Climate change

Ahh, the weekend. Even though I’m mostly at home all the time as I am in want of at least one kidney and preferably two (the live donor for which I must find myself) I still like weekends.

This weekend the weather’s good and I can sit in the garden and read. Lovely. It’ll be a quiet one too, as it’s a week before most people’s payday and no-one’s going anywhere or doing anything; the stores have yet to ramp up for Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving, Ede/Suikerfeest or Christmas depending on cultural affiliation and the end-of-month bills have yet to hit the doormat. For the moment all is quiet and gezellig – a Dutch concept that’s very hard to describe in English.

It’s an amalgam of style, cosiness, warmth, comfort and ease, a pleasure in small things and the domestic; you know how sometimes as the evenings draw in you’ll see a lighted living room window and all is warm and safe within, everyone occupied, everyone content? That’s gezellig, though my description really can’t do it justice.

A weekend like this is the perfect time to sit down, survey, take stock of life and plan next year’s spring bulbs. Well, I say spring and I say plan but who knows what the weather’ll be? It could be very, very bad indeed, if Cheney has his way and America nukes Iran. To many it’s a done deal and we’re merely marking time.

Rupert Cornwell , describing in the Independent the odd, pregnant hush that’s fallen over political America:

These are strange times here, our equivalent of when the dogs and birds supposedly fall silent in the moments before an earthquake. Not that America’s political animals have fallen silent. The candidates to succeed Bush criss-cross Iowa and New Hampshire where the first primaries are less than four months off, holding forth on every imaginable subject. But somehow what they say matters little. Whoever wins, his or her presidency has already largely been shaped by the desperately unpopular lame duck who perforce will remain in charge of US foreign policy until January 20 2009 – and worse may well be to come.

Having entrusted the verdict on his presidency to historians generations in the future, Bush now sounds almost contemptuous of the opinions of his contemporaries. Confident that, like his role model Harry Truman, he will be vindicated 50 years hence, he openly admits that his successor (or should it be successors?) will have to find a way out of the mess left by his disastrous adventure in Iraq.

Iraq, however, may only be the start of it. The real question, the one that, spoken or unspoken, dominates every foreign policy discussion here, is another. Will Bush, now that the Iraq folly has handed Iran a massive strategic victory without lifting a finger, go double or quits by launching a military attack against Tehran?

As if we didn’t have enough looming threats, like the economy and the environment – “..and the Red Death held sway over all…” – we could all be plunged into a third world war at any moment on the whim of a stupid, vicious iblowhard who’s descending into psychosis, aided and abetted by his VP.

That pregnant hush Cornwell describes is real, although, as he says, there’s plenty of chatter. But we surely all know that however important the latest governmental or constitutional outrage we’re avidly discussing is now, it could become an utter irrelevance overnight should Bush order a nuclear first strike on Iran. Will he? Won’t he? Your guess is as good as mine.

There may be a small industry in predictinion but in the end Bush alone has the decision. That he’s demonstrably mentally unbalanced and deteriorating fast is obvious, even to the layperson.

Because should this madman push the button it wouldn’t just be one strike. It would escalate. The very expression ‘first strike’ implies there will be a second, and a third… when you start to think about a nuclear attack on Iran as a real possibility (and in the hands of a megalomanical madman it’s as real a possibibility as any other) a kind of stunned panic sets in.

But this weekend I’m going to take pleasure in small things and try not to think about it. Bloody hell, we got through the seventies and eighties’ threat of mutually assured destruction all right, didn’t we? We’ll get through this too.( How we do it is another matter entirely.)

But like I said, I’m not thinking about it any more this weekend. A mixture of flame orange Darwin tulips and violet hyacinths sounds good for the windowboxes…

In uncertain times gezelligheid is a very precious thing. So let’s all slow down a bit, step back and enjoy this autumnal peace and quiet while we can. It may not last.