tags: water wars

2006

August

2006 Aug 6

seven years (not in tibet)

(I was thinking of the city of Lhasa this morning as I contemplated my dog, who is a Lhasa Apso-something else. I also thought of the cheery thought my sister shared with me a while ago: you know how we’re fighting wars for oil these days? She predicts that the next natural resource we’ll be fighting wars for will be water. Specifically, as the Himalayan snowpack starts to melt because of global warming, India and China will be forced into a standoff over water rights. I also think that contention over water rights will be the single most important factor driving the politics of California in the next few years. But that is neither here nor there.)

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2011

March

2011 Mar 5

why did don quixote cross the road?

The Western genre as treated by Hollywood is itself like a cultural palimpsest. Long before Hollywood was even a metonymic signifier for the entertainment industry, the westward expansion and the genocidal Indian Wars driven by Manifest Destiny were already the equivalent of America's Dark Ages, at the very least in the sense that mythology and legend could be easily inserted into that period without running too much afoul of history. (Like how Europe's Dark Ages are ornamented by King Arthur, and Roland and the paladins of Charlemagne, and the lost Ninth Roman Legion beyond Hadrian's Wall, to name a few that come easily to mind.)

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