Phil Spector was found guilty of murder yesterday. Another man who drove deadly drunk into the car containing star athletes from the Angels was charged with second degree murder yesterday as well.
Every day I forget how much crime goes on. Every day I forget how difficult it is to solve crimes, how much effort goes into that constant battle against it. It's a sobering thought. Some days when I wonder about the economy, I always try to remember how basic and fundamental it is that we will always have jobs that cannot be outsourced and whose importance is permanent.
I don't know Phil Spector at all. The associations in my mind are tenuous. I don't see a face. I only know 'Wall of Sound', 'The Supremes' and 'Murder'. I don't know the name of any of his songs, I don't even know if he is a songwriter or a producer or an ex-band member of some band I should know. I'm quite likely to leave it that way. The more I know about Phil Spector as a murderer, the more I know about the reality that matters.
I don't know the name of the Angel's ball player that died in the car wreck. But I make sure that my kids hear me cursing at idiot drivers whenever we are in the car together. It's the biggest risk I share with them, and they oughta know how scary it can be.
I hear that one of the crew of the Maersk Alabama incapacitated a would be pirate with an ice-pick. The pirate had an AK-47. People are right not to focus on the car, the ice-pick or whatever it is that Spector used in his atrocity. It's the man that counts. Sometimes we have to ask ourselves if we are men enough to deal with these wayward men.
A couple weeks ago, March 27th to be exact, I made something of a fool of myself in front of Doc's new girl. To make a point about discipline, I stood up in the conversation we were having and started swinging my arms like a girl in a catfight. That, I said, will never be a martial art and no martial artist will ever lose a fight to a raging fool, no matter how incredible their rage. Swinging your arms in a rage is dangerous, but the proper man will take you out in a fight, like Indiana Jones famously did.
'Never ever' is hyperbole to underscore the point that we should never ever think that the rage of adversaries overrules our thoughtful discipline. This should be a caution to the Right in support of the sort of temperance our fellow citizens, so full of hope, are wanting to demonstrate these days. We could destroy the ports of Somalia because we have accumulated over the decades, an unrivaled military sophistication. All the discipline that is the Pentagon lies ready to spring into action, because we haven't been, by and large, foolishing swinging our arms like Kim Jong-Il.
Terrorists and other latrunculi swing wildly. A strategic Systems Administrative force on global deployment is our discipline. We are the world's policeman, and we need to get our patrol cars out there and ready for all the geopolitical slow speed chases to come, with discipline.
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