Category: Sparrow Chat

^{West Bengal, August 22nd 2017}

Hurricane Harvey has captured the West’s attention, mainly due to blanket coverage by the news media. It’s been hard to escape this drowning of a city, short of liberal use of the ‘Off’ button on the TV remote. While it’s to be expected that the American media would focus on this catastrophe in the home country, there was less excuse for blanket coverage from European channels, to the near exclusion of worse problems elsewhere in the world.

But why, you may ask, should we not participate in this sad spectacle of Americans forced from their homes and into the nightmare scenario of overcrowded ‘shelters’, with little hope of any home to return to once the waters have subsided? Why should we not feel the pain and suffering of others, share with them across the airwaves, or internet, our bond of love and affection for these fellow human beings in their hour of need?

There’s one good reason: deliberate media selection. Our news media selected Hurricane Harvey on a daily basis as the ‘désastre du jour’, while almost totally ignoring a hugely greater weather calamity that was occurring simultaneously eight thousand miles away from Texas, in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Twelve hundred people are known to have died, four million displaced, and while the BBC News did run a ‘special’ on Saturday, it was while most Brits were out shopping or watching the afternoon sport.

Does it matter? The mass media coverage of Harvey and Houston won’t change anything one iota. It still continued to rain. Prayers had no obvious effect on the weather, unless they made it worse, which is of course impossible to judge. All in all, the suffering of people in Houston was to most of us no more than a reality TV show at its best, an ongoing form of entertainment that only palled when the rain stopped falling, the crocs, snakes, and fire ants began to disperse, and North Korea carried out another nuclear test that caused yet more frothing at the mouth from Donald Trump.

The painful truth is that the media gives us what we want. The sight of a huge conglomerate like Houston being systemically torn apart by nature is way more exciting than a load of perceived peasants, far away across the globe, drowning in their own paddy fields. After all, the latter is a relatively common occurrence…

…and they don’t have a life-size Barbie doll in four-inch heels gawping at them from the sidelines. Nothing attracts media cameras like a Barbie doll in four-inch heels striding nonchalantly into a disaster zone.

Meanwhile, Kim Jong-un is becoming more and more frustrated. No amount of threats, hydrogen bombs, or missiles aimed at Washington are proving effective in gaining him the respect he desperately wants from other world leaders. One has to feel a certain sympathy for North Korea’s diminutive leader. Even without being a nutcase, having a stature as wide as it’s long doesn’t easily draw respectful friends. One only has to consider the governor of New Jersey…

…Chris Christie, to understand that.

North Korea’s leader is angry. On his doorstep for the last sixty years have been thousands of U.S. troops and a vast assortment of technologically advanced military hardware. And it’s all aimed at him. To add insult to injury, every summer the U.S. and South Korean military stage wargames just to antagonise Kim and show off their military prowess. It’s enough to make a half-crazed, short-assed, dictator execute his uncle and assassinate his half-brother.

An even bigger wasp in the honeypot is another half-crazed, wannabe dictator on the other side of the world from North Korea, who believes his nation is the best, and the goodliest, and has God on its side – despite the fact that God was nowhere to be seen in the last Korean conflict, or Vietnam, or Iraq, or Libya, or anywhere else on the planet where the U.S. has tried to plant its military jackboots, along – of course – with its accursed flag.

Donald Trump is desperate to have a war, but it will have to be the biggest and best war the world has ever seen. For Trump, anything less would be a failure. His conundrum is how to achieve it and keep America intact. China, Russia, North and South Korea, and every other nation on earth could be obliterated, yet “frankly, my dear, Donald wouldn’t give a damn.” But he promised, “America First!” and by God and the whiskers of Steve Bannon, he’s not going to let his people down.

Even as these words are being typed a ‘Breaking News’ BBC banner proclaims, “US defence secretary warns any threat to US or allies by North Korea will be met by “massive military response”. ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis is gearing up for battle.

There’s a bevy of old and wise sayings: “every cloud has a silver lining;” “it’s darkest before the dawn;” “the sun always shines on the righteous;” “there’ll be bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover.” They were all invented to help us look on the bright side. After all, if Kim Jong-un does manage to land a hydrogen bomb on America it’ll prove the quickest way to dry out Houston.

And just think what a media spectacle that would make.

No, I’ve not been away on vacation, though with the atrocious August weather in northern France one is almost envious of those further south sweating profusely under a mammoth heatwave. Neither have I been ill, nor in any way incapacitated sufficient to prevent me bashing the keyboard. Truth is I can find nothing to write about.

Sparrow Chat isn’t just a repetitive tome mirroring the news. I like to think it comments on topics at least a little outside the mainstream media, but of late the whole world seems to be drowning in the two most obnoxious ‘T’s of the century (so far!) – ‘Trump’ and ‘Terror’.

There’s nothing to be written about either that hasn’t already been said a thousand times by every blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, TV news channel or online news rag. It saturates the mediasphere and hammers away at our grey cells every time the internet, TV, or radio is accessed.

In desperation I turn to the BBC’s “Future” magazine page for inspiration, only to find they’re running “Apocalypse Week”, and the lead image is of a huge atomic explosion, under the heading:

“THE MONSTER ATOMIC BOMB THAT WAS TOO BIG TO USE.”

What the f….!

The story concerns a Russian nuclear test in the 1960’s during the Cold War. The BBC has obviously expended too much time and energy on ‘Trump’ and ‘Terror’, to the point of befuddlement. Apparently, they now believe the 1960’s are in the future? Or, maybe they have no BBC “Past” pages and were just a bit short of content for “Apocalypse Week.”.^[1]

One other story from this doom-ridden BBC page concerns the supervolcano under Yellowstone Park, apparently due to explode any day and probably exterminate the human race, slowly, but inexorably. NASA has plans to prevent it by drilling into the magma chamber and pumping in water which, as it comes back out ‘super-heated’ will provide electricity in the surrounding area for thousands of years.

Hell, that’s great economics – if it works. Why is it that the thought of scientists planning to meddle with nature in such a way always sends a shiver down my spine? Probably because of sentences like these:

But drilling into a supervolcano does not come without certain risks. Namely triggering the eruption you’re intending to prevent.^[2]

At this point I gave up reading “Apocalypse Week”. There was another feature entitled, “Why do eclipses cause apocalypse fears?” I have no idea, but a guess would be because the media instills such ridiculous thoughts into people’s heads. Eclipses are a natural phenomena that occur all the time in the universe. Any fears of such an event are entirely irrational. My apocalyptic fears are far more rational: Trump, terrorism, and a world media obsessed with creating mayhem.

Happy to extract myself from the dark chasms of BBC horror I scroll down to the bottom of the page where those ‘Around The BBC’ features are placed. My eyes are drawn to an image of Scaramucci…

…and the caption, “How to keep a job longer than 10 days.”

Now, that might have been worth reading, had I not become convinced by the BBC’s “Apocalypse Week” that the world will probably have come to an explosive end before I could even get to the interview.

^{[1] “Apocalypse Week – a special series about the end of the world” BBC, sometime in the future (or was it ‘the past’?)}

^{[2] “NASA’s Ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano” BBC, 17th August 2017}

Two men sit at a chess board. Player ‘One’ is quiet and scheming; player ‘Two’, brash, given to occasional ill-thought-out moves. He is the more powerful player of the two. He is very competitive. The word ‘lose’ is not in his dictionary.

Player ‘One’ started from a position of weakness. Some pieces were missing from his side of the board. He’s had to play with a handicap, compared to his opponent, and he knows it. But by carefully calculating his moves, rattling player ‘Two’ into making the occasional error, he’s now been able to call “Check!” on his opponent. A quick glance at the board shows that player ‘One’ has left player ‘Two’ little room for manoeuvre. The most player ‘Two’ can hope for is a draw, but that could mean annihilating much of the human race.

Kim Jong-un has Donald Trump by the ‘short ‘n curlies’, figuratively speaking. Trump’s ego needs him to come out on top, but he sees only two ways to possibly achieve that, and both involve military intervention. If he attacks North Korea with conventional weaponry, Kim will almost certainly retaliate with nuclear weapons likely aimed at the United States. That would mean relying on America’s missile defence systems to take down Kim’s warheads before they reach their target. It would only take one to get through for unimagined devastation to occur. America’s MDS has never been tested against an actual nuclear attack. Dare he take that risk?

The second choice for Trump is an all-out nuclear strike to take out Kim’s nuclear arsenal before he has time to fire it. That option truly doesn’t bear thinking about. With thousands of U.S. citizens stationed just across the border in the South, and China only a whisker away, the aftermath of such a strike would be too horrific to contemplate.

Western media is united in condemning North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, but consider for a moment the position of Kim Jong-un and his country. No-one, apart from the regime, would argue that this isn’t a dastardly dictatorship, but there’s little doubt it deservedly feels threatened. With U.S. military bases in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Guam, half the U.S. navy parked in the East China Sea, and a brand new missile defence system partly installed in South Korea, plus decades of U.S. political rhetoric condemning the regime, and George W Bush labeling it part of the “Axis of Evil”, if Kim and his cohorts are feeling decidedly edgy one can hardly blame them.

Is there another option? Yes, there is, but it’s unlikely Donald Trump will consider it.

Basically, Kim wants the U.S. to back off, get out of his front yard, treat North Korea with a little respect (meaning lift all the sanctions) and stop threatening him. Tillerson keeps telling him the U.S. isn’t interested in ousting him from power, but he’s seen what America has done to Iraq and Libya, and would like to do in Syria, so he’s not too keen to believe all that baloney. He knows he stands between America (in the form of ally, South Korea) and China, and the U.S. government would love to be able to position itself militarily right on Xi Jinping’s border (and, incidentally, next door to Russia).

All of which means America is unlikely to back off, and of course it wants regime change in North Korea, just as badly as China wants to preserve it. Any other U.S. president would have been pushing hard for diplomacy to cool the tensions. Trump is no diplomat. He’s allowing Bannon and his military advisers to call the tune.

Donald Trump is just completing his first six months as president of the United States. In that time he’s brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. What will he achieve in the next six months?

It’s your move – Mister President!