always a moment to think

i'm not really a political person. i have beliefs, but that doesn't make me political.

i do read the news voraciously. i have since i was a child. i've always had an awareness of the horrors of our world. i guess the internet is my favorite thing these days, since i can read news readily from foreign sources, the bbc, the guardian, spiegel, die welt... german and english sources anyway. occasionally will try and muddle through le monde, but my french is just awful.

hm... days of assassinations are always bad days somewhere in the world. in this case, it was a bad day in pakistan.

if there's ever a politician who gives any kind of hope of finding a solution that doesn't lead to bloodshed, there's always a fanatic to blow them away. i was 16 when yitzhak rabin died. i was buying a comic book and heard the radio report.

today, pakistan's best hope for stability was killed. maybe any kind of honest hope that that whole fucked up situation could be maybe tempered enough to take the bite out of the power of the madrassa-educated fanatics. out of the power of the greedy corrupt pakistani military. benazir bhutto was no great heroine - she was probably guilty of corruption, and wasn't really an effective leader. but a glimmer of hope is better than no hope.

so, another fucking country is condemned to years of civil unrest more, due to some asshole's bullet. it could have been musharraf who ordered her death or it could have been pakistan's equivalent of fundis that had her killed. who fucking knows.

of course, the best part is this isn't just some third-world hellhole nobody cares about. it has nuclear weapons (hurrah!) and a long-standing grudge against their very large and well-armed hindu neighbor with increasing religious fanaticism of its own. fuck, i feel like bismarck: he once said the great european war would be started by "some damned fool thing in the balkans." i wonder if some very nasty war of nuclear attrition will start because of some damned fool thing in south asia. someone will insult mohammed or allah or rama or shiva or whatever fucking name people give to their gods and prophets. i wonder if the bjp or the madrassa parties in india and pakistan respectively have enough sense not to start a fucking nuclear dick-waving contest. i wonder, really, if some of the states' vaunted cold-war leadership were still alive if they wouldn't give some credence to the fact that even krushchev had enough sense not to start a nuclear war. i would take a krushchev or a brezhnev over a religious fanatic holding a big red button with a mission from their own twisted version of a divine message.

there are worse things, virginia, than communism. religious fanaticism. an undereducated and angry populace. yep, those are pretty bad things.