A little speck on this morning's horizon turned out to be a sizable vessel, bursting at the seams with marine biologists and environmental scientists. A nice bunch, they drew up close and invited me on-board for some food and a few glasses of rum. Before I departed we said a little prayer together, to the Gods of the sea, asking for a safe return to dry land and clement weather (I put in my usual unvoiced request for a nice cabin-girl also). The captain - a solid Norwegian fellow named Kanute - gave me a little bundle of goodies to take back with me. When I unwrapped the kind offering I gasped with delight. Some rare treats there were indeed - two pouches of Captain Black (an exquisite pipe tobacco), a little box of Belgian chocolates, a sturdy pen-knife with their company logo on it and (joy of joys) several newspapers. 'Tis rare for me to get a newspaper on the day of publication.
As is often the case, one news story stood out and played on my mind for the remainder of the day. I felt compelled to write this post and share it with you.
I don't imagine that I have very many readers - I mean, who cares what an old salt thinks, right? But I have a sense that there are one or two who glance at this an odd time. So to you, my friends, I direct a gaze of bewilderment. The story which fills me with such confusion and awe is on the front page of The (London) Independent newspaper. The headline reads Bush: God told me to invade Iraq. According to a soon-to-be-aired BBC documentary, Bush told Palestinian leaders in 2003 that he was acting in accordance with the word of God. Now - to be clear - there is nothing wrong with a fella reading the bible and taking it seriously. And there is nothing wrong with a fella living his life in a way that he thinks accords with the wishes of the almighty. But Bush (apparently) thinks that God is talking to him. He is quoted as saying that God told him: 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.' Seriously. Of course, the fact that he subsequently brought tyranny to Iraq doesn't factor in this man's thinking.
Now, as we all know, many people have felt the hand of God upon them and this has spurred them on to accomplish feats of magnificence and enormous good. And I don't mean to be disrespectful to anyone's faith -- BUT, it seems to me to be unlikely that God wanted tens of thousands of innocent people to be destroyed by American weapons of mass destruction and an entire country to be thrown into poverty, social unrest and chaos. It seems to me to be equally unlikely that, if God did want to do this, he would a) entrust the task to someone so inept; and, b) need any help. As recent weather phenomena in the US have illustrated, God has a lot of ways and means to do damage without needing to call up the village idiot in Washington.
I suppose I would say that every man's thoughts are his own, and it is not a crime to hear God talking to you, even if he is saying brutal and terrible things. However, when you start to kill people, based on the suggestions of voices in your noggin, we have a problem. And when you are the most powerful man on earth, who presides over a fearsome war-machine, and answers to no-one (except, presumably, to God in his head) and you start to attack other nations, based on these voices, then the world has a problem. And not for the first time, I am glad to be at sea - far, far away from Bush and his voice-of-God.
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