Nostalgia of Diplomacy 8-20-2010

                    Nostalgia of Diplomacy 8-20-2010

       In this day and age President Kennedy’s administration stands out to me. He had great ambition. “We will go to the moon,” he said on black and white TV.  He said it confidently and we did.

       Then there was the Bay of Pigs incident with Cuba. He sternly stopped the USSR from mounting nuclear missile silos off of our coast line and posing a threat to the United States. Makes me wonder where the former governor of Texas was regarding Mexico.

        I cannot think about President Kennedy without thinking about President Carter. How he went over to the Middle East and made peace between Sadat and Begin. We have not really seen a peace making diplomat of that character since. Most people would scoff if you said a president of the United States once make peace in the Middle East. In today’s world it seems unimaginable that such a mess has been created there. Osama Bin Laden studied in the United States. What could have made him hate us so much?  Did he have a run in with a would be priest? What alienated him?  What made him hate us?  Did someone try and steal his soul?  I would be duped by him because he doesn’t look evil to me. In some pictures he looks like an Amish farmer innocently proud.            

       I will say this about what I see in him. There was a character named Francis in an Arnold Schwaznerger movie or maybe it was a Bill Murray movie, “Stripes”? He was skinny and had a tension of anger in his blood.  His line was “I don’t want anybody touching me.” To which someone replied, “Lighten up Francis”.

       We have all known men like this in our day. In high school we called them “hard asses”- someone ready to snap with a tension wire in their blood. It seems to be a self propagating tension that is hard to ease from. Something that eats away at a person from the inside, a restless fire in the blood and head, an inability to relax in thro the start in our dealings with oil nations we needed to hold tight on foreign trade presence of certain others.  Once a hatred like this has formed, it does not settle easily.  It would seem to me that we are too far along in the history of mankind to be waging such hatred.

      Some young people look to the actions of those that came before. They see the bravado of victory and that is what they want to be.  That is what they want to emulate in experience. Some people learn through reason, knowledge and experience. And some buy the manikin suit off the shelf and are “monkey sees and monkey does.”

     The command of the United States military forces and our economic policy regarding other countries in not something to be taken lightly.

    We have relied on the natural reserves of foreign countries for resources for too long.  When you know you only have so much syrup, honey, cider, mead, and w coffee, whiskey in the cellar you ration it and boil water while you look for a substitute. We have known since the Carter administration that our cellars were finite. But we have not rationed and we have not looked for alternatives.  We have dealt with other countries of lesser standards and now in turn we have lesser standards. From the start in our dealings with oil nations we needed to hold tight on foreign trade arrogated at least tried to put forth our standard of living in some form, leading by example to other countries.  We could have made suggestions such as “Saddam, if you keep torturing, we won’t buy your oil.”  Wouldn’t it be nice if we were in a position of strength to deal with foreign nationals this way?

       Nixon-Watergate

      Ford-The pardon

      Reagan- Iran-Contra

     Bush-foreign policy led to war

     Bush’s son-By passed the will of the people- The Arab world thought the same about him as the Democrats did. “How weak is the democratic process that the son of a president be the next president?” What do Americans truly value-nepotism?  What message did the election of George W. send to the rest of the world? Something they didn’t like about it and involved the world trade center.   I am speaking out of turn for the Arab world.  As any US soldier stationed over there will tell you-“opinion polls of individuals are unreliable”.

       In some film clip from Osama Bin Laden, I remember someone asking him what he thought about the looks of an American woman. He shook his head with a wave and smile and said "NAH” He with his many wives knew something we didn’t at the time.  What did he know and what point was he trying to make?

        Will we be able to make peace with the Arab world? Just for a change, I would like to see a discussion of how this could be done.

       I took my nephew fishing Thursday. He said to me, ‘I would have liked to have been there when the Statue of Liberty was first erected by the French, to see the golden colored copper shining, glistening in the sun.  He got me thinking about what you could coat copper with to make it stay golden.  A clear coat that slowly erodes without peeling and needs to be reapplied every so often. Then I sensed that a Republican Administration would cut funding to recoat it. And then I said to my nephew, “wouldn’t it be nice if some day an Arab world build a second Statue of Liberty with permanence on our west coast”?

        God Bless those who dream in optimism!

       I am driving home from my secret writing oasis in the rain. It always rains when I am mad and then somberly sad. I reflect on the 1998 Buick that I am driving, how I changed the oil two days ago. I ponder and wonder how many young American men ever have the skill to change their own oil today. It must be a lost art. I notice that the car runs a lot smoother when I greased the ball joints and tie rods. New cars have seal joints and are not greased and tuned. I wonder if they could ever be retorqued as a matter of importance. Sometimes a groove can wear in a joint and when it is retorqued the joint fails because it binds and breaks at the groove.

      The car I am driving was built in 1998 and cars of the same brand today get no better gas mileage.  I wonder again who is responsible for such progress?  Progress an impossibility for one faction to conceptualize

This is how I ended the essay earlier before I left my oasis.

 At the table to the left of me in the basement of my writing oasis sat three men smoking a hookah pipe. It smells like asbestos to me. When I left I jovially asked the three who although brown olive skin colored, one had the exact same face as the chief inspector who opposed the French Chief Inspector Cousteau in the Pink Panther movies.

He knows he looks that way and is acting way a giggling crazy laugh with his hand covering his mouth, just like the acting of the Chief Inspector.  Darting nervous eyes.  And I know that he knows that I know that he is acting silly that way as if he is the Chief Inspector who has lost all his nerves and is stir crazy.  A Chief Inspector defeated by what he considers and will always consider a dimwit.  Why did the dimwit win in the movie?  Because he was of honest and pragmatic intent and not contriving to spitefully best a coworker, I have always reasoned.  One would stab you in the back and one would never conceive of it.  I don’t know myself how it would be to look like a famous person.  If I did suppose people would tell me I looked like so and so, and I might even try to impersonate so and so.  Sometimes adult want attention just as children do, I was done writing and stood up.

“What kind of tobacco is that”, I asked.

“Its molasses”, he says and the three smile.

“Like what you buy in the grocery store?”

“Yes” One of the three says and they all laugh.

“What does it do for you; does it give you a lift?”

“No, not really”

“Then it is just kind of a social “ I offer to their answer.

They agreed and I chimed in “A Molasses Social” What am I to say- I felt welcome at the Molasses Social.

God Bless Those Who Dream In Optimism

Thomas Paul Murphy

Copyright 2010 Thomas Paul Murphy

PS if you think I would take a smoke from that Hookah Pipe you got a screw loose.

Originally published at:
http://politics-thomasmurphy.blogspot.com/