Our arriving ordeal is now upon us: “It was in fact a world disorder we inherited, we who came after and which we have bequeathed to our own children. “During the 1960s, as is now clear, America began a slow but unmistakable process of transformation. The signs hardly need belaboring: racial polarity, educational dysfunction, social fragmentation of many and various kinds.”
But what comes now?
“Europe, at least in the way that we have known it, has begun to vanish. And with it, the West itself…” Again Robert Kaplan writes – bookending the post-cold war period…”
The Harmattan billows above blotting out the sun, dust coalescing with diluted traces of the acrid garbage fires that warm the ditch beyond the potholed road and the wood smoke from the last trees of the plains burned to cook beans and rice and the occasional dried fish from desiccated and barren lakes. A black plastic bag escapes the flames, parasailing the harsh winds over the ten foot wall crowned with concertina wire to lodge itself on a carefully pruned pine tree. I walk the compound pulling my dog on her leash, imported beer in hand brewed in a place cold and clean and shipped in to be sold for more than the value of a day’s labor. Back and forth and back again in a restless, trying parade. She was a gift to my wife, my dog was, a tiny pretentious little thing, a historical memento from days when…
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