Dave,
You will enjoy reading Robert Kaplan's "Eastward to Tartary". It's a marvelous travelogue by a writer for the Atlantic Monthly.
Unfortunately, Kaplan has gone off the deep end, and is now advocating imperialism. Which is when the Texas Walker, the Shrub Who Could, the Son a Gun, the Second Coming of really bad Administration, caught on to the Kaplan act and found him an apologist for some really stupid efforts at American imperialism which we are in the midst of. Bush's rebuke of Sharon notwithstanding.
You say: The hatred these people have for each other makes no sense at all to me.
Well, duh! That's because you are sane.
Re: (By the way, what is your area of expertise? I am a forester myself.)
Until I got passionately concerned that we humans are destroying the planet with our greed, grasping and grand schemes, I was a consumer and modifier of your forest products. I was a Christ-like figure, I was a carpenter. But that proved to be non-sustainable. So now I'm a speculator. That can go on forever.
-Ray |
