The universe is a crumbling Victorian ruin
An Edward Hopper horrorhouse
In which we are spending the night
What silence!
We hum to ourselves to break that wall
of nothing, then call out
HELLO HELLO HELLO
IS ANYBODY HOME
HOME
HOME
There is no response
This is probably a good thing
We might not want to hear the answer
At the antipode of audibility
Comes a distant, lifelike, creak
We wait
The housefolk will come soon
And we will not be able to hide from them
The world is a house in which a pipe burst and filled the basement with raw sewage.
Dust is dangerous. Anyone who works in a grain elevator or a sugar refinery knows this. When dust reaches a certain concentration in the air, the atmosphere becomes literally explosive. A spark ignites one mote of dust, which then ignites its neighbors, which ignite their neighbors, all of this happening in microseconds, until the room erupts with the collective force.
Our world is roomful of dust. There is now a broad band of conflict stretching from the Mediterranean/Black Sea to the Sea of Japan. In that band are numerous points of antagonism. Any one of them could be the spark that lights the explosion.
The reason I bring this up is that it hit me recently that there was no single World War II. There was no inherent connection between the war in Europe from 1939 to 1945 and the war in Asia from 1937 to 1948. They were two separate conflicts that coincided, because the world had grown “war-ish.” By that I mean the idea of putting armies on the march and violating borders by invasion had become thinkable, eventually typical. Once that mindset was in place, events took momentum of their own, going in directions that no one could foresee.
I worry we are getting close to a recurrence of that spiral.
Since the end of the Cold War, the overwhelming size of the American military has put a blanket on open international warfare. The U.S. Defense budget is the size of the next five largest military budgets in the world plus. There’s nothing like it. By that score, it’s difficult to imagine any nation’s decision makers thinking themselves capable of going on the offensive.
However, that very power makes the U.S. resented. One possible scenario is that China, facing economic troubles and wanting to distract the masses by foreign expansion, decides it is simply no longer willing to endure being limited by American squeamishness, and attacks anyway. If this sound familiar, it’s a contracted version of what happened in Japan between 1932 and 1941. Should China attack Japan, Taiwan or the Philippines, the U.S. will certainly intervene. Even Bernie Sanders or Ralph Nader would feel compelled to strike back under those circumstances.
With that occupying the American war machine in the Pacific, Putin may decide that he will never get a better opportunity to strike in Europe. This would not be an all-out war of conquest. It would be an attempt to impose an atmosphere of co-operation with Russian foreign policy objectives, along with annexation of Belarus and the rest of Ukraine (and the Baltics, if he can get away with it). The main idea would be to cow Western/Central Europe and stop the current drift toward anti-Russian unity (as demonstrated by Sweden and Finland seeking to join NATO). Europe would fight—but it’s hard to say to what degree, and how much support an already burdened US could give them.
And then what becomes of the Saudi/Iran conflict or Indo-Pakistani tensions? We can’t know. It’s impossible to tell how any war will turn out until you fight it. Warfare is inherently chaotic and unpredictable. Might turn out that the Russian economy has less warmaking potential than it seems. Or that might turn out to be the case for the U.S.. Or here’s an odd one: China goes to war with Japan and the South Koreans swing in on the Chinese side. Unlikely, but not impossible. The Korean people consider Japan to be a threat, and being in the middle the ROK govt would be under strong pressure to pick a side. Strange things will happen. The Nazi/Soviet pact that opened the gateway to the European theater seemed unthinkable right up to the moment it was announced. That’s when wars starts, when folks do something unexpected.
I remind myself that it once seemed inevitable that the Cold War would turn hot, yet that never happened. I’m hoping this is the case again. Dona nobis pacem. Dona nobis pacem. Dona nobis pacem. Amen.
During dinner my wife paused and stared at her plate. I asked why. She said “I was just looking at the Rice-a-Roni and thinking about the vastness of the universe.”
(That’s why I love her, folks.)
And she’s right. If we yap on about how the stuff of humans is forged in stars, we must note that all the higher elements are forged in stars, and so likewise the stuff of toads, viruses, dog turds, heroin, fruit bats, and, naturally, Rice-a-roni. There are billions of stars for every human being; humans are much more precious than stars. The occultists were right: the macroverse is mirrored in the microverse. Just not quite how they expected.
You can’t make a replacement moon. All you can do is point to the moon. Because the moon is worth pointing to.
The Library You See in Dreams 