Wheelchair Basketball

Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows. Of these obscure heroes, philosophers, and martyrs, the greater part will never be known till that hour, when many that are great shall be small, and the small great; but of others the world's knowledge may be said to sleep: their lives and characters lie hidden from nations in the annals that record them. The general reader cannot feel them, they are presented so curtly and coldly: they are not like breathing stories appealing to his heart, but little historic hail-stones striking him but to glance off his bosom: nor can he understand them; for epitomes are not narratives, as skeletons are not human figures.--Charles Reade, The Cloister and the Hearth

Ah Charles, the five minutes to midnight conservative psychiatrist to whom I've edged ideologically closer. I could be making coffee, nursing my monoxide inflicted lungs, eating my Snickers bar watching the younger Alec Baldwin before his unseemly disgrace put grappling hooks on the God complex, and instead I am asking myself why European Antisemitism is necessarily a congenital defect. For you, apocalyptic scenarios are easy because everyone apparently has it in for the descendants of the Hebrews. It is a polite matter of degree: The Catholic Protestant West forced conversions, and then it tried Fascism, and the East, having lost Constantinople a long time ago, never got its chance at global dominion, so here we are, doomed in the modern world because of Resolution 181 and Albert Einstein's unwillingness to hose nuclear technology off his sidewalk when he was teased, and the Persians are more wily than we expected.

The Iraqi state might have fallen to the Shi'ite minority without the considerable interference of the Bush family of course, and Jimmy Carter could have taken a page from his brother and supported SAVAK with our considerable American resources. How is the contemporary Revolutionary Guard any different? But Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi died somewhere in exile after being treated for cancer. History being what it is, you're goading Obama, who is basically out of gas, or scolding Hillary, should she win and give her husband a third term, but simply as a matter of geopolitical reality, the modern state of Israel cannot survive into perpetuity on the guarantee of the US military, but beneath these macro niceties, la bonne docteur, lie the petty details of what makes people what they become. History isn't made by analysts, but by backlashes, and paradigm shifts, misery and discontent, reactions against the status quot.

I am not winning any popularity contests on Blogger with some of my posts, my clever veiled strategisms to admit.to belligerent attitudes after a lifetime spent as a discarded lab animal. but the Holocaust isn't going to repeat along the lines of Auschwitz due to the imposition of post-war borders. The petrol states fuel extremism to shield wealth and privilege, and Americans then wonder about fractious Arabic peoples like puppies dumbfounded by a coiled newspaper. I've branded myself as a bigot, to use a softer term this evening, because a good chunk of my prime career years have wafted up in smoke due to disingenuous assurances, duplicity, prevarication, lack of caution around caviler Jewish princesses, and if I was still physically resilient enough, perhaps virulence wouldn't have taken a toll on the ability to rebound.  

Remonstration from the graveyard has minuscule reverberations, but humanity will not yield to the destructiveness of its nuclear capability, despite my lack of optimism from my simian bleachers. It is too simple, but the recognition that a Jewish state with an exceptional covenant is a contradiction in terms is not. Another thousand years, demographics will prove that point. 

Transference, a Response to Charles Krauthammer

I remember certain things about the Bush Administration's response in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Any administration would deserve some slack in the face of such chaos, but should it remain buried as a neo-conservative footnote that administration officials loaded bin Laden's Saudi relatives onto a plane without so much as even a brief interview on what they knew about Osama and his whereabouts?

We're busy relitigating the Iraqi War, flinging mud at the administration which started it, blaming the administration which ended combat operations, while Frontline's investigation into the Saudi royal family and its attempt to export its Sunni extremists is conveniently overlooked, because consumption of fossil fuel drives foreign policy. No established media outlet, to my recollection, ever investigated why the Bush foreign policy team was so closely aligned with the Saudi foreign ministry once the invasion of Iraq commenced.

The Saudi's get scolded by liberals, ignored by the right, while only one non-profit media outlet dares to connect the dots on the igniting sparks of Sunni radicalism. I am not attempting to insinuate that a declaration of war against an insecure monarchy with which we've had a long alliance, touted up by correspondents with weapons deals long before my university enrollment, would have been better than up routing Baathist Iraq, or destroying Muammar's grip on power in Libya; I will also concede Krauthammer has a point about the current administration's soft underbelly, but is the global oil conglomerate so powerful that it is worth the hundreds of thousands of Muslims dead, the reverberating psychic trauma to Americans and Europeans? Removing or reinforcing the al-Maliki regime is moot if the executive branch has been barking up the wrong tree for over a decade.