06 December 2006

Squeaky Springs

There is a poetry war in progress in the professional group I belong to on the net. I trotted out the old chestnut by Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice.”

Mr. Frost wrote it as a philosophical piece, comparing passion and icy distance as two approaches to the inevitable individual exit from the world of the living. In the end he couldn't make up his mind about which he preferred. Ice goes with age, and there is a general consensus that getting old is preferable to blowing yourself up in youth.

That is a singularly useful topic, since there are so many of the young who are engaged in that pursuit. There were other verses exchanged, good ones, but the one from John Ciardi's wonderful poem “Celibate Farm” was a winner.

It was a young and lusty man's thoughts about living with his young wife's parents. They are Puritan farmers, deeply suspicious that someone, somewhere, might be having fun.

“Damn that celibate farm, that cracker-box house
with the bed springs screaming at every stir….”

It sounded creepy, like living with Pat Robertson as an in-law. The exchange of verse had started in the context of the warmest winter in Europe in 1300 years, which is a long time. All the ancient trash is emerging from the ice on the crags that has been covered since the Little Ice Age, Bronze-Age hunters who died on the passes, stuff like that.

We will be down to rock, soon enough, with nothing to indicate that people ever passed that way, except for the new trash that will blow in the warming wind.

I'm not going to whip a dead horse on that one. It appears the policy decision on the environment has been made to “act surprised” when the natural world changes under us, or at least defer the realization for a couple years.

I'm easy, even if I can hear the bedsprings creaking with movement. I'm prepared to go along with it, and pretend I don't hear a thing.

Even if the planet is going down the tubes, if things go all right, this should be a pretty good year. The Iraq Study Group is in with their set of recommendations to fix the quagmire in Iraq. I'm a little surprised that the word “quagmire” has passed into common usage regarding the conflict, while there still appears to be controversy about the term “civil war.”

“Chaos” seems to be OK, but “Civil War” is bad. I expect that is because we live in chaos, and many of us have books about the “Late Unpleasantness Between the States.” The National Park Service, who is the custodian of the dusty past, says that 623,000 soldiers perished in the conflict, more than in all the other martial adventures in the nation's history, combined.

Anything is better than actually reading the book, right? That is the way it is going to be with the Blue Ribbon Report of the Iraq Study Group.

Bob Gates made a show about being candid in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said that we weren't winning, and that is where the sound byte stopped. He actually equivocated for a while, once he got the words out that made him acceptable to the Committee.

But the whole sentence would not have made good television, and that is the way it is. He said the right thing, and the Committee is going to recommend his nomination unanimously to the full Senate.

Considering the nasty confirmation that preceded his confirmation as the Director of Central Intelligence, that is only an indication of how deep is the revulsion they feel about Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

He is going to get tagged as the poster child for this quagmire of a civil war, replete as it is with ethnic cleansing, rapine, torture and brutal murder.

As it turns out, Uncle Don had some ideas about the quagmire, and some of them included adding more troops to the mix to stabilize the situation before we walk away from it.

>From the right, Senator McCain is in favor of that approach. Agreeing with him is Congressman Silvestre Reyes, the likely new Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The Iraq Study Group is likely to suggest something along the same lines, since they have had time to listen for the bedsprings squeaking down the hall.

The President is quoted as saying there are some tough proposals in the recommendations, and we are going to get a look at what former Secretary Baker and Congressman Hamilton actually said later today.

The President says he is going to read the whole report.

My personal belief is that he doesn't get much beyond the Executive Summary. What do you think?

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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