Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Nobody has ever accused me of being some sort of cockeyed optimist. Any rose tint that may have once colored my spectacles has faded due to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
I’m a kind of a hope-for-the-best, plan-for-the-worst kind of guy.
On the other hand, every morning when I wake up and pour a cup of coffee in me to get my heart started, I feel blessed.
In casting a jaundiced eye over the current world situation, it seems to me that we are neck deep in a proxy war against the Russians in Ukraine, while at the same time being dragged into a shooting war in the Med-East with Iran against Israel, despite the fact that we are trying to disengage from these two entanglements so that we can challenge our real perceived most dangerous threat, China.
This foreign policy humiliation is occurring while our sitting president is believed to be mentally diminished, but unwilling to release the levers of power.
Not to be outdone in incompetence, our closest ally, Great Britain, anointed with “special relationship” status, has had four prime ministers in the last three years, one of whom is said to have torpedoed the Istanbul agreements, thus prolonging the Ukraine war.
In 1958, less than 15 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, satirical songwriter Thomas Lehrer penned a tune called, “They’re Rioting in Africa,” made popular by the Kingston Trio. Read the whole thing, but pay particular attention to the last two stanzas:
They’re rioting in Africa
They’re starving in Spain
Theres’s hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans and the Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don’t like anybody very much.
But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
That man’s been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud
And we know for certain, that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away
They’re rioting in Africa
There’s strife in Iran
What nature doesn’t do to us
Will be done by our fellow man.
Déjà vu all over again. When it comes to predictions, Lehrer makes Nostradamus look like a piker.
Rube Render is a former Clovis city commissioner and former chair of the Curry County Republican Party. Contact him:
