(of the mental kind)

I read recently in The New York Times that former Dallas Cowboys running back and current Republican candidate for United States Senator from Georgia Herschel Walker, “after getting over the surprise about his [son Christian’s] sport of choice [as a competitive cheerleader], was supportive.”

Not sure why Walker père was “surprised.” After all, he is a former professional ballet dancer with the Fort Worth Ballet company, as you can easily verify via Google.

I lived in suburban Fort Worth at the time (late 1980’s), and I remember seeing a brief clip on the local news which showed Walker holding out his arms in the “holding a beach ball” pose and taking little steps on tippy toes.

Say what you will about his politics, intellect, or personal behavior. The man looks good in tights.

Currently high on my “heartily dislike” list: those gigantic plastic inflatable Halloween decorations. They don’t look creepy, just ugly. And they’ll look even uglier buried in a landfill for the next 10,000 years.

Ok, there’s a rhetorical problem with the previous sentence. You can’t see something if it’s buried in a landfill. Like Dracula, they’ll just be in a landfill, without decomposing, for the next 10,000 years. Now that’s creepy!

Atrocities happen in every war, but the sadism committed by Russian troops, in its degree and scale, astonishes me. I don’t completely understand it. I don’t think Russians are particularly bad people. Nor did I have a suspicion that there was a fundamental resentment among Russians towards Ukrainians. My best guess is that this sadism is the product of ignorance, propaganda, fear and alcohol. But even those factors aren’t enough to explain so many mass graves and torture chambers.

You’d think Putin would have a lot to gain by having his troops play the part of the benevolent liberators his propaganda machine makes them out to be. Instead they’re acting like Nazi invaders. And that’s something the Ukrainians know all about.

Of all the terrible effects of this war, one will be a long-lasting hatred of Russia and Russians by the Ukrainians.

It’s encouraging to see so many Russian millennials deciding to opt out of Putin’s dirty little war. But rather than protesting or burning their draft cards in public, it looks like they prefer to work from their laptops in a cozy little cafe in Kazakhstan. Whatever.

Many years ago, thanks to a wise college English professor whose name I cannot recall, I read Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. One of the theses of that novel is that wars between great powers are instigated by multinational corporations, as a means of snagging massive amounts of government funding for technological research projects. It’s one of those propositions that seems absurd at first, but as one sees more of how the world works, it starts to seem almost reasonable. For instance, every time Russia fires a missile that does or doesn’t get shot down by an American anti-missile missile, both sides learn something new about what works and what doesn’t, and I am positive that engineers on both sides are feverishly working on how to better kill people and blow things up in ways the other side can’t prevent. The Ukraine is a living (or dying) laboratory for military research, and Ukrainian people and Russian troops are paying the price as test subjects. Nonetheless I hope the West keeps supplying the Ukraine with all the weapons it needs to survive and win.

Bill McKibben has an article in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books entitled, “Where Will We Live?” He talks about the ongoing migration of animal species (those which are able) away from the equator and up to higher elevations, as the planet heats up. One of my many fears is that this planet of ours will end up being populated only by humans and the animals they raise to eat or keep them company, plus the ones that live on their leftovers. A planet with nothing but people, dogs, cats, pigs, chickens, cows, cockroaches and rats. And maybe tilapia. What a dull house to live in.