HARBINGER

There's a quote that's been mis-attributed to Winston Churchill about jaw,jaw being better than war,war. it's a good quote,mis-attributed or not. Back in January 2003,I planned and curated a Poetry exhibition at Wakefield Cathedral on the Iraq war at the time using  the title , "Jaw,jaw war,war". Anyhow... It's a good day today, June 12 2018 ; the world has opted for more life in preference to nuclear self-immolation. Presidents Trump and Kim Jong Un shook hands and called each other friend. And the Washington DC neocon neanderthals and their liberal global interventionist cousins are pissed off beyond belief. Clearly they didn't see this one coming or they might with the benefit of hindsight in the next few days,as the new reality sinks into their troglodyte consciousness, claim to have done so but are not best pleased about it at all. The inimitable practitioners of  Realpolitik such as  Bismarck and Talleyrand however,would no doubt be enorm...

Back in 1982,in the middle of the ColdWar ,British commercial TV aired a mordantly witty six-part black comedy, "Whoops Apocalypse " -a tale about events in the week leading up to WW3. This extract from Wikipedia,captures the tone :-  The naive and highly unpopular Republican U.S. President Johnny Cyclops (an obvious Ronald Reagan parody, played by  Barry Morse ) is advised by an insane right-wing fundamentalist security advisor, And here we all are in 2018 and life is imitating art to the full, a real  President Johnny Cyclops is being advised by the likes of John Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo. There was,what was commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal - the US unilaterally tore that one up.There was a summit arranged for June in Singapore between DPRK-North Korea and the US.The US has unilaterally cancelled it. In a recent scathing denunciation of the Iranian government,in the wake of the US abrogation of the nuclear deal, Pompeo tore into Iran ...