Busy morning. I am texting back and forth with the JG who is at the Air Mobility counter at SEATAC, checked in, but still more than three hours from boarding the flight to Yokota, surrounded by enlisted Marines. He was briefly alarmed that there might be no beverage service on the charter flight. I told him it would be ok, and the way I normally got across the Pacific was vodka and a solid dose of melatonin.
“Bladder management,” I wrote. “And oblivion.”
Yesterday was highly emotional. His flight out of here was scheduled for 1845, so we spent the day looking at the clock. We went to the Club for lunch, but neither of us had much of an appetite. At around 1600 he said: “I think I am going to puke.”
I responded that I thought I was going to throw up as well.
Driving back from the airport, watching him stagger into the terminal with his four sea-bags, I listened to one of those 9/11 tear-jerker stories, and it had the intended effect. What a day.
To get my mind off things, I checked out what happened with the Million Muslim March, or the Million March for Freedom, or whatever it was. The turnout was famed intellectual Cornell West and 23 others, mostly 9/11 truthers, who also believe that space aliens were responsible for the 1st (but not second) Bush Administration.
Marchers were outnumbered by the media and the bikers, who apparently could not find the crowd, which was smaller than most family reunions at Haynes Point.
(The entire crowd at the Million March for Whatever. Photo AP)
I think most American Muslims were appalled at the timing, and I don’t blame them. I am a fierce defender of the First Amendment, though, and since it does not exclude making a complete fool of yourself in its exercise, I find it a marvelous thing.
I was considering a tale this morning about Right to Protect (R2P), another of those magical thinking concepts that has not been discussed here before. It is timely, since it is being pushed into the public consciousness in the context of the increasingly bizarre Syria intervention, or non-intervention, or Putin-for-Nobel-Peace-Prize initiative or whatever it is.
R2P fits in as a means to justify intervention just about anywhere, on just about any grounds.
I had not thought about it before- the first time I heard about it, I thought was one of the Droids from one of the Star Wars Prequels I have not seen.
It actually is an exciting new doctrine that apparently fell out of the United nations a little after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which is in such trouble these days, what with the C02 increasing but the temperatures not cooperating.
The United Nations is the home for great ides, though, and R2P is another one. If you take this and add it to magical thinking, you get the notion that when a government of a society chooses not to protect its people – and starts to kill some of them to suppress a revolt – that the United Nations- or somebody- must act.
That is what the President was getting at about the Assad Regime’s use of chemical weapons on the children. It was not so much that the United States had the “option” of acting, but rather it has the “responsibility” to intervene and protect Syria’s people.
Conceptually, of course, I completely agree. But I missed the part where the world’s non-policeman (us) became the “international community.”
That is how I understood R2P, anyway, once I had it sorted out that it was not a Robot from Lucasfilms.
Actually, it has a lot in common with that, but let me get to that tomorrow, since today has quite got away from me.
I have to get going. Mr. Putin called, and he would like us to pick up his dry-cleaning.
More on all of that tomorrow.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303