Time to Repair Your Bicycle?

Since there isn’t room for Reagan on Mt. Rushmore, the Republicans are petitioning the Reverend Moon to promote the late president to the third person of the Trinity—not so radical a tribute, when you think about it, since nobody is sure what the Holy Ghost is anyhow. Meanwhile, back in the sublunary sphere I continue to be troubled by the possibility that I was right about something. It’s sure looking likely that Saudi Arabia is going to go Iranian on us over the next several months.

The Iranian revolution began a parenthesis in American political history what with the hostage crisis and Carter’s subsequent defeat, the rise of the Neocons, the Iran Contra affair, our sponsorship of Saddam Hussein, the Iran-Iraq War, Kuwait, and the various Desert Storms, and 9/11. It would be satisfying, though only from a formal point of view, if this era of skullduggery ended with the ) of a second Islamic revolution. Unfortunately, the foreseeable bad consequences of the collapse of the House of Saud trumps the advantages of any possible Schadenfreude, especially in view of the possibility that Fundamentalist insurrections are also possible in other Muslim countries such as Pakistan. Well, I solace myself with the thought that I’m reading too much into the bombings and assassinations in Saudi Arabia, though granted the incompetence of our Press one may perhaps be forgiven for reading corpses like tea leaves—who the heck knows what’s going on? The trouble is, even on general considerations, you’d have to figure that our activities in Iraq and our attitude towards the Palestinian problem would set off an explosion if an explosion were possible at all.