FROM THE WILDERNESS

If One Would Dance, One Must Expect to Pay the Piper

by James Strauss

The third Russian news organization report coming out of Moscow would seem to indicated that the rumors about Putin’s collapse on October 22^nd, are true: “Reports indicate that Putin collapsed in his bedroom after suffering a cardiac arrest on October 22. Reports also suggest that the 71-year-old Russian leader had to be resuscitated and taken to a special intensive care unit after security heard him falling on the floor.” Apparently, Putin has so far failed to regain any full consciousness and his body doubles trained to make sure he’s not assassinated are standing to keep the public from finding out that the dictator is near death, and not likely to come back.  The most definitive report has Putin suffering from the effects of late term Parkinson’s and then going down from a near terminal (if not already terminal) stroke.

What would this man’s death really mean for the rest of the world, what with Russia mired in a miserable and not quite winnable war with Ukraine?  What would it mean for Russia’s support of an ever more bellicose Iran (possibly more bellicose on Thursday of this week because of their knowledge about their greatest single supporter)?  What would this mean for Ukraine and its war effort against the giant bear trying to eat it alive?  Russia would still need to get its hands on the Romania re-enrichment facility it’s been after all along (what good is the rest of that rebellious and recalcitrant country?).  Iran would still be on the its nearly endless but also unstoppable course to being another member of the nuclear community and therefore giving it relative immunity from attack from the rest of the world (unless it had a two million citizen pocket of basic hostages that Hama has been able to parlay with in its bid to survive).  Saudi Arabia wants the bomb too and its patently obvious that the Prince can’t seem to talk the U.S. into giving it to then, and hence their seeming wiliness to make a treaty with Israel.  Israel, in its rationality would not give the bomb to the Saudi Prince, but Netanyahu, like Trump would give anything in the world, and a bit beyond that, to be insulated against public charges of corruption leading to prison.

Putin is only 71 years old, but he’s collapsed at least four times in the last four years and been witnessed to be close to collapse several more times by independent witnesses who’ve reported credibly about the events.  The pressure on the man, to hang onto the office, the power, the only life it gives him, ought to be so immense it’s hard to imagine, but that’s not good for his survival.  He’s gone to eating vegetables, fruit and fish, almost like he’s been watching the phony Balance of Nature advertisements all over U.S. television.  Maybe he believes that Americans can really reduce an apple into a tiny pill (it can’t) but then, many Americans have been fooled too.

The world’s current problems with its world leaders has everything to do with the effects of age upon human anatomy and psychology. The leader of the U.S., the previous leader and candidate for current leader again, the leader of Russia, the leader of Lebanon, the leader of Israel, are all old, and getting really older fast.  Mental and physical issues begin to dominate almost all thought upon reaching about seventy years of age, for normal males, and there almost no female world leaders at all anymore.  Over the course of only the next four years, using life insurance calculations developed in the U.S., only two of those leaders are likely to survive alive, and of the two, one of then won’t be mentally capable.

That nobody really seems to care is of no consequence.  The planet, the solar system, the galaxy and the rest of the universe doesn’t give one hoot about the aging capability of these country’s leaders, or their lack of capability for that matter.