When we stumbled down in the general direction of breakfast- or at least the dark steaming liquid substance that begins the headlong fall into the day. This one warmed as the coffee cooled, and was tinged with surprise.
We were going to start with a nice and poignant piece by a distinguished scholar. She isn’t Iranian, or not exactly. She is a representative of the Persian cultural tradition, one that celebrates, among other things, beauty, subtlety and pride. There are some other things, but our feelings ae a little conflicted by the current episode of travail. Our little part woke up while doing something else.
We went through training with some of the Shah’s bright young pilots back in the Carter years, when Tehran was seen as a useful bulwark against the Soviet Union. That abruptly changed with the overthrow of the Pahlavi’s, we think by us, but you can see the sensitivity of the matter. We try to keep the emotion down, and Lina Khatib does so with aplomb. She was talking about what is going to happen in the region with a step back from the efficient killings of the leadership of Hamas and now Hezbollah.
It would have been a good day to close out the Foreign Policy furor and turn attention to what is going to happen back here on the home front, but of course that is already starting. Hard to tell what themes are going to be emphasized, since they range from one candidate being associated with a historic mass murderer has also already had at least four assassination attempts and reports last night of surface to air rockets imported to shoot down his aircraft.
So, that new element in the campaign is a shiny object, and there is also the whole gigantic sordid mess about what has been going on for decades with our assorted leadership. It started with the Epstein thing everyone is tired of hearing about, but the new round of inditements has caused all sorts of things to bubble up again. Prince Andrew has blipped as now being “out of favor.” Wherever that is.
There are fifty other assorted celebrity or power names associated with the parties held by Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, so there will be multiple disclosures of useful or damaging things long held on video but held back as a common leverage until the time is ripe.
So, there is that stuff going on, and we had Splash working on the nuts-and-bolts of the Israeli ops as we heard on-scene reports from almost right here- a pal down south brushed by Helene’s hurricane wrath. The sound of chainsaws cutting on the downed trees in her yard will be most of the sound in the neighborhood until the lights back come on, she hopes by next Saturday.
So, it’s all happening with a few more decibels and a little more tempo. We’ll get inundated with sharp increase in electoral stuff from the LawFare stream. Some of that is spiking about Maricopa County in Arizona is already contested in the state court- but we are determined to see how some of these streams mount. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
In the high-elbows, forward-leaning American politics we knew, this would work out in some vaguely unpleasant but generally reasonably fair manner leaving most parties equally dissatisfied. Something that worked. Lurched, perhaps, but the dichotomy in perceived realities- clad in Nazi and Stazi metaphors- is an escalation in imagery.
We seem to have lost some of that old restraint this time. We’ll see, right?
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com