Ummagumma

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (Posted at noon eastern time.) The US-Iran nuclear talks survived the war longer than I actually thought they would . That is probably the strangest part of the whole thing. Before the Strait became the center of the story, the “interim ceasefire” had settled into tit for tat with minor complaints. Everyone issued statements about restraint while doing the thing the statements were supposedly restraining. It was dangerous, ugly, and absurd, but it still had a rhythm. Like most everyone, I kept waiting for the talks to collapse because the nuclear talks were supposedly the point of the war. That was the final justification. We can’t let a jihadist theocracy have nuclear weapons. It takes a pretty primitive view of the world to disagree with that. Iran's nuclear program had to be set years back if not eliminated. Iran's leadership had to be restrained. Iran's military capacity had to be whacked. As usual, Trump wanted the grand declarative ver...

Since I watched videos pertaining to my recent post , there has been sooooo much Göbekli Tepe clickbait in my YouTube feed lately. "The world's oldest temple." "The mysterious sanctuary that rewrites human history." Then a thumbnail appears showing some ancient limestone pillar next to an ominous-looking guy pointing at it like he just found proof that the Neolithic had Wi-Fi. It is mostly bullshit. Maybe Göbekli Tepe was a temple site. No one knows. That is the first thing to say. There is no surviving text. No named god. No prayer. No priestly rulebook. No account of what people thought they were doing there. No carved little sign saying, "Welcome to the Temple of the Great Fox. Please leave your offering at the front desk." There are, however, enormous limestone pillars. There are animals everywhere. There are lots of animal bones. There are some human remains, though the site does not appear to be a cemetery or a place where people we...

In July 2024 I wrote two posts about Sudan (see here and here ). The war had already run more than a year. Khartoum was being destroyed. Darfur was returning to the ethnic killing that made its name infamous twenty years ago. Millions displaced. Hunger spreading. Hospitals collapsing. The death estimate then: somewhere around 13,000 to 15,000, mostly civilians. Almost no one in the West was talking about it. Still isn't. Yet it was already one of the worst situations on earth. Ukraine became a war of attrition. Gaza took the headlines. Then the Israeli-US-Iran war. Israel has a special relationship with America. Sudan does not. South Sudan does not. Chad does not. Ethiopia does not. Some places become catastrophe as an ongoing fact rather than an event. Nobody denies it's happening. They just don't look. I read a piece this morning titled " Sudan: The Deadliest War You're Not Hearing About. " A little dramatic for my taste. But the point stands. Sudan'...

My 1998 paperback featuring an ominous photo of the World Trade Center on the cover. These towers would fall three years later. “ It is all falling indelibly into the past.” That line appears early in Don DeLillo’s Underworld and serves as a wonderful encapsulation of the entire novel. Everything in the book is falling into the past. The Cold War. The Polo Grounds. Bobby Thomson’s home run. J. Edgar Hoover. Lenny Bruce. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Nixon. The Zapruder film. The Bronx. The great postwar promise of American life. The garbage that promise produced. It is all falling, but it is not disappearing. That is the key. It falls indelibly. It leaves marks. I first read Underworld not long after it appeared. My copy is the 1998 Scribner first paperback edition, the one with the epic, ominous photograph of the World Trade Center on the cover. All page references here are to that edition. I doubt DeLillo chose the cover. That was almost certainly a publisher’s decision. September ...

I’d rather be lucky than good. That old saying applies in many places in my life, but never more so than on the occasion of my first concert in high school. I was 17. I didn’t know anything about life yet though I had strong opinions. My first concert happened to be Fleetwood Mac with the Eagles at Atlanta’s Omni 50 years ago tonight. I went with eight or so of my high school friends, including my future first love. We were just flirting and having group fun then. On a grander scale, it was Bicentennial weekend. Being a lifelong history buff, I knew its significance and probably more about its history than anyone I went to that concert with. But still, I was just a kid, and it really wasn’t that big for me. But the Omni electrified me that night. Just entering the space, we were kids and got there early, and seeing a vast indoor arena for the first time in my life was somewhat awe-inspiring. It was a cool building, constructed so it would rust through time. It has been bulldozed since....