The World at War

(I wrote this post a year ago, but sadly the outlook for the new year is more depressing than ever. After our American friends put a man in the White House who should be in jail for High Treason, we’re in a similar place to the one comedian Tom Lehrer found himself in after Henry Kissinger was given the Nobel Prize for Peace. He said that was the end of satire, and went back to teaching maths.)

As the year 2023 draws to a close, the world is at war in so many places. Our world is also more deeply divided than I’ve seen in my lifetime. Not just in the USA, where opposing forces seem to occupy different planets, but also in Europe where populist politicians are fanning the old flames of hatred.

Refugees from many war zones are the hapless subjects too often, and always seem to make ready scapegoats. Rational, civil discourse has become a rare experience. Instead we get insults, rants and diatribes, wedges pushed into soft underbellies where fear doubt and uncertainty live, missiles from hefty armories hurled across the trenches of deep divisions.

Civil Discussion – Innocent Victim

Brian M., one of our long term subscribers summed it up this way:

‘Civil discussion was an early victim of global warming. Later victims were LGBTQ+, The Voice, The Middle East and others.

These subjects can no longer be discussed rationally among friends, without polarity, emotion, umbrage, and even anger endangering the friendships.

So, important matters are simply not raised, among people who like and respect each other. We retreat to trivia and small talk.

A few public voices fist it out in the media, and politicians vacillate, but we stay quiet.

This is not how it should be.

If something can’t be discussed or criticised, it can’t be valued.’

I think it’s going to take a lot of hard work to restore civil debate as the norm.

Wine as a Retreat

A few subscribers have politely suggested that I should stick to the subject of wine and food. We used to have civil discussions over scrumptious dinners and seductive wines. These days we discuss the wine and food, because it’s safer. And travel and other stuff that’s harmless.

I write about wine and food most of the time but this website is a free speech zone. We launched Muscles & Marbles late in 2023, a resource for boomers who want to stay fit and health; boomers who want to stay out of hospitals and nursing homes.

It’s a place where we share the latest research on health, and blow up many of the entrenched medical myths that have turned this once great sporting nation into one of the world’s fattest and sickest.

Here’s a brief but poignant example of the vital research we share: ‘Can Too Much Information Harm Patients?’ an excerpt from Scientific American, written by cardiologist Eric Topol.

And here’s a post on the dangers and benefits of drinking red wine: Red Wine: Cluster Bomb or Fountain of Youth?

Stories as a Retreat

Great novels can be a great comfort, but our personal likes and dislikes come into play here. Good stories with universal appeal are hard to find. Tracey found several: ‘Horse’ by Geraldine Brooks, whose husband died while she was writing that book.

‘Horwitz’s sudden death three years ago,’ writes Susan Wyndham in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘opened an abyss from which Brooks had to crawl to finish ‘Horse’, a novel infused with love, loss and shared history.’

Tracey also loved ‘All the Light we cannot See’ by Anthony Doerr. A very big story in very small print put me off despite the quality of the writing and the Pulitzer Prize. Needs plenty of time and a love of detail to appreciate.

I loved Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, one of the most original stories I’ve read in many years. What a wonderful imagination this writer has!