Understanding the enemy
Vladimir Putin looks a little like a guy who used to run a liquor store not too far from where I lived.
That liquor store owner is dead. Or maybe he went to Russia and became Vladimir Putin. There are shiftings in the world and changing shapes in the night. It's possible. I guess. It would certainly be more fun than selling me endless 40-ounce bottles of Budweiser.
If any of that's true, then the end of the world may be precipitated by a man who spent several years sitting on a stool behind a worn, wooden counter, slapping down lottery tickets, and picking up money.
If it's not that guy's fault, then who will be to blame when they send up the nukes and we turn into burn marks on the sidewalk?
Well, here in America, here in the twilight of empire, it's a good idea to round up the usual suspects, check our enemies list and see which of them will be responsible for nuclear war in the world.
If the world ends in a month or so, if America dies like everyplace else, will it be caused by African Americans?
No.
Are illegal Mexican immigrants going to end the world?
Dios mio! No. The ones working the third shift deboning chickens in Arkansas are too tired to end the world, and the ones in Hispanic street gangs don't have that kind of imagination, or that kind of armament. The Mexican mafia can only look on in hopeless admiration just before they turn to smoke.
Gays? Transgenders? Drag queens?
No. They will not end the world.
Communists? Nope. Right now, Russia is about as Communist as Cleveland.
Did the removal of Confederate statues start us down the path to the day when the sun dies? No. Critical race theory? Nope.
Maybe it was when we took jolly old Aunt Jemima off the pancake box? Maybe we tripped something in the universe that wheels and moans in the skies over liquor stores and the palaces of dictators? Probably not.
Black Lives Matter? Masks? #MeToo? None of those has an eyeshadow of a chance of destroying the world. Even the braying hillbillies who stormed the Capitol didn't have that kind of ambition.
Muslims? It must be Muslims. They hate us because of our freedom or because of Kim Kardashian or Pop Tarts or something.
No. Praise be to Allah, but he won't be riding the rocket.
Here in America, we've been hee-hawing and hissing and spitting at each other for better than two decades, and we've cut each other to ribbons trying to drive the devil out of each other. We've fought wars for the wrong reasons in the wrong places, hunting the wrong enemy.
It's still the same world it was 60 years ago, when I was a boy, and my parents waited for white guys to throw the switch. We turned on each other; we called compromise weakness and compassion the vice of the uncertain. We never got close to piercing the black, beating heart of the thing that will kill us all.
Think of it! Sixty years gone, from hi-fi to Spotify, and the world may end just the way it might have ended during the Cold War, when the white men in charge licked their dry lips and tentatively stared at the red button.
No change. No new reasons. No new rhymes. No new anthems. No new ideas. No new world.
When will that bright flash come? Maybe not this time, but come it will, and when it does, we will be looking the other way, hating some imagined enemy, grubbing and grinding at each other as death drops his hood and lets us see his face.
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