The Confusing World - It's Boring Too

I haven't been posting a lot recently - that's obvious. There are so many things going on that I should have plenty of fodder. The problem is, I don't understand most of it. I guess the biggest deal is the Russia-Georgia conflict. I don't get it. I mean, I have read all the propaganda about Cold War stuff - you know, this crap from McCain? "My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War. This is an act of aggression"??? Oh my God. Of course, it could be that something else entirely is going on - watch this farce of a news report on Fox: Geez, didn't that girl get the memo? What else is making (yawn) news these days? Oh yeah - did some Viet Cong guard draw a cross in the dirt for McCain at Christmas while he was a POW? My answer: who cares? Lots of people seem to... The presidential candidates are pandering to the religious sector and blaming the media for anything they can. In the words of Lili Von Shtupp... How Audin-awie. Musharraf just quit in Pakistan... I guess stability abounds in the Middle East, eh? The surge in Iraq sure was spiffy, and any problems we have with Iran certainly won't improve with our President condemning the Russians and their aggression. My prediction: when the Russians (and most of the rest of the world) finally get done laughing themselves nearly to death over Bush's pathetic hypocrisy, they will tell us where to go...Meanwhile, we worry (with parental-like concern that barely conceals a massive moral superiority complex) about underage gymnasts in the Olympics - even as we turn a blind eye to possibly the most publicized genocide in history: No genocide has ever been so thoroughly documented while it was taking place. There were certainly no independent film-makers in Auschwitz in 1942, and the best-known Holocaust memoirs did not achieve a wide audience until years after the war. The world more or less looked the other way as genocide unfolded in Cambodia during the 1970s, and the slaughter in Rwanda happened so quickly--a mere hundred days--that by the time the public grasped the extent of the horror, the killing was done. But here is Darfur, whose torments are known to all. The sheer volume of historical, anthropological, and narrative detail available to the public about the genocide is staggering. In the case of the genocide in Darfur, ignorance has never been possible. But the genocide continues. Maybe I'm supposed to care about all the petty stuff, and I'm just not doing my patriotic duty as I marginalize it. Perhaps the lack of oil and economic potential in Darfur means that the people there are not worthy of consideration. I'm just not sure why.