NOAA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper in the gray world as it observes global icing by closing schools, suspending garbage collection, and sending out the salting trucks.
It is somewhat the way the world is reacting to Putin’s circus-like machinations: protect the innocent, live with the garbage and watch the tanks spread sticky stuff.
The keeper’s grasp of world politics is not tight, making him unable to hold on to the reason the Military-Industrial Complex remains in charge, around the world, and especially in the US. Part of the MIC scheme’s success depends on the control of money, but also on the necessary sham of holding surviving veterans in reverence; and marking the graves of the dead with endless rows of white crosses.
As a “used” occupant of the MIC, for-profit toolbox, the keeper remembers the gray cold smoldering Korean hills where the so-called peace he and other were told by the MIC they were fighting for never came.
The keeper remembers describing another tree-destroying ice storm along the lines of “the day the bones of the Earth shattered in an agony of helplessness;” and as a burned-out old journalist he begs forgiveness for dusting off an old phrase for current application on another gray day.
