I sometimes think the world would be a better place if thoughtful men replaced the ambitious, the driven. It will never happen, but it would be nice if our leaders took the time occasionally to consider that thought should precede action.

He softly walks the forest of his mind
Each bole the storehouse of his threaded thought
The leaves and branches supple, intertwined
His life full laid upon what he’d been taught
He rests beside the freely flowing brook
Each pebble washed to brilliant diamond shine
The dancing light to him an open book
The air upon his tongue like new made wine
The evening light grows dim and day’s events
Are catalogued and filed as bird calls cease
He lights a lamp and knows without pretense
That at the end of day he is at peace

The Greeks referred to anyone who spoke a language other than Greek as a barbarian, whether Egyptian, Phoenician, Persian or whoever. The word comes from the Greek word barbaros, meaning babbler, someone who cannot be understood, and was, and was meant to be, derogatory. We still have barbarians among us, and likely always will. Today’s barbarians are our old friends the Muslim Barbary, of the Barbary Coast pirates, though they have graduated from capturing innocent sailing vessels to capturing and beheading Christians and capturing and selling Christian girls into slavery, as well as sending out suicide bombers to kill people at weddings and so forth. It used to be we called barbarians Huns; today we call them Muslims. And just as the word barbarian comes from an ancient Greek word, the word Hun comes from an ancient Chinese word. Archaeology and genetics has come together to trace early migrations of Europeans through DNA, and what was found was that at one point some ten or twelve thousand years ago, tribes of proto-Europeans, under the pressure of expanding population, left their homes in Anatolia and moved out into the wider world in all directions. Those who moved East met tribes from the East who pushed them back West. The Gauls, for instance, were driven all the way from Central Asia to the western coast of Spain by successive waves of tribes moving westward. The Romans were run into by a tribe of barbarians the Romans called the Huns, who were, it turns out, a tribe known to the Chinese as the Hsuing-nu, a name the Romans found difficult and so called them Huns. One thing is for certain: when Western civilization collapses there will be far more Huns than Swiss or Swedes.

Barbarians are with us still
The Tribe will never die
The Other we must quickly kill
And not to reason why
The human brain is wired hard
To stay with those like us
To kill who come into our yard
To take what’s theirs a plus
We think we live in nation states
We don’t, we live as tribes
Our neighborhoods control our fates
Our futures it describes
We’re born to tribes and tribal life
Though some we civilize
Who preach that war and tribal strife
Are gone, but they are lies

Massed armies deciding the fates of nation states may be a thing of the past, but a man killed in a small war is just as dead as a man killed on Omaha Beach seventy-one years ago. In both cases a wife, a mother, a girlfriend, had to go on living, and as year follows year most get through the day, but not the nights.

She lies abed these sleepless nights
And thinks of many things
Of all the many wondrous sights
That each tomorrow brings
The windows turn from dark to gray
The birds are now awake
To celebrate the newborn day
As sunlight paints the lake
Now fully light, the woods ablaze
With autumn’s brilliant hues
She rises and she turns her gaze
To other wondrous views
A pair of deer walk by the fence
Unhurried, unafraid
A squirrel’s tail switches, quite intense
Annoyed by the parade
Meridian comes much too soon
And life slows to a walk
All sleeping now that it is noon
Except the red-tailed hawk
Who circles lazily at height
For the unwary prey
And soon the afternoon is night
As dusk replaces day
The starlit wood stands crystal clear
The moon begins her climb
A hidden owl says he’s quite near
It’s midnight says the chime
She sighs and wanders off to bed
Insomnia to fight
She doesn’t mind the daytime dread
But oh the lonely night

The world is coming apart, the Middle East is in savage chaos, we have a president determined to destroy the country, and the most important news event of the century is the transformation of Bruce Jenner into Caitlin Jenner. There are those who want to take his Olympic medals away because he was a woman, and feminists who insist the birth certificates of his children be changed to list him as one of the two mothers. But he is not a woman now, appearances to the contrary, and never was. He may very well have always been homosexual or bi-sexual, but still a biological man. Whatever his sexual orientation, he is obviously suffering from a severe mental disorder, and needed a psychiatrist more than he needed a surgeon. I can sympathize with Bruce/Caitlin for thinking he was someone else, because I once briefly thought I was Captain Marvel, a 1940s comic book superhero. Fortunately I didn’t require surgery, just a pair of red socks and a white cape.

Transgendered now is all the thing
And men are women too
And queens may choose to be a king
Who wouldn’t, wouldn’t you?
Birth records now leave spaces blank
Where once were fathers names
For every Joe and Bob and Frank
Have now become cute dames
No longer surgeons we employ
But madamegeons instead
So just be careful, little boy
With whom you take to bed

The Founders built an impenetrable and impervious granite wall around the new Republic, keeping it safe from outside forces that might wish to destroy it, but they could not build a wall that looked inward, to the enemy within. Historians will note, some with regret, some with satisfaction, that the grand experiment, the American Republic, had come to an end at a known time, date and place, on the steps of the Capitol, at twelve noon, the twentieth day of January 2009.

