The Horsemen
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The President popped up to give a major address on the Global War of Terror last night. I had company in town and did not watch. I should have, I think, since I need to stay focused on things. We have been paying too much attention to the weather of late, or rather been consumed by the power of nature. It is time to raise our eyes to the other three horsemen. They would be our old friends famine, pestilence and war. The bird flu is lurking out there someplace. So far it is relatively contained, but everyone in the health community is a little jumpy. A hospital in Toronto has a couple dozen elderly residents die of something respiratory, and the same warning signs went up on the doors that were displayed during the SARS outbreak there. But maybe there is hope. Scientists managed to recombine a complete sample of the deadly Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19. That one circled the globe twice and killed 150 million people out of some tissue samples the Army saved, and the body of a young woman from Alaska who had been interred in a mass grave in the perma-frost. There was some interesting news, and some possibilities that they might be able to tinker with future pandemics and render them less deadly. I hope so. The pestilence already abroad in the world is scary enough. The President and the people on the Nobel Prize Committee in Norway are on the same beam. Mr. Bush is concerned about the terrorists, and he wanted to remind us that he has foiled a dozen plots since 9/11. The Norwegians are not currently under attack, and they took a wider view of the threat. The gave the Peace Prize to the International Atomic Energy Committee and its chairman, Mohamed Elbaradei. He was hounded by the Administration for not finding a current nuclear program in Iraq before the invasion. As it turned out, he was right. Thomas Friedman had a wonderful column about that in the Times this morning. “What were they thinking?” he mused, referring to Mr. Hussein and Mr. Bush, respectively. He did his musing from the comfort of one of the Navy’s Aegis cruisers off Basrah. I like Mr. Friedman, and I like those Norwegians. They have a droll sense of humor, which developed after they stopped sailing south to pillage England in the summer. The nights are long up there, and I suspect they spend the hours of darkness figuring out ways to tweak the noses of god-fearing people from Texas. It is weird crashing around in the new unit. I gave my guests the pool side unit and moved upstairs while they got organized after their long drive. I probably would have done it the other way around if the pool was still open. It is warm enough still here, but that will pass. I watched the rain coming down from the balcony. It is not coming down very hard, and they had been talking about a drought, so a little moisture is perfectly all right. Not living here makes it a little strange. I bought a Macintosh mini, so that I would have a back-up computer and one that was safe from Mr. Bill Gates. I now have it working as well as I could expect. A little frustrating- I don’t have the moves or the clicks down, but it is not as baffling as it was when I got it. The internet connection is now reliable and I have encrypted all the files, so that I have another password to forget. I am not completely sure I am using my wireless network or someone else’s. I leafed through the Times on-line version to kill a few minutes until cocktail hour. I saw that the Congressional Budget Office estimated the war on terror will cost half a trillion dollars over the next five years, most of it to be spent in Iraq. That could be good for business, I thought, though another tax cut might be, too. I clicked over to the BBC site to listen to the streaming audio of the Morning Update. It was pretty entertaining. The was analysis of the latest credible threat to the New York subway systesm, and coverage of the President’s forty minute speech about terrorism. Some fellow from the Muslim League of Britan was on the program, and he seemed to think the Reverend Pat Robertson was a member of the Bush Administration. Mass communications is truly a two-edged sword. My guests arrived and martinis seemed to be in order. We talked about the Horsemen for a while. We could do nothing about the storms, of course, or war or pestilence. We came to no solid conclusions, except that we probably had to stay the course like the President recommended. We don’t get to vote again on that for a while. But as to the last Horseman, we could take decisive action. I got on the phone and ordered Chinese. May as well do that while we can, I thought. If things keep going like they are, it is likely to be the other way around. Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra |
