Blood and Sand

It's been quite a little while since the ten-year Trojan War, but human nature remains unmoved. Throw in some new science and technology, new religions and a few new ideas, and here we are now, World Refugee Day, the first day of the summer of 2007. Forty years after the "Summer of Love" (during Vietnam) and, as my pal Jim points out, also 400 years since the English planted themselves at Jamestown among the Powhatan, the Summer of Love is gone, while surviving remnants of the Powhatan (ex., the Pamunkey and Mattaponi) have lived on tiny scraps of land in Virginia like Palestinians in the Middle East -- little known reservations in the Eastern U.S. -- since the 1600s.

Some of the top refugee groups in 2007 C.E. in terms of population density: Palestinians, Afghans, Iraqis, Sudanese, Somalis. Symptomatic of global disaster on a colossal scale. We know how to make war messily, but what else can we do? At one of the places I teach, there are noticeably many more war veterans and there are many more refugees, too, this summer -- some still wearing their military uniforms and many more Muslim women wearing traditional attire. It’s getting to be quite bizarre. We’re not in Kansas any more. We're in some kind of Trojan War that makes about as much sense as the original. It will probably have the same kind of ending -- and aftermath.


Today's Rune: Journey.

Birthdays: Wolf Tone, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Jacques Offenbach, Charles W. Chesnutt, Kurt Schwitters (his Dada artwork above), Lillian Hellman, Errol Flynn, Terence Young (007 filmmaker), Chet Atkins, Audie Murphy, Eric Dolphy, Olympia Dukakis, Martin Landau, Danny Aiello, Rossana Podestà (as Helen of Troy above), Mickie Most, (b. Michael Peter Hayes), Nicole Kidman.