News Comment 2/5

Barely awake, the standard morning ritual of stomach acid and coffee, thinking on the things I need to do today. It’s a great thing, this new intention, even if the drivers behind it tend to scare me a little. Maybe a lot.

Watching the Turkish situation on the Syrian border simmering towards confrontation this morning. The BBC issuing a report on the refugees, Turkey’s deep concern for them, pummeled by the joint Russo-Assadist offensive in Aleppo and the bombing in the Latakia mountains – Putin’s massive metaphorical middle finger to Erdogan over the shootdown incident in November. I can smell a media justification a mile off, the narrative cover for an intervention.

I listened to an on-point episode in the bath the other day, ripped off one quarter of a sativa KushyPunch and 1500 miles of road exhaustion, closing my eyes to see the ice-slicked roadways on the mountains of southern Utah, feeling the tonnage of the thirty-foot rig slipping out from under me, riding that edge of control like a knife edge down and down, finally dropping out the Virgin River Gorge into Nevada and off the continental plateau. I listened to the episode, paused it, went back to the beginning and listened again, because if this is the situation then we’ve been beaten already and even the pundits can’t seem to speak on it without a stunned disbelief, this “Hobbesian choice” we’ve been left with. Pick your poison, an empowered Assad backed by a Russo-Shiite axis stretching from Teheran to the Med or a mad patchwork of eschatological obscenists, more refugees, plastique and Kalashnikovs on the streets of Europe to hemorrhage the Union apart. When you have your experts asked how long it might last and receive only a shrug and a curt, “indefinitely,” in return, you’ve got a justification for worry. Putin’s a smarter predator than we’ve given credit for, and what can we possibly do about any of it? We’ve been outplayed.

By the time I’d finished listening to the program, the peace talks in Geneva had already collapsed.