur at the helm? Major economies would be disrupted, and the very thought of NATO occupying the border of the world's most populous nuclear power? 


The despotic personality cult of the upper peninsula has plagued three previous administrations. The longer this drags on, the more lethal the impending consequences. The only reasonable solution the dowager can contrive: induce the Chinese military to defang the puppet state over which it has suzerainty, however tumultuous that muscle is, at present. I've written this before. I'll write it again: I voted for Donald Trump, reluctantly. If there was ever an election to sit out, in decent libertarian felicity, it was 2016, and though I could route my diction otherwise, as I am posting this with some gravity, a mild alarm-- on election day, I made a choice, without being blind. I am fully aware conservatives have problems: but I can never return to the progressive sensibility of a triumphant egalitarian field, and so, my minority vote said "fuck you," despite the small fortune I have cost the welfare state, I am a pauper, broken by activists as much as any residual austerity, and Trump's impropriety has amused me, but we do not need to reignite the ghosts of opposition to Vietnam, which was a travesty on the heels of Truman's escapades.