243. Who Minds the Minders?

We have laws and police to dis­cour­age bur­glars, extor­tion­ists and mur­der­ers. That’s the low level stuff. Remem­ber that old idiom that laws are for the com­mand of fools and the guid­ance of wise men? Who han­dles the clever scoundrels? In fact the main rea­son for hav­ing armies is to deflate the egos of politi­cians, the “enemy’s” and ours. Politi­cians every­where and regard­less of ide­ol­ogy have scant respect for the rule of law when their inter­ests or egos are at risk. But then who minds the gents with medals and guns? Unfor­tu­nately it takes extreme courage to con­trol mil­i­tary offi­cers who think their right­eous­ness and power grows out of the bar­rel of a gun. This is excep­tion­ally so when the gun bar­rels make dol­lars as well as corpses, which is the nor­mal state of things. Real courage is def­i­nitely rare amongst bur­glars, politi­cians, dis­armed gen­er­als, or you and I. In the end we all play tag with threats and thumb­screws and flat­tery to keep the other guys in line.  Tech­nol­ogy reaches to the stars, but human pro­gress … well, we still share all that DNA with chim­panzees.