As I was biking through yesterday's snowstorm on the inadequately
cleared streets of Somerville I found my mind wandering (as it often
does) to the subjects of love and foreign policy. