Horses sporting gas masks. That, of all things, has been on my mind lately. Bear with me, now. Gaze at the ever-so-cockamamie photo. A horse, wearing a gas mask. Nothing so illustrates the rank absurdity and irrationality of the human condition. It was during World War I—which killed an unheard-of nine million soldiers in just four years—that the armies of Europe still employed horses in an age of machine guns, airplanes (eventually), tanks and poison gas attacks. Rather than call a halt to the inane slaughter in the trenches, the world’s great powers fought that wildly nationalistic war to its macabre conclusion. One result was horses in gas masks. That was only a hundred years ago.
As the U.S. government, as well as far too many Americans, remain fixated on the decidedly minor threat of Islamist “terrorism,” two actual global existential perils persist and are hardly addressed. I’m speaking, of course, of nuclear war and man-made, climate-based catastrophe. Hardly any serious establishment political figure in this country has taken meaningful action on such grave matters, mind you—busy as they are either reflexively attacking or defending Trump’s comparably trivial policies in Ukraine or Syria. Who noticed as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ticked the Doomsday Clock a stroke closer to midnight? Who has commented on the absurd reality that one of the two major American political parties denies the very existence of climate change, while the (hardly progressive) Pentagon repeatedly warns of its reality and profound consequences?