Good For the Goose, Good For the Gander

I hate to admit it, but communism probably was good for Russia, and Red China too for that matter. At least it was better than what both of them had before. Now that both of them seem to evolving towards capitalism, we'll have to wait and see if that's even more better for them. Of course that's not how it was supposed to happen. Marx predicted that, as feudalism had evolve into capitalism, communism would be the next step, and then the state would ultimately wither away, leaving everybody free and happy for the first time in recorded history. Russia and China went from feudalism directly into communism, and now they are finally getting around to capitalism. Meanwhile, the state doesn't seem to be headed for extinction any time soon.

I don't know if Saddam Hussein was so good for Iraq. There's been a lot of trouble since he was overthrown, but there was also a lot of trouble while he was in charge. Maybe Iraq is just a troublesome place by nature. It's hard to believe that it was once called "the cradle of civilization". I agree that the U.S. would probably be better off if we had never gotten involved with those goofy people in the first place.

Speaking of goofy people, how about that big uproar about the latest terrorist attack in France? Hard to believe that it all started with some silly cartoons in a low circulation magazine. Come to think of it, didn't something similar happen a few years ago in the Netherlands or Denmark, or some place like that? It doesn't take much to piss those people off, does it.

I don't remember seeing anybody like your yo-yo guy at Sawyer. There was one year that almost everybody seemed to be playing with their yo-yo, but I never saw the guy from Duncan who got them all started. Maybe I was home sick the day he came around. Be that as it may, I don't see the connection of the yo-yo man with the tambourine man. Maybe you have to be stoned to appreciate it.

All kidding aside, you're probably right that, in real life, the line between the good guys and the bad guy is not always clearly defined. When we played war games in the army, the fake bad guys were called the "aggressors", no matter if they were playing the attackers or the defenders. We never played any of those competitive games where the outcome was in doubt, it was always a scripted scenario and we had to follow the script. Sometimes it was a graded exercise and we were judged on points. Other times it was a "mox nix exercise", which meant that it was just for practice and nobody was grading us. Either way, it was more fun to be an aggressor than a good guy because the aggressors didn't have to follow the script so closely, having more leeway to put their own creative spin on it.