I’m sorry for the lack of posting, but I’m totally out of the loop right now. The 550 miles between primary home and secondary home have been covered so often I’ve long ago thrown the maps away.
I try to keep up with other blogs as and when, but I’ll be back up north next week for an indeterminate period while I redecorate the living room and do a few other of the myriad odd jobs outstanding.
School begins again on August 18th in central Illinois, so I have to be back by then.
There’s an old Aesop fable about a little shepherd boy who cried, “Wolf!” He grew bored out on the hillside watching his sheep, so to amuse himself he cried, “Wolf, wolf!” and the villagers ran out of their houses to chase the wolf away, only to discover there was no wolf and the little shepherd boy was lying. After a while, the wolf really did come and attack the sheep, but when the boy shouted, “Wolf, wolf!” the villagers assumed he was lying again, and took no notice.
So, what really happened to Shahram Amiri?
According to the American government, the CIA persuaded him to defect. They handed him a large sum of money, whereupon he willingly gave up the secrets of Iran’s nuclear program, but then had a ‘breakdown’ and decided to return to Iran.
Mister Amiri says he was kidnapped by the CIA, held under guard and tortured, until finally he escaped into the shelter of the Pakistani embassy in Washington.
There was a time when the American version would have been accepted by most Westerners as the more plausible explanation. After all, ‘Home of the Brave, Land of the Free’, actually meant something once.
9/11 changed all that. Or, to be more precise, the barbaric and dictatorial response of successive American Administrations to the 9/11 attacks blew away any of their remaining credibility.
We now know that the American government routinely kidnaps, holds people without charge, tortures and humiliates them, frequently murders without compunction, and all the time denies vehemently it is doing so.
Why, then, should we believe what they tell us about Shahram Amiri?
Frankly, his version of events is considerably more plausible.
The American government has cried, “Wolf!” too often.
There’s little that incenses me anymore about the world situation. What we do to the planet, and ourselves as a species, was once sufficiently ire-inducing as to provoke angry responses on Sparrow Chat’s pages, that left little doubt as to the opinion of this writer for his fellow human beings.
Or, at least, a certain percentage of them.
I’m not sure if it’s simply life’s orbital swing passing three score years that tempers the emotion, but I’ve discovered of late that no longer can I become angry and frustrated when the news media gushes forth with horrific tales of war and strife, poverty and famine, gross political greed, or even oil companies finally proving beyond any reasonable shadow of doubt they have the capability to destroy our environment with no outside assistance whatever.
Maybe it’s the knowledge, finally realized, that apart from some cataclysmic event like a nuclear holocaust, or on a more personal level, a fatal assault by a Sparrow Chat reader holding a grudge (and possibly an AK47), there’s nothing much that can happen on the world stage at my time of life likely to have a major personal impact.
I already appreciate that this is something of a selfish reaction, so there’s little point you all screaming out, “But, what about the rest of us?”
Frankly, my dears – and to anyone under sixty this may well sound original – I don’t give a damn.
Which raises the question, I suppose, of what is to become of Sparrow Chat. After all, for some seven years this blog has been my personal venting machine – my very own Eyjafjallajokull. Now that the desire to blow my top at every news summary has subsided to little more than a cocked eyebrow and an additional glass of Château de Chasselas, is this literary fumarole about to expire?
I hope not. With life’s long road to retirement almost run there are certainly going to be changes, not least a move within twelve months to Michigan’s Upper Peninsular and a more rural lifestyle, with a quaint old farmhouse and forty acres to play around on.
I won’t stop writing. I may even find myself doing more, though whether Sparrow Chat will figure heavily in that only time will decree.
On thing is absolutely certain: oil spills, American imperialism, and any other madnesses that don’t directly impinge on my bit of Michigan wilderness, will not be on the agenda.
On the other hand, in this life is anything truly certain?
Overworked
Shahram Amiri
It’s their world now