Unfortunately, I won’t be doing a Zoom Cast today. My continued computer woes make it impossible to have any confidence that I can hold a live video chat without my computer shutting down. So I think it’s best to reschedule. I’m traveling next week but I should be able to find a few hours to check in with all of you. I’ll keep you posted. I have a longer post coming soon so also keep an eye out for that.
In the meantime, perhaps we can try things the old-fashioned way and have a web chat (yes, these days a web chat is old-fashioned!). Feel free to ask me anything in the comments - on Afghanistan, the infrastructure bill, COVID-19, horse de-wormer, what’s on TV (I have some thoughts on “White Lotus”), what I’m listening to, what I’m reading, etc. The floor is yours!
I remember the drum-up to the war in Afghanistan, the comments that Bush made about "smoke 'em out and get 'em running," the slavering news industry revisiting their 1898 "Who blew up the Maine?" frenzy. Then the next year they did it again in Iraq.
Never mind that that second war was illegal, never mind that it was blundered start to finish... the "real" war in Afghanistan was bum[ed to the back burner. Not enough troops, equipment, supplies. And, most tragically, not enough airpower. Not that it would have made a difference. The Afghanis have been at war for the better part of recorded history, and no matter which empire has tried to fight, occupy, and remake them in the imperial image, it has failed. The troops go home, the Afghanis remain. I can think of three examples (Alexander, the British, and the Soviets) where war in Afghanistan cracked the foundations and precipitated the fall.
The latest trend of crying woe about the war's end is not only disingenuous, it's just dumb. Blaming Biden for a deal Pompeo cut after the election is like blaming the mess officer because somebody rolled a grenade into the chow hall. Our children are walking into a contagion ward disguised as a classroom, the whole west is still on fire, the Colorado (and the major western aquifers) are tapped out, Tennessee had the worst flooding since 1927, and the GOP has hammered voting rights into a narrow channel that resembles a slaughterhouse kill chute.
But hey, yeah, let's keep the focus on the "disaster" of Afghanistan. The fact that until yesterday, there were no casualties despite a massive continuous evacuation has largely gone unnoticed.
We never should have been in Afghanistan in the first place, but we ain't exactly leaving either. There are tons of intelligence people, corporate consultants, private military, and diplomats who remain. Remember that Afghanistan is not only the source for most of the world's opium (remember how we had a major opioid crisis right after the US took control of the poppy fields?), it is also the Saudi Arabia of rare earth metals so crucial in the manufacture of batteries and other components for mobile devices.
Oh yeah. The infrastructure bill will have the greatest effect on the lives of average Americans since the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935, but why talk about that? better to cash in on the short-term outage at the betrayal of our troops because we're no longer sending them into combat. Turn on Tucker to find the truth! Real as his log cabin background.
I got a question via email about White Lotus and while I reasonably enjoyed the show (especially the score) I thought, overall, that it was a meh. All the characters were one note and not terribly appealing or interesting and the story wasn't all that interesting. But what really annoyed me about the show is that it's another HBO prestige drama about how "white people suck." First it was Succession, which is great. Then came Big Little Lies, the Undoing and to a lesser extent Mare of Eastham (the first three are about rich white people -- the last is just white people). Rich White People have become the bogeyman of the 20s! I get it. They're an easy target and it allows everyone to feel better about themselves - "look at how awful those rich white people are" -- but it's gotten a bit tired at this point.