WE'RE ALL LIVING IN A GOTHIC NOVEL

Gothic novels are always dark, foreboding, and crammed with sinister characters. Like our morning newspaper....!

Recently, though, they're adding new characters to the plot. Hussein? Kim Jong? Ahmadinejad? Been there, done that. According to the New York Times, now it's the future threats our government agencies are predicting for the next 10-20 years. Sounds like a cruel twist to the old Al Jolson promise to his audience: "You ain't seen nothing yet!"

One of these predictions has to do with the effects of the global recession on certain populations. The experts have spent thousands of pages to explain what any cop in any big city can do over just one donut. Tight times trigger unrest, protest and crimes against the Have's. Other government agencies project civil strife, riots and wars wherever mass climate changes disrupt the the regular rhythms of social life. Not to minimize this second report, but anyone whose community has been devastated by a flood or hurricane can predict the same thing.

In each of these dire projections, the agencies are postulating the need for US intervention. Economic, military or both. As a non-expert Gothic novel reader, I suspect this is another way of saying those-who-want will always find any target of opportunity to grab from those-who-have. Which is why Have-governments like the US and its allies are always the candy store against whose windows are pressed the dangerously hungry faces of the Have-not world.

It started with the first tribe with the most cattle, n constant alert about the less fortunate tribes around them. Exhausting to be primo uno! Sometimes it seems it would be a hell of lot easier just being, oh say the Czech Republic.

Predictably, members of our primo uno tribe seem to be following historical patterns. First, the warrior class imagined by Humphrey Bogart in the "Caine Mutiny" and Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men" always supported by the industrial-military-congressional complex. Second, the who-cares class as found in selected campuses, communes and coffee salons.

Neither extreme is the ideal, which is why the current administration seems to be trying for the middle ground. It all got me thinking this week as I watch a member of each class dying. The first, a dear friend who survived 25 incredible B-17 missions over Germany in WWII; the second, a Wall Street vagabond who seems to survive every market crash or company court trial to dance another day in another place.

The warrior will die with the dignity of having fought what he believed was the good fight. The who-cares is already dead. An unreported spiritual suicide in which the cadaver never met a prospect he couldn't hustle and call it capitalism.

You wonder. And yearn for the middle ground....