Mark Morford has returned from his vacation. His pointy words were missed but his time off from the world seems to have brought new perspective, renewed enthusiam, and more pointy words.

Sad Spouts Of Ignorance
Where humpback whales meet the snarling void of war, and human progress takes a bullet

We think we know so damn much.

We think we know cause and effect. We think we know basic systems and human nature and the arc of time, what sort of hellish road we are paving right this minute, all those big colorful maps and arrows and diagrams and missile trajectories on CNN, all the clusters of little green plastic army men pushed around a giant map table by embittered generals.

We think we know what will happen to the collective unconscious, to the soul of the population at large when the scowling GOP war hawks issued the order to rain 3,000 multimillion-dollar warheads down on a bedraggled piss-poor food-starved nation in a single day.

Or when we massacre tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians and lay waste to an entire culture and landscape and history, as a 20-mile-long procession of U.S. troops rumble into Baghdad to kill anything with a turban and an Islamic faith and a dusty 1983 U.S.-Iraq chemical-weapons sales receipt, and call it patriotism.

We think we know all about body counts and nation building, and we think we have some sort of sanctimonious monopoly on the idea of what type of freedom everyone should have, what sort of force-fed democracy everyone really needs, whose self-righteous angry SUV-driving god has the right to bitch-slap which self-righteous angry Koran-reading god, and call it Christian largesse.

We don't know anything.
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