Ariel ben Cartwright

The Israeli National Health Service has apparently convened a death panel and decided to throw Ariel Sharon, 5 years comatose, under the bus. They've sent him home to Sycamore Ranch, David Ben Gurion's ancestral family farm (once he got his hands on it), in care of family and friends who reassure themselves daily that Sharon's pale half-lidded gaze contains flickers of recognition.

Indeed it does! Easily recognizable there is Pa Cartwright at the Ponderosa, the "crown of Lake Tahoe." Except in the TV series the ones who wore out and died back at the ranch were Adam, Hoss and Little Joe's respective mums — Elizabeth, who died in childbirth, Inger, who perished of acute toxophilia, and that slip of a girl, Marie, who fell off a horse — not the insatiable patriarch himself.

It makes you wonder what Ariel ben Cartwright could have accomplished in a world without intifadas. At the Ponderosa, the Cartwrights lived 'longside nice neighbors, such as indigenous tribal peoples who obviously had no use for a prime chunk of Nevada real estate^†, and they got along with them immigrants, especially Chinese immigrants who did all the cookin' and laundly and bootlickin'.

At the Sycamore Ranch (Havat Shikmim on the map, 35 miles N.W. of Be'er Sheva, near Sderot next to Gaza), aside from being in rocket range of a few misguided malcontents, possibly including Benjamin Netanyahu^‡, things seem to be much the same. Boom tiddy boom tiddy boom tiddy doom tiddy tah dum...

^†Or was that F Troop?

^‡Euthanasia is illegal in Israel, according to the BBC.