Bad news continues to be delivered by firehose on a rather continuous basis this week. I was able to avoid it on Monday as I spent most of that day in airports or up in the air returning home from Seattle but the respite was short lived. Over the last few days we seem to be going to war in Iran, making it impossible for Trans adults to exist in Kansas, filing bills in the US congress to censor books throughout schools and public libraries that mention anyone or anything about the LGBTQ community, a record setting State of the Union address that seems to have been about pretty much anything other than the actual state of the nation’s affairs, the consolidation of national media under MAGA friendly control, and executive agencies flouting court decisions left, right and sideways. I really don’t know what to make of it all. I just keep repeating my current mantra of ‘get up, get dressed, go out, do good’ and let national and international affairs take care of themselves as there’s not much I can do about them. I do call my elected representatives but my senators seem to have no interest in representing that part of the citizenry not of their party. My representative, Terri Sewell, is one of the few Deep South democrats and she seems to try, but she’s a salmon swimming upstream.
We have been interfering in Iran routinely since 1953 when a democratically elected government was deposed in favor of the Shah at the behest of US oil interests. The Shah maintained control for a quarter century until his ill health and an opposition coalition consisting of students, intellectuals, and religious fundamentalists succeeded in toppling him. The religious fundamentalists came out on top in the ensuing power struggle and there have been serious issues of extremism throughout the Arab world ever since. I’m not sure why Trump and Hegseth have decided to attack, although it’s been clear for some months they were going to. It may be another deflection from growing domestic scandals, especially of the Epstein variety. It may be an excess of faux testosterone bravado. I don’t think the Joint Chiefs are very happy as things could escalate rapidly and the logistics aren’t necessarily all in place but Hegseth has been playing the Queen of Hearts and yelling ‘Off with his head’ at anyone in the Pentagon who dares to question or get out of line.
Most of the Arab world is Sunni Muslim. Iran is the major exception and is Shia. The Shias and the Sunnis split in 632 CE after the death of the prophet Mohammed. The Sunnis believed power should devolve through election and popular mandate. The Shias believed power should continue through Mohammed’s bloodline and descendants. And they have been fighting this battle for 1400 years. So we have internecine strife, unstable geopolitics, the economics of the oil industry, Arab/Israeli tensions, global warming leading to catastrophic water shortages in the region and population migration as the result, and the US deciding that this is where we should be expending American treasure and lives. It just doesn’t strike me as the brightest move. There’s a lot of fussing that Congress has not issued a formal declaration of war. Congress hasn’t done that since 1941 when we entered World War II. Everything after that (Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, Afghanistan, etc.) has been by executive action under special circumstances and police actions. That particular cow has been out of the barn for eighty-five years now and is unlikely to meekly re-enter its stall.
I was too young for Vietnam to be a truly formative experience. It’s one of the reasons that the late Boomers (born late 50s and early 60s) are so different from the early Boomers who are now busily turning eighty. I was in 5th grade when the war ended and in 7th when Saigon fell. I was never in danger of being drafted and I was not out protesting in the streets. (Now I was in San Francisco in the summer of love, but I was 5 years old at the time and my parents kept me well away from the Be Ins in Golden Gate Park). The classic Boomers were shaped by the 50s and 60s. The young Boomers, sometimes referred to as Generation Jones, were shaped by the 70s and early 80s, a very different time. Because of this, war has always seemed a bit unreal to me. When the Gulf War happened in the early 90s, I was in residency and for the first time I began to understand the instability that war creates. Steve and I had been together for a couple of years and he was very much a child of the 60s so it was all old hat to him but I had some processing to do, especially as the surgical residents on military programs all rapidly disappeared.
I’m hoping that this doesn’t spiral out of control and into major regional conflict and that Iran, which has affiliations with Russia and China, doesn’t become a proxy as the various great and not so great powers jockey for position in a rapidly changing 21st century world. We live in interesting times and with each passing week, they get more and more interesting. I could use some mundane in my news feed, but that’s not likely to happen for awhile. Going to wrap this up and work on a chapter of the new book before having to head off to church for our annual stewardship dinner where we try to convince the congregation to cough up for another year. The choir is singing ‘The Money Song’ from Avenue Q. Like most modern musicals, the bass part is written in a second tenor tessitura. I may quietly sing down the octave. Don’t tell anyone.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 