the enemy of my enemies

War has a way of bringing people together.  Everybody has a common enemy.  As the Arabs like to say "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."   Of course that is just a temporary situation.  Once the war is won or lost and the enemy is no longer an enemy, the enemy of my enemy reverts to being my enemy.  We loved those charming Russkies with their beards and booze during the war and they us, but afterwards not so much.

One of the reasons, but not the only one, that things keep changing is those damn youth.  They come into the world and they reach their teens and they've only been around say ten years, because you can't count those early years when you are a baby or a toddler, and then you realize that everybody else around has been around twenty, thirty, forty, and so on more years than you, and knows a lot more than you do just because they have been around, and if they have been good citizens they have been reading newspapers.

So you take a liking to BB King, but then if you try to talk about him to some old guy, and the old guy already knows about  BB King, already knows about the blues, already knows all this shit, and if I know old guys, and I guess I do, blabs on and on about it deep into the night, while you sit there twiddling your thumbs because all you know is that song.  Well shit.

So you go out and invent hip hop, something totally new, just as new as you, and so you know just as much as any old guy would know about it.  More, because it's crappy music and nobody but some dumb kid would listen to it.  See, when old guys say something like that, you know your path is true.

Well here's something, of course everybody loves the music of their youth because it reminds them of their youth.  You might feel a little different because you are a folksinger guy, but most of us sixties types hated the music of our parents and 'invented' rock and roll.  And it's big.  it's been going on like sixty years now, and kids listen to it.  You still see young kids going to like Beatles tribute bands.  Of course they have also invented that horrible hip hop crap, but I wonder how long that will last.  While our children and our grandchildren still love rock and roll, will the children of the hip hoppers love hip hop?  Personally I doubt it because it's crappy music, but I suppose time will tell.


Those Iraqi soldiers who threw down their arms are sunnis and they hate their shite government which does not treat them well, and they probably don't hate ISIS as much as we do because ISIS are fellow sunnis. and thus are the enemies of their enemies.  The only reason they are fighting is because we are paying their government to fight, and likely their officers are stealing the money so these guys are not so well trained and well armed.  The shite militias have been more than willing to fight ISIS and do much better than the sunnis, but afterwards they tend to fuck with the local civilians who are sunnis. 

And in Syria and Yemen it is even more complicated.  We are fighting a war of lines drawn on quicksand, and the sooner the last American leaves, the better.


A man's grasp should always be beyond his reach.  Else how is he going to eat an Italian beef sandwich.