Old Guard
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Old Guard College football is finally over, though I had to take a pass on it. I am sad that the Big Money has decided that the most significant games of the season will be played till midnight on a work night, and I refuse to watch the corn-chip commercials for the privilege of watching it. I missed the changing of the guard. The reigning power in football was overthrown, and there is a new Champion. They are from Texas , and I am pretty burned out on Texas at the moment, for a variety of other reasons. I understand it was a pretty good game, like the one I didn’t watch last night. I checked briefly to see if anyone else had been indicted overnight that would have changed my schedule, and didn’t see anything. If I see Federal Marshalls in the waiting room this morning, I will just have to change my plans. I think people with warrants have precedence. And that is what the is happening in Gaza this morning. I’m sorry for the State of Israel this morning, and a little nervous, like the Palestinians must be. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had a massive stroke while he was waiting for surgery to repair a little stroke, and he underwent seven hours of surgery. I hope he recovers, but that is a personal issue. He will not be back in politics. His passing from the scene reminds me a little of the parade of old lions in the Kremlin, before it all unraveled. Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko was the last of the Old Guard to sit on the communist throne, replacing his ancient rival Yuri Andreopov. Chernenko represented a return to the hard-line policies of Leonid Brezhnev before the changes brought on by Mikhail Gorbachev and the young technocrats. He was too old to have the vigor required to rule, but he was all that was left in the cupboard to carry on a dying legacy. He lasted a year in power, and then he was dead. With his passing went the old certainty, and in came the youthful Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. We all remember what happened next. When you are no longer certain of the justice of your cause, anything is possible. Ariel Sharon had been at the center, or in the wings, of everything that happened in Israel since the foundation of the Jewish State. Combat commander, politician, and statesman at the end. Maybe a war criminal, if you believe some of his critics, and his son was convicted of harvesting illegal campaign contributions. At the end of things, even if you distrusted him, he was a known quantity with the ability always to be surprising. He directed the pull-out from Gaza as decisively as he had led the incursion into Lebanon . He kept his own council, and it is not sure where he was going, or what boundaries he might have drawn. He created a new political party to smash the stalemate in the Knesset, and he would have been elected in March, in the next round of elections. That won’t happen now. Vice Premier Ehud Olmert was named acting prime minister and convened the Cabinet for a special session to show that the Israeli Government was alert and on the job. The departure of Mr. Sharon will disrupt the electoral process in Gaza , too. Sharon , a caricature of the overweight hawk, seemed like the last best hope for peace. At the emergency Cabinet meeting, Sharon ‘s chair remained empty. The unsettled state of affairs that is the State of Israel has existed all of my life, though we generally knew the players. We had a general idea of how they would respond to provocation. That isn’t true anymore. Mouhmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestinian Authority, is concerned. I don’t blame him. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |
