Say Goodbye to Okinawa.
I’ll be leaving Pendleton area tomorrow… so perhaps that’s what I meant in the title. Or perhaps I meant that China is reaching out via Pakistan via Saudi Arabia into Japan. These are the sort of moves that adversaries make and other nations accept willingly when our country is seemingly run on the whims of a person who changes their mind regularly. Although the question remains, what happens after. I have always sort of hoped somewhere in the back of my mind that American soldiers would leave Japan. Japan is a country of 122 million people. That makes it about a third the size of America in terms of population. Although, we don’t have to leave. Not if you boys really like it there. Oki has its privileges. The great fear that people have, without knowing where that fear stems from, is that American might will be somehow diminished, if American forces left Japan. What is the exact cause of such fear? May I ask? Or am I just supposed to accept it as the status quo? I mean to say, the Brits left their colonies and that didn’t diminish their power at all. They even defeated Argentina over the Falklands Islands. Yes sure, but why exactly do the Brits need the Falklands? See what I mean? When I start speaking about the Brits it suddenly sort of becomes more palatable. Yeah okay, young man, I can sort of see what you’re saying. Why didn’t you start with that example?
Why did they need to hold overseas bases to remain influential? When I frame it that way, the argument for permanent bases sounds less inevitable and more like a choice informed by history and ego. So why accept the status quo without asking whose interests it really serves?
I guess what I am saying is we’ve been playing an extended game of Risk on a board without fully playing it or committing to it. So we could start one of two ways… Do we need to play Risk? The yes or no there has its own flowchart. Or, do we need to play Doctor? You remember playing doctor I am sure of it. I played it a lot. I would take an imagined stethoscope and examine my friend’s mother. Or my friend’s girlfriend. Doctor’s back then were experts at examining body level symptoms manifesting on the tongue, abdomens, heart rates, breathing and all sort of other ways that now seem antiquated. It would befuddle us kids so we made a game out of it. Does America need a doctor with antiquated skills? I guess what I am saying is what does the CIA briefing look like? Is it mainly sort of out there… that’s what happening… Saudis made an offer to Japan… China may be involved or…. we have 625,000 homeless in America today and we are short of around 3-4 million homes. I mean… there are things a President and The American People ought to know, you know?
It’s like an eagle soaring above the sky, king of the heavens, but a snake came and stole its eggs.
So… having said my thoughts now on paper, do you still want to talk about Okinawa? Does it still feel like a diminishment of America for soldiers to leave Japan? Or are we still talking Risk and Doctor? Here’s the final thought to this rather strange musing. Even in Risk, there is something called defending home. Where you start from, in other words. I have played Risk from many different homes. Australia was the most defendable. America was the most easy to win the world. China was actually quite difficult. And the only way China could win was if the other players kept playing stupidly. That’s all I got.
Some readers sent in their thoughts…. are you sure we make 52% of stuff in America? No, those are numbers Meta provided and Gemini chuckled over. I don’t know anything for sure. That’s part of the problem, Doc.
