If raconteur Will Rogers were still among us today, he’d have a storehouse of anecdotes about the world’s strange predicaments to share with his audience.
I couldn’t shine Will’s shoes, much less those of his horse, but please allow me to share some musings on these events on the world stage:
Egypt, said to be the cradle of civilization, continues to rock our world with the latest pronouncements of the nation’s military. President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood cannot be trusted to run the country, the generals have pronounced, with the tacit assent of America’s envoys.
Perhaps Morsi will now be whisked off to some wait station at some Middle East airport and somewhere cross flight paths with the American fugitive leaker Edward Snowden. If so, Snowden can probably shed some light on why Obama & Co. lost patience with the man in Cairo.
Turns out this Arab Spring phenomenon has more twists and turns than the Secrets of the Sphinx.
So the military has taken control in Egypt, which as the press pundits point out, sounds like a coup – in which case, the country forfeits the $1 billion-plus aid we use to prop up our Near East ally, mostly for weaponry, by the way. Which we’ve already given them this year. Oops.
Maybe we’ll take it away next year and hand it over to Israel. They can use the dough to build more border settlements, just in case the Palestinians want to explore the notion of statehood again.
The cause of social media is advancing in the Far East. Japanese politicians are learning about Facebook and Twitter and transparency. Seems their media-savvy consultants are cautioning them not to overtax their constituents with a lot of heavy talk about the meat-and-potato issues … just tell the voters what you had for lunch, for example, so they know you’re a real person. At least that’s what The New York Times has reported.
In the U.S., we’ve got some fun stuff happening in Wyoming, where the cattle outnumber the people, and where Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is itching to run for U.S. Senate as the Republican nominee and dad is stumping with her, the Times notes. Only problem is her opponent would be the incumbent Republican Sen. Michael Enzi, a longtime fly-fishing pal of Dick. Enzi isn’t backing down. Put down those shotguns, fellas.
Then there’s Frank Serpico, the ex-New York cop who, you’ll recall, blew the whistle on what he claimed was widespread police corruption in the late ‘60s, retiring on a disability pension after being shot during a drug bust. Serpico, now 77 and living in a rural upstate N.Y. town, is upset again, the Times reports, this time with his neighbor in a property dispute. The neighbor, aiming to sell his land to a developer, has bulldozed the grounds and, in the process, according to Serpico, has uprooted trees on his land which the ex-cop says he’s maintained in its natural wild state. Maybe there’ll be a new movie in the making.
– Ron Leir
