Hope and Gory

Well, I’ve been flyin’ under the radar a little bit lately. Crazy busy. There was some traveling in the middle there, then all this work that piled up before and after. Then a power outage and an internet melt-down that ate about 36 hours of my life and stomach... My point is, all kinds of swell news passed me by during my most recent period of embunglement.

In this case, the pivotal embunglar was my nephew Andy. He planned himself a wedding far from the home I love and The Missus ended up not being able to make it due to a nasty cold, so I was solely responsible for the boy all weekend in a not-my-own-home environment. In other words, I really had to pick up my game.

Here is a picture of my son with my mom; he is decorating a belated birthday cake she made for him:

One thing I would have blogged about, if I had taken my computer with me, was Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize win. My first thought, like everybody’s I assume, was that he won it for not being George W. Bush, which is admittedly a mighty low bar.

The political implications came next. Man, I thought, this is not going to help him get anything done in Washington with an opposition party that could already be politely described as recalcitrant. All this is gonna do is add rocket fuel to Obama’s detractors, give new wings to their hate.

On the other hand, people did kind of stop talking about Letterman. By the time Entertainment Weekly showed up with a Photoshopped pants-less Letterman on the cover, it felt like really old news.

The other recurring news item I couldn’t escape was the escalating number of dead American servicemen and women coming home from Afghanistan. The Bad Guys over there, they are definitely stepping up their game.

I saw a great movie a couple years ago, “Charlie Wilson’s War.” Although it was from award-winning comic director Mike Nichols and starred Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, the story it told was spine-chilling. It was about Afghanistan and how, throughout the ages, it had held off world-class conquerors like Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great in antiquity up to the very best despotic efforts of the USSR in more recent history.

Total number of would-be conquerors who walked away a winner after coming in to kick ass and take names in Afghanistan? Zero. Eminent dickwad Christopher Hitchens, sounding like he was quoting someone else, called it “the graveyard of empires” on Bill Maher’s show the other day. NBC's Richard Engel, a balls-out, straight news reporter if there ever was one, broke character a couple weeks ago and opined on-air that our involvement in Afghanistan “could only end in tears.”

It was a Walter-Cronkite-denouncing-the-Vietnam-War moment. This tide is turning, jack. If I can see it anyone can.

Can Obama? Two things history teaches us is that ground wars in Asia are a lost cause and generals always think they can win any battle by throwing enough troops at it. For God’s sake, that’s why the framers of the Constitution put the citizen president in charge of the military brain trust. Cooler heads were designed to prevail, not be talked down the path of lunacy.

I got to thinking, Obama got to have his cake and eat it too when he accepted the Peace Prize. A Nobel award, sure. Even the Peace Prize, some day, when he had actually ended a war or two instead of, at this point, stretching a couple out indefinitely. Let’s maybe snag ourselves a little corner of Iraq, like we have Gitmo in Cuba, then get the fuck outta Dodge. Then go to Oslo and make a nice speech.

Or better still, get us out of Afghanistan. Those three countries – Pakistan, India and Afghanistan – have been doing a slow death waltz together since forever. Adding India and Pakistan’s nuclear arsenals to the equation just puts a ticking clock on the whole thing. Why the hell would we want to be anywhere near there when those nut-jobs eventually nuke each other to mutually-assured destruction? And next-door neighbor Afghanistan is bound to be mostly collateral damage, let’s face it.

And for the rest of the world, that’s a best-case scenario. Depending on weather at the time of the holocaust, however, it could become a worst-case scenario for countries planet-wide.

Seriously, we can watch it on CNN from our hastily-dug fallout shelters. We don’t need to send our kids over there for a front-row seat. I like Biden’s idea of unmanned drones and for my money, Chuck Norris and his Delta Squad have my personal permission to slip behind enemy lines and take out a few of the guys at the top in their sleep. So many virgins in the afterlife, so few surviving leaders of al Quaeda…

I must confess a personal consideration in my New Pacifism: My nephew Andy, whose wedding just screwed up about two consecutive weeks of my life, is a United States Marine and is scheduled to ship out to Afghanistan next April.

He’ll be driving giant trucks full of ordnance over IED-laden roads in the graveyard of empires. In the pursuit of a war that absolutely everyone knows already, today, can’t be won. We should be moonwalking the fuck on out of there, double-time, instead of throwing more of our dick up on the table.

The more I think about it, the more the Peace Prize pisses me off. Not at Obama – except for accepting it, but really, you don’t bitch-slap the Nobel committee by refusing their award – but for all the well-meaning, unhelpful meddlers abroad. We’re happy he’s not Bush, too. Probably happier than you are, but we’re not throwing unearned, insanely high-profile awards at him either.

We get it. You really, really, really like him.

Now it’s just us who aren’t as sure as we used to be.