Flapping arms and hooting like owls to keep away elephants.

A man was standing on a street corner in a major city, flapping his arms in a "flying" motion, and hooting like a huge owl.

Another man watched the first one for a time, noting the passers by looking at the first man as if he'd lost his mind (and rightly so), but they said nothing to him: he kept flapping and hooting.

Finally, the second man walked up to the first.

"Please excuse me, but what on EARTH are you doing?"

The man stopped hooting, but not flapping.

"It's a public service! I'm keeping away rogue elephants! It's a well known fact that elephants are pathologically afraid of owls: the bigger the better, so I'm imitating a huge owl to drive them off!"

He resumed hooting.

The second man was puzzled. "Sir, you do realize don't you, that outside of a zoo, there isn't a free roaming elephant in a thousand miles of here?"

The first man stopped hooting and nodded enthusiastically while continuing to flap.

"SEE HOW WELL IT WORKS?!?"


The Department of Homeland Security and the Bush administration would have us believe that their "War on Terror," the subjugation of Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq with its associated hundreds of billions of dollars in public debt are all a form of flapping our arms and hooting: the proof of their efficacy is supposed to be obvious; don't see any terrorists, do you?

This is the highest form of inductive lunacy; unfortunately, it's also "working," more or less, at least as a form of deception. Why else would anyone believe them? Granted, with elections relegated to a form of public fiction, they don't need a majority, but at least a few must be duped to put up a Potemkin Village of supporters. We even have prominent members of our own party that either cannot bring themselves to embrace honesty and abandon all support for these criminal travesties masquerading as legitimate conflict. One would think Vietnam never happened.

I don't remember who originally said this: History may not repeat itself, but it sure can rhyme a lot. The shame of this is that we are doing it this time: not Stalinists, not Nazis, not the Japanese Empire; just us.

Where is our shame? Have we all become so very deluded in our world dominance as the last superpower that we now believe "Being the biggest, baddest asshole on the block means never having to say you're sorry..."?

What we have done and are doing to hundreds of defenseless innocents in Iraq, soon possibly in Iran and even Sudan is beyond excuse and worse than that, it cannot be logically defended. THE END MUST COME. SOON. To delay it is to compound the sin. We cannot hide behind statements like, "...I didn't vote for (insert idiot here)..." much longer without doing irreparable harm to our way of life and our legacy to history.

Everyone in the United States is consciously or unconsciously lumped by the rest of humanity into the same category as the Neoconservatives of the Bush Administration and their followers. This will be our doom.

We can either recognize this, and do as Tolstoy said, "...whatever can be done..." or we might as well start flapping our arms and hooting.

I'd read it to my dogs, but they're too much into canine meditation to care.