STING RAYS AND BEARS, OH MY!

R.I.P. Steve Irwin

I, like a lot of people, were entertained, fascinated and occasionally appalled by the antics of Steve Irwin, the Australian naturalist and entertainer who was killed while swimming with sting rays over the weekend. I am saddened by his death and will miss his antics and his contributions to the world of science and the field of naturalism.

But, if you're like me, you cannot be shocked by his death. Here is a man who spent his adult life wrestling with crocodiles, filming with snakes and swimming with sting rays--perhaps the real surprise is that he lasted this long at all! I'm reminded of Warner Herzog's documentary GRIZZLY MAN, which I recently watched. It's moving, maddening and fascinating, painting a portrait of a troubled but gregarious young man who devoted his life to protecting his Alaskan animal friends and educating schoolchildren about bears--but ultimately, after spending 13 summers with them completely unharmed, he was eaten by one. If it's true that passion is equal parts love and madness, then it was perhaps inevitable that these two very different men's passions for the wildlife and for nature would ultimately be their undoing.

After all, it's called The Wild, not The Safe.

The Perfect War

Your President is on the campaign trail--no, even Bush realizes he can't run for office again, but he's trying to sell Americans on the necessity of "The War on Terror" and how good it would be if the Republicans were left in charge of it.

I've blogged about it before (I'd link you to it, but I'm too lazy to search he archives right now), but I have to say it again--from an archconservative, military-industrialist point of view, this is the perfect conflict. The enemy is hard to see, spread all over the globe and, from our perspective, implacably evil. The enemy looks different than us, believes differently than we do and is concentrated in an area just loaded with oil, a resource we desperately need. Because the enemy is so spread out and ragtag, they don't (yet) posess nuclear weapons or the kinds of weapons of mass destruction that could lay waste to our troops, but they are stubborn, determined and motivated by ideology in a way that's guaranteed to produce a sufficient number of American casualties for years--or even decades--to come. Because we're not fighting a conventional head of state, Congress will never be compelled to issue a formal declaration of war, which allows whoever occupies the White House and his (or her) few advisors and military people to allocate sufficient means to wage the war almost indefinitely, which in turn generates business for those companies that profit the most from sustained conflict--the Haliburtons and Lockheed Martins of the world.

And on and on and on it goes, a war Without End that depletes the nation's coffers without ever really attaining it's stated objective--which mysteriously seems to change every couple of years--a war that sends first a trickle, then a steady stream, then perhaps a flood of body bags back to American soil while planting the seeds of terrorism and anti-Americanism in the home soils where the war is being fought...guaranteeing a fresh, and even more vicious, crop of the enemy in future generations. The perfect self-perpetuating, self-sustaining war.

Unless we put a stop to it now...no unilateral occupation of Iraq, no invasion of Iran and we go back and concentrate our efforts on trying to capture Osama bin Laden and crush the fascist, misogynist Taliban in Afghanistan. Then, after we do that (and I know America is capable of this), we bring our troops home and we take care of our own the way we're supposed to, so that no hurricane can devastate us like Katrina did.

Do you see why I end every blog with the word, "peace?" It is not a statement of fact, just a simple a request that peace be the one goal we should all be striving for, because war makes a few people rich at the expense of many, but only in peace does everyone prosper. And I want to be goddamn rich--in mind, body, spirit and bank account.

Peace.