Is war imminent? I hope not.

Just moments ago I came in the door after a morning run. Greeting me at the top step of the stairway of my apartment was my Pitbull Marcus. I hadn’t been this happy to see him in a while.

Marcus woke me up by vomiting this morning. The moron had broken into a Ziploc bag containing his dog food (despite his earlier dinner) and hours later, had to let it out some way.

I cleaned up the barf (really makes me wonder why anyone wants kids) and put on my shoes for a run.

Crossing Madison Avenue I noticed a headline on our local paper, the Times Union. Apparently now a paper known for its restraint is handicapping a war or at least the chances of one.

More than 50 years ago Mohammed Mossadeg, the aging, bird-like but grandfatherly president of Iran made his first transatlantic flight to address the United Nations. The issue he was here for, one on the minds of so many Iranians: The right to protect their national interest and get a fair return on the oil pumped from their land by a heartless company based in the dying British Empire. Michael Kirzner’s All the Shah’s Men, a fabulous book, recounted the secular president’s trip as one of do or die consequence. If the United Nations could not understand how a sovereign nation could demand better treatment of its workers on its own oil fields operated by a foreign state-run petroleum company bent on withholding as much in dignity as in money, then his country was surely doomed.

A cane-carrying Mossadeg, erudite but emotional, kind but stern, made his appeal to the newly formed world body, a passionate address in which he urged member nations to see the plight of underpaid workers and the sorry state of his country, which had long been dominated by imperial interests. Tears streamed Mossadeg’s face, newspapers reported. A subsequent meeting between him and U.S. President Harry S. Truman was pleasant and Truman urged the leader to stay a few days longer while he negotiated with the British to no avail. Mossadeq left the U.S. embittered and broken. Within two years he was arrested in a U.S.-backed coup d’etat brokered by a lukewarm Dwight Eisenhower and lived out the rest of his life under house arrest, a broken man.

 

Inside the Company

A good friend of mine is clearing out his house before it is sold. Last weekend I grabbed a book that his father, long deceased, had collected in the 1970’s. It is Inside the Company by Phillip Agee. I’ve heard his name before, but I’m not sure where.

  I think this book might be an entertaining read. I’ll suspend the urge to read criticism of it, be it on the Web or excerpted from old newspapers or journals because knowing what I do about the book right now, it seems like reading it’s reception could really hanker with my enjoyment of it.

  So far, I’m 30 pages in. It’s a breeze of a read so far. Maybe there are 400 pages altogether in the hardbound first-print that I have in my possession.

  Agee’s title is misleading. If a diary is something of a chronological recollection of events from a person’s day-to-day life, than Dick’s book is anything but a diary. I keep a journal most days and I don’t touch it. Once it is written in that’s it. Someday should my nieces of nephews or grandkids or strangers read it, they’ll find out some embarassing things about me I suppose.