Burying the past with language

removes it from the usual patterns of evolution, as would deliberate gene splicing. The Dravidian languages of southern India deliberately remove Sanskrit influence while ignoring similar influences from English, which would certainly be easier to locate and remove because of their obvious foreignness. Local politics and petty jealousies weigh heavily. ‘Aryanization’ carries with it the connotation of ‘civilization’, at least in Thai, notwithstanding the fact that the same people now called ‘Dravidians’ have ancestors who created one of the world’s greatest early civilizations in the Indus River valley. They undoubtedly left much DNA in the current bloodlines of both northern and southern India. Unfortunately for them, this is the darker-skinned lower-caste bloodline that was ripe for Islam to enhance their status. It’s no accident that that same Indus River is now in Muslim Pakistan, though linguistic traces with their forbears are long gone. The lingua franca of Pakistan, Urdu, in fact is mutually intelligible with Hindi, the closest thing India has to a national language, and the local language of no one in Pakistan. Once again, efforts are continuous to separate the two for political reasons. The same has not yet happened, but could, with India’s other major language, Bengali, also known as Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh.

No matter how hard the West may squeeze the rest of the world by the balls,

individually a single man has no assurance that anyone loves him. The more that the world fragments and splinters, the more that people need simple unequivocal love. This is the Achilles heel of even the cruelest warrior, the need for certainty, the need for absolutes, the need for loyalty, the need for love. Empires of love all crumble and fall without warning nor welcome, just like empires of the map and empires of the soul, systems and constructs looking for reasons to return home to entropy. Still we need it, like we need belief systems and religions, insurance companies and bank accounts. We hedge our bets as fast as we can make them, joining hands with our enemies and rejecting our allies simply by the natural laws of turbulence and motion. We can only unite in something larger than us, the overarching umbrella, the golden parachute. Catch us if you can.

The past is a pool of blood.

Internecine squabbles continue between former camel-shit caravan drivers turned oil princes and former horse shit cowboys turned capitalists. When planes slammed into the World Trade Towers like two over-extended penises caught in a lie, a warm radiation spread over my body like an afterglow to knee-jerk fear. Many of us took a hit when the twin towers fell, psychologically if not physically, conspiracies sprouting like mushrooms from fertile imaginations, unable to accept the fact that not everyone loves us anymore. So that must be our fault, the rejected lover accepting responsibility for imagined crimes against an unfaithful spouse that he didn’t want anymore anyway but didn’t have the heart to tell. But not me, I know suicidal despair when I see it. I know that suicide bombings are suicides first and politics second. We’re on my turf now; this is the world I know, the world of opposites. In martial arts like marital arts, use the aggressor’s weight to his disadvantage. The bad guys might just save us all despite themselves, slow down run-away capitalism before we all die from the heat of our own fires, accomplish what a gaggle of rich-daddy environmentalists driving $30K hybrids could never accomplish in a thousand years. What happens when one billion Chinese all have cars? Whose air will we breathe then?

POLITICS

Politics loves a vacuum; it sucks. Politics sucks in the best and the brightest and turns them into utter fools. No less than Einstein himself dedicated a large portion of his life to political activism, only to have it come to no avail, his best theories used for military ends, he himself advocating its use for one side’s advantage over the other. How do you know who the bad guys are anyway? Democracy may win by default, simply the best of bad systems. Let the law of large numbers rule, and everything should average out okay, safer than the eccentricities of dictators. But when governments start fighting over who gets to pump the gas, then you know something’s wrong. The struggle for power has always been about power. More and more these days that means, “oil”. The party’s over; now we gotta’ start paying for it, through the hose, through the nose. That’s the price we paid to win the cold war- we had to cut everybody else in on the deal. Now they want oil as much or more than we do. China and India have got some catching up to do, and they’re jamming on it. What happened to the days when government promised to create a perfect world for us, rather than just guard the pumps? I’m not complaining, mind you; I know we’ve never had it so good, but many are falling through the cracks of a world they can’t fathom.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

Politics is musical chairs.  Wherever you sit when the music stops is yours, more or less, depending on how fat your butt is.  In the case of our political map, the music stopped about 1948, with the demise of colonialism in the aftermath of WWII.  With only a few exceptions, boundary changes since then have been the result of realignment, not conquests or land grabs.  Circumstances like these have a life of their own, following topographical boundaries and ancient animosities.  Most of the action of the last century has been the break-up of empires, first the medieval Habsburg and Ottoman, then the colonialist British, French, Dutch and Portuguese, and finally the Communist Soviet and Yugoslav states.  These fixed borders just might be the cause of much tension and stress, the fact that some countries have much land and few people, and that the ability to change that situation is limited.  It’s even gotten a bit ridiculous with the situations in Timor, Biafra, Nagorno-Karabakh, and others, but laudable, in my opinion.  If there’s ever to be a world government that’s truly effective, then there will have to be world political units that are meaningful.  If Dixie tries to secede again, though, then that’s going too far.