They built a wall of granite blocks
Great oaken doors and cast iron locks
Guard towers musket shots apart
All guarded by the free man’s heart
The walls were sturdy, wide and high
In length horizons met the eye
Secure so long as ramparts stood
So long no granite turned to wood
Yet turn to rotting wood they did
As deep within the people hid
The enemy who crept unseen
Whose touch turned all to that unclean
The walls gave way, now worn and thin
Torn by the enemy within

There are those who believe the world today is a dark and gloomy place, that Western civilization is in decline and soon to die. I don’t think things are this dark. Throughout history every society has produced a man who rises up to save the day. Cincinnatus, Themistocles, Washington, Lincoln, come instantly to mind. Of course the world has seen the Napoleons and Caesars as well, but so far we have avoided such a course, and there is every reason to believe we shall do so again. ISIS may not be the junior varsity in its region, but how long will they stand up against the full weight of the US Air Force and the Fourth Infantry Division? And that is what it will come to, and then it will be all over for ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas and all the rest, as well as every Muslim state allied with them.

When things look very dark and gloomy
The bravest say “Just leave it to me!”
The Left elites are still in power
But free men rise when comes the hour
To take a stand and grab a rifle
The world has found it’s not to trifle
With those Americans when pissed
Who put the names of those on lists
Who wind up pushing up green sod
And crying to unhearing God

Richard Fernandez, the creator and writer of the essential conservative blog The Belmont Club, asks how can ISIS receive so many blows and not only survive those blows but thrive. He answers his own question by saying ISIS is resistant to whatever we throw at it because it is not a nation state. Westphalian nation states are very good at making war against other Westphalian nation states, but ISIS is an amorphous blob of fighters who, when hurt or defeated, simply reform and fight on. There is no capital city to be conquered, no Emperor or Tsar to hang, nothing to really get at with modern weapons. The thunderbolts of Zeus do not work against a force like ISIS or al Qaeda. It seems to me, then, that the solution is to make ISIS a Westphalian State and, Pygmalion-like, turn it into a puppet. It should be an easy task for Obama to assume the role of Pygmalion, for does he not already consider himself a Greek god? The problem arises when Obama, again Pygmalion-like, falls in love with his jihadi puppet.

Create a State Westphalian
From ISIS, like Pygmalion
Has done in times long past when there was Zeus
Make them a nation state
Give them their Caliphate
And then like Zeus a thunderbolt cut loose
Give them a lordly king
Line up to kiss the ring
And give them letter agencies and such
An EPA of course
For stocks and bonds a bourse
A crazy leftist polis like the Dutch
And once that this is done
You’ll find the war is won
Without a shot, for when push comes to shove
Obama can create
A modern Leftist state
And like Pygmalion, he will fall in love

President Obama’s overriding goal is the re-creation of the Ottoman Empire, with the destruction of the United States a by-product of that ambition. What will Obama gain by realizing this ambition? He will gain the place in history he has dreamed of since his birth to his virgin mother as he accepts the Sword of Osman and reigns for life as Caliph Hussein Mehmed 1, the Conqueror of Constantinople and the Bringer of The Light of Islam To The World, with the minor benefit of a hareem of beautiful young boys and the pleasure of turning Michelle into a castrati in the expectation that the royal boys choir will need another soprano.

The Sultan sits upon his golden throne
Surveying all in his all-seeing eye
Adoring choirs sing for him alone
As from his lips from time to time a sigh
For seldom has he time to play the lute
Nor time to write the books once slickly Ayerd
He mourns that his strong loins will bear no fruit
Because his chromosomes were all X paired
He reigned until his death by accident
As Janissaries playful cut him down
His legacy a lovely precedent
His fine castrati voice of much renown

Memorial Day was created to honor the dead of the Civil War, and has since come to mean honoring the dead of all the country’s wars. That is the idea. The reality is that Memorial Day is a beach or lake or picnic holiday, surrounded by Memorial Day car sales, all observed by vast numbers of Americans who have no clue what the day is meant to be. Except for those who have lost someone, the ones who still put the tiny flags on the cold, cold  graves.

The cemetery’s winding walk
The grass as green as grass can grow
Beneath the grass the soldiers talk
And wonder if the people know
What it is like to die so young
Alive until that fateful time
When in the balance living hung
Without a reason or a rhyme
They talk together in the cold
And don’t bemoan their awful fate
For ever young, for never old
They can but rest and patient wait
They know what day it is today
They feel the gentle press above
They smell the wreaths their families lay
And know the tiny flags are love

ISIS has captured the important city of Ramadi in western Anbar province, the largest province in Iraq, and American pundits are already wondering if this is another Tet, the offensive by the North Vietnamese in 1968 that was defeated in every battle, with the North Vietnamese suffering great losses, yet was a victory because it turned American opinion against the war. At the fierce battle for the important city of Hue, the US Marines reduced the flower of the North Vietnamese army to rotting corpses, but Walter Cronkite, the anchor of CBS News and the most trusted man in America, convinced President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that the Tet offensive showed that the war was lost. The media has no such power today. Today it is Obama making every attempt to convince Cronkite that the war is lost.

The differences are stark, and yet
Ramadi may yet be a Tet
If our Barack will ISIS save
And Cronkite rolls inside his grave