The horror, the horror,

 So it's been about two weeks since we have heard from Beagles.  I sent him an email a few days into the silence asking him if he was ok and he said he was but that this Ukraine thing had gotten him down and he just didn't want to write.  I figure it's this thing where you sit down and pontificate and meanwhile across the ocean the slaughter of the innocents is going on and there you are twiddling at the keys.

Or something like that.  He didn't go too deeply into his reasons.

I spend forty minutes a weekday treading on the treadmill, I push myself to panting and sweating and that is unpleasant, but the worst part is how boring it is.  The answer to that is podcasts.  The Story of Rome has about 200 chapters and I am halfway through it.  Rome is past its conquering stage and is just trying to keep itself together, and doing well enough, but just north the barbarians are waiting.  What was that we used to sing so proudly in our revolutionary days? The old get older and the young get stronger.

Those were rough unenlightened days back then, but I think it was the beginning of western civ.  Things were getting organized, though you can't make an empire without breaking eggs and the battles were pretty bloody.  The Roman soldier after a victory was much happier knowing they were going to loot the city than knowing it would be welcomed into the great Roman Empire, subject of course to paying a high rent.  

One of the most dispiriting things to me is the way the Russian soldiers go along with the program.  A Roman soldier never thought twice about killing women and babies.  Why should he?  Isn't that what everybody else was doing at the time?

Yes it was, but then we got Christianity which was flawed to be sure. but maybe it made us a little more civilized, at least you had to pretend that your cause was just.  Then there was technological progress which made things a little easier for most people which soothed out some of the savage.  Then my favorite period, the enlightenment, and then the democracies.  See we were getting somewhere.

Not so much the Russkies on the eastern edge of western civ.  They had those terrible czars to be sure, but western ideas were soaking in.  The revolution was nasty and so was Stalin but after that things got a little better, there was glasnost, there was Gorbachev.  There was widespread literacy, education, was the western sun melting the cold ice of the savage land?

I kind of thought so.  Putin was an evil man, but he was a pretty smart cookie too.  He wouldn't just plunge into some terrible slaughter that wouldn't even do his own country any good.

But here we are.  See that's mostly what dispirits me.  That all this progress I thought we had made over the last two thousand years.  Well we really haven't.

Watched Apocalypse Now Saturday night for about the tenth time.  The Vietnam war was not a high point in western civ.  We did our fair share of atrocities, but at least when they came to light we were ashamed.

And of course the movie was based on Conrad's book, The Heart of Darkness.

The horror.  The horror.