“Driving through a red state in a blue Camaro, just tryin’ to stay on the straight and narrow…”

I have to interrupt this start of a ditty… tough to concentrate when the dude who’d be holed up in a single-wide trailer (called ‘caravans’ in Europe- single-wide caravan) writing manifestos and letters to the editor, calling up Fux News, eating the Russian variation of Cheetos… should be, and would be if he hadn’t used small amounts of power and whatever steamy info the KGB (and post-Soviet KGB) are privy to as a route to attaining greater power, and eventually, absolute power… yeah, that guy, the one who can score five goals (I may have the number wrong, but, any goals would be a joke) against a (his) national ice hockey team (some professional hockey team, any hockey team), and now, he has decided to add Ukraine to the Soviet Union reboot.

He has grievances. Sure, I get that. People do. T.C. has grievances; they were rude to him at the La Jolla Country Day School. DT has grievances; had to have his silver spoon gold-plated- didn’t help. Vladputin has grievances- Despite all the threats and poisonings and jailings and extra-judicial, um, accidents, all the beefcake publicity shots, all the practice he has put into his swagger, people just don’t give him true and honest respect.

WAIT. I have grievances: I just can’t react passively to criminal injustice, to people dying because of some delusional asshole who has guaranteed that everyone below him is, indeed, below him, afraid, with good reason, to stand up to him. So, I write. It’s not like I’m all brave and such; I plan on deleting this pretty quickly. Wait, now I am considering not even posting it. Shit.

Evidently Vlad the Re(according to him)claimer is flat-out freaked out by video of the brutal killing of former buddy Colonel Gaddafi. Video, yeah. Back wowhen Mussolini’s body was hung upside down in the town square, still images, maybe some newsreel footage. Saddam Husein? His capture and hanging are available, evidently, on YouTube (no, didn’t check it out- still images and a rather sanitized description of horrifying actions were more than enough).

There’s no point here. Tyrants die. Dictators die. We all die. We don’t all take a lot of innocent people with us. We’re used to the Hollywood version of things: The worst villains suffer the cruelest fates. And we love that they do. Fall into a helicopter’s blades? Seems about right. How do I balance caring about human lives and almost celebrating the cruel and often obviously unlawful deaths of dictators?

Depends on the dictator.

I am not totally thrilled that I feel compelled to write something about Ukraine. I keep telling myself that, with the limited time I have for writing, and “Swamis” taking up most of that, I can do something quickly for realsurfers. That doesn’t seem to happen. This site is important to me. Research in necessary. Here is a quote from fictional detective Joseph Jeremiah DeFreines: “The world operates at an acceptable level of corruption.” There is a mandatory pause here. “It is not a particularly low level.”

Does the quote apply here? Grievance, power, corruption, war. Seems like a sequence.

It is late on Friday night. Hopefully I will have some time to think about something surfing related AND have some time to write on Sunday. Will I also consider whether or not to delete this post? Absolutely.

But I can’t help but think- Peace isn’t often delivered by convoys of military vehicles and heavily armed troops.