Fortune's Pawn

An angry man dismissed his muse
as nothing more than an elaborate ruse
and shoved her out the door
but despite this act which left him alone
he found he still couldn’t write a good poem.

Back in March of 2004, Pawn quoted Christopher Patten on the “War On Terror” (the WOT in the Bush administrations Global War On Terror – GWOT – acronym).  Now another British luminary has forcefully joined the fray over this misbegotten fighting label.  David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, starts off with references to the recent attacks in Mumbai, then says, “The idea of a “war on terror” gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.”  Here is a further excerpt:

The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common. Terrorist groups need to be tackled at root, interdicting flows of weapons and finance, exposing the shallowness of their claims, channelling their followers into democratic politics.

The “war on terror” also implied that the correct response was primarily military. But as General Petraeus said to me and others in Iraq, the coalition there could not kill its way out of the problems of insurgency and civil strife.
David Miliband: ‘War on terror’ was wrong | Comment is free | The Guardian

Here’s hoping that our soon to be President, Barack Obama, is quick to quit that locution and instead distill GWOT in the Iraq War and the Afganistan War and treat them separately as they should have been all along.

Wow – two whole weeks without a post! What kind of slothery is this? No, I have not forsaken thee – merely busy and distracted. Let’s review some recent events…

Been watching a lot of Dexter lately – What a good show!! Two energetic limbs up!

What a rollicking good time we have been having with the primaries and all? Wright or wrong, those newsdroids just can’t help but love their puns. The events of last night, wherein Obama swept NC and was nearly IN was all the buzz. Now it’s kind of a death watch. Last time I wrote about a death watch, however, it was for Mr. McCain, so I’ll just leave that alone.

One of the great things about having a MythTV box is recording shows to watch later. One of the bad things is that you’re watching them after everyone else has. I watched last week’s episode of Law & Order tonight, Bogeyman, and within the first few seconds realized that it was “Ripped From The Headlines” of the unfortunate suicides, last year, of my old online chum Theresa Duncan and her hubby Jeremy Blake. I paused the playback to quickly Google “theresa duncan law & order” and was rewarded with a mixture of hyperbole and spoilers. Thanks for that last. Seems that my online cohort is shocked, simply shocked, that the media offspring of General Electric Corp. would exploit the seemingly benign (!) suicides of a couple of conspiracy minded bohemian artists for a good story. Here’s an example of the outrage:

Law and Order has violated the memory of Theresa Duncan and slandered Jeremy…

Which seems like the perfect follow-up to this prophetic post from August 20 of last year:

Sounds like a potential episode for Law & Order.

Oh well -
what can we do… No sense crying over spent artists…

On the way to work this morning, saw a small flock of starlings playing in a cyclone fence. One bird, near the top, shat upon one near the bottom. The shat upon bird squocked in protest. Avian fratricide!