Full Stop

 I have one video game that I play, aside from the somewhat tedious and OCD repetitions of computer solitaire. It is called "Civilization." There are a lot of newer versions of this game, but I tend to favor the one that I started playing a couple decades ago. It was a reaction to kicking free from the first-person shooters that we had discouraged my son from playing. The very high-minded concept of this set of code is that starting thousands of years BC you are charged with guiding one of several tribes through centuries of development, hoping to survive drought and disease and other warring tribes to eventually create a modern world in which these former barbarians to inhabit. You could win the game through diplomatic means, or by beating those other civilizations to outer space. Or through do mination, crushing those other poor unfortunate peoples' lives under my cyber-despotic bootheel. 

Which raises the question, "So, if you don't want your son roaming around the universe with a ray gun, zapping aliens, why is okay for you to destroy other civilizations with a moderately superior military technology?" Well, I have spent a good deal of time rationalizing my motives, but I can say that my high-minded response centers around the notion that this is Civilization after all. Kill or be killed, isn't that the way?

The Orange Worst has been ramping up his rhetoric as his marbles continue to disappear. On the morning of his threatened destruction of the infrastructure of Iran, he let this one fly: "a whole civilization will die tonight." Not eliminating the war machinery or retaking the Strait of Hormuz by force. "A civilization will die tonight." Speculation has run rampant over the past few days as the countdown to meet the convicted felon's demands. The war crimes for which this idiot is already culpable continues to grow. This is the guy who somehow has his tiny hands on the buttons not just for Diet Coke on Demand, but the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Billions of dollars and thousands of lives have already been thrown into the flames in attempts to, what do we keep saying, distract from the horrors that this infantile tyrant who couldn't run a casino in Atlantic City or keep his trousers zipped.

Why hasn't anyone run into the Oval Office, or onto the golf course, thrown this enfeebled failure to the ground, handcuffed him and taken him someplace where he cannot harm another human being? 

We used to have a Congress. We used to have a sense of morality. 

I hate to say it, but we let this happen. And even if tomorrow shows up and the literal Cradle of Civilization is still standing, we should have done something different. The fate of the planet should not be left up to a Narcissistic doddering old fool with delusions of grandeur. 

"Oh, he didn't really mean it." Or, "What he really meant was..."

It should stop. 

Now. 

Hey, the stock market went up. 

Or in two weeks. 

Whatever.