Them again

Beagles is indeed a group of one, the only guy in the world who believes in Them, that vague forever unknowable cadre of poobahs who pull all the strings to make everything happengggggggggg.  Aha! Note that string of g's?  I stepped away for a second to get another cup of coffee and when I came back I saw all those g's.  A foolish naive person like myself would have thought that my cat Sweetie who had been on the table watching me type, which she finds endlessly fascinating, and was just jumping off the table on my return, her rear paws leaping from the keyboard in the vicinity of the keyboard had hit the key causing the g's.  And indeed I did think so, even though I had just read the logical, analytic, exposition from Beagles pointing out how They had engineered a couple wars, and the election of Donald Trump, or maybe not Donald Trump, because he is not one of Them, unless he is, and maybe it was one of Their failures because They fail now and then, or maybe They just make it look like that to fool us, but anyway, a more thoughtful, less gullible guy, like Beagles would have realized that what had happened was one of Them had slipped into my frontroom while I was in the kitchen, Their agent dangling from one of those Tom Cruise (a known Scientologist, this only gets deeper) ropes from a helicopter equipped with a silencer (which only They have) and slipped onto my balcony and through the door to the computer, held his finger on the g key for ten g's (the exact number of fingers on both our hands, if we count our thumbs, which we do), and slipped out quietly as the wind.

Their motive of course (or maybe it is something else as They are infinitely devious) was to distract foolish me, and hence the horde of Beaglestonian followers who are eager to hear the lone voice of The Group of One. Except, of course that by definition of The Group of One, they are not part of that group, which I believe makes them Them.


If we go down the list  of wars since our birth (this will exclude Old Dog, who is actually a young pup), we have WW II which was our last regular war with clearly defined sides and an actual declaration at the beginning and a peace treaty at the other, and the bad guys were really bad.  I am not sure if we were as united on that one as Beagles claims, but probably more so than any of the following wars.

Which takes us to the Korean War, or more properly the UN Police Action, the forgotten war, though Kim III appears to know it well.  I was just a little tyke, and I don't remember if there was any resistance to it on the home front.

Then the unpopular war, no declaration, though there was that Gulf of Tonkin resolution.  Technically it was the north fighting the south and we were only advising except when we were also getting out boors wet,  Russia and China were sort of hovering in the wings but keeping their boots dry and indeed China was the first country to go to war with the newly united country once we left.  A lot of resistance on the home front to this one.

The First Gulf War, some kind of declaration to get all those countries involved.  Not sure if there was a treaty at the end, but there was a big parade under a shower of yellow ribbons.  The song was about a guy getting out of prison, but somehow yellow ribbons became the mascot of the war.  Over too fast for there to be any resistance.

The Second Gulf War, which most have started with some kind of piece of paper.  Everybody was for it at the beginning including my beloved dems.  Never really any goal to it except toppling Saddam, but then we hung around to establish some shaky government, and we're still there doing something.  Afghanistan is in that picture too, we're doing something there too.  Polls show the country is not too crazy about either of these wars, but it's an all volunteer army and lately not many are getting killed so there is not much resisitance.

Wiki gives us 4 years for WW II, 3 for Korea, 8 for Vietnam, .5 for the first gulf war, and 16 years and counting for Iraq/Afghanistan.