Essays in Idleness

The wartime saying, “Loose lips sink ships,” has apparently been reversed in the present generation, where the ships sink, first. Indiscreet talk, from politicians and the press corps, follows in due course. Much has been made, persistently, in the mass-market news, of these “leaking” stories.

In the chief one this past week, a Supreme Court clerk, or other irresponsible person, took it upon himself to publish the draft of a decision overturning Roe v. Wade. This would begin to erase it from the American consciousness a few dozen news cycles earlier, and allow us to spin from violence and pointless rioting to mere persiflage more quickly.

Meanwhile, the American “intelligence community” (a purposeful contradiction of terms) boasts that it helped the Ukrainians locate, and therefore sink, the Moskva into the depths of the Black Sea; and also to pick off a dozen or so of the Russian generals, in land warring.

This was bound to annoy the Russian invaders very much, for they had already tired of American interference in their military stunts. And as some journalists “believe” that Putin is a madman, they expect him to retaliate with nuclear weapons. Then, because the other governments of the world are ruled by madmen, too (except for the several Fennoscandiyan nations which are ruled by madwomen), we’ll be flinging the missiles back and forth, until everyone is incinerated.

It is not so serious a fate as we might imagine, however; for the planet has recovered from numerous such extinction events; one every few million years. Who knows that another should not be welcomed, if we are to evolve a truly intelligent species? I have sometimes wondered if the evolutionary progression, thus far, is laughably incomplete.

And anyway, what does it matter? The current environment will likely succumb to global warming, according to the most impassioned climate prognosticators. Many of these self-appointed experts give, at best, ten years to our sporting life, before our sun-baked retirement.

Limiting our consideration to historical time, or to what has actually been recorded with dates (i.e. not the full geological record, which is vague and irrelevant), these ten lost years represent a tiny fraction — less than one percent — of the whole duration. We are excitable indeed, if we allow ourselves to become upset about such a relatively minor loss — especially as the great majority of the human race (persons ever born) are dead already; and many of those who happen to be still alive are quite old.