A new/old Great Game

Dear George,

Thank God it’s over, that sickening day of Hallmarkian prattle about Peace on Earth that surfaces shortly after the winter solstice has plunged the world into darkness. I suppose it has its place, for the more they mumble their platitudes, the more ready they are to return to their lives of greed and venality on the following day.

Nowhere is this truer than in that sheltered workshop for arrested adolescents we call the Beltway. Christmas makes nary a dent on the aged children who walk its corridors with their wet dreams of power and glory. When it comes to war and death, they are dewy-eyed idealists. And it is this idealism that turns them into civilized brutes.

The Beltway is where time is frozen and policy can only move, like an executioner’s cart, along the deep ruts carved into the roadway by policies of the past. So locked in the past are its denizens that they continue to play the Great Game in Central Asia that the Britain and Russia began in the nineteenth century. One writer speaks of our “’Great Asia’ strategy, which aims at rolling back Russian and Chinese influence in the region.”

I love it, George! America is insolvent, and our senile old men are still locked in a past that is no more. They still think it’s all a chess game. What they fail to realize is that the rules have changed. The lowly pawn now carries a Kalashnikov and can now move with the same impunity as the queen. It can even leave the board, hide behind the game box and blow away the queen as she passes.

Check this out! Russia plans to sell an S-300 missile defense system to Iran. The system is described as one “that scares every western air force” because it is so efficient. One U.S. official complained that the system stationed “around Iranian nuclear facilities would be a direct threat to Israel’s fleet of advanced but ‘not-stealthy’ F-151s and F-161s.”

Our arrested adolescents now define aggression as any attempt by a country that is in our gun sights to defend itself. In other words, if I announce that I am going to kick your ass and you pick up a two-by-four to defend yourself, it is an act of aggression since it denies me the right to bloody you up.

That’s policy for you, always one step ahead of the curve.

Our policymakers are like passengers on the Titanic who continue to move their game pieces even as the water laps around their ankles.

God bless ‘em all, I say. Without them life would be empty, and we would be forced to face the boredom of our meaningless existence.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones