Wednesday, September 5, 2007

[1897 - Morris Carnovsky, actor, born in St. Louis, Missouri]

[1897 - Arthur Charles Nielsen, market researcher, born in Chicago, Illinois]

[1902 - Darryl F. (Francis) Zanuck, writer, producer, born in Wahoo, Nebraska]

[1905 - Arthur Koestler, journalist, novelist, born in Budapest, Hungary]

[1912 - John Cage, writer, composer, born in Los Angeles, California]

[1972 - PLO terrorists kill 11 Israeli team members in Olympic Village, Munich, Germany]

Premature Infatuation

President Bush continues to label the clash between Western civilization and Islamic terrorists as: "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century" Putting aside for a moment the merits of that statement (it has few), on its face this assertion simply makes no sense.

Unless william has entered a time warp and this is the year 2107, it seems just a trifle premature for anyone at the dawn of the 21st century to claim to know what will prove to be its decisive ideological struggle. If President Teddy Roosevelt in 1907 had said that the greatest threat to American cities in the 20th century was that of earthquakes (based on the disastrous San Francisco experience the previous year), he might have missed a few significant events that were yet to come. (e.g. nuclear weapons, incendiary bombing, chemical weapons, biological weapons, tornadoes, and the like). Fortunately for the country, President Roosevelt had more sense than that.

Even now, half a decade into the 21st century, you could generate quite a debate among scholars by asserting that you knew what had constituted the decisive ideological struggle of the 20th century. Most historians, I suspect, would caution that we have insufficient perspective to make such a call, and should wait at least until all the trends of the previous century have fully played out to pick the most significant. In retrospect, will the decisive 20th Century struggle turn out to have been between colonial empires and nationalism, the battle between totalitarianism and free states, the clash of capitalism and communism, or the tension between industrial development and preservation of the environment? Remember, there is still some controversy as to what actually caused the decline and fall of the Roman Empire almost 2 millennia ago.

William's Whimsical Words:

If our president was not consumed by delusions of Armageddon and enthralled about his own importance in history, perhaps he would be less inclined to stick his dude-ranch boot in his mouth.

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