Ground Zero

I learned some history the other day. It turns out that Palestine is a Roman name imposed on the troublesome former district of Judaea after the Diaspora, the Emperor Hadrian's "final solution."

The current conflict goes back centuries before anyone had ever heard of Mohammad or Islam, so the sheer bumptious scale of bloodletting in the name of God — but surely, evil in the name of good was prohibited in the ten commandments? Where's Charleton Heston when you need him? — finally just boggles the mind.

Like watching puppets dancing on the strings of destiny... Zionism seems to be a kind of insane desire to install refrigerators on the stricken Titanic and keep from sinking by freezing colder than the very icebergs. It doesn't make sense, but damn, those refrigerator salesmen can sell snow to Eskimos.

My guess is, Iran will eventually nuke Israel, or Israel will bulldoze the Gaza Strip into the sea, or both ... and we'll watch it on the evening news, twirling our battle rattles and waiting for halftime to get another Bud and watch Christiane Amanpour chatting up the sidelines.

So yeah, it's a Rube Goldberg war, a little miniature gem from our own cracked indifference. But it's somebody else's kids who do the dying, and somebody else's moms who do the crying, and somebody else's hate that does the lying. Just look at it! That can't be real.

And we broadcast this merde to the stars.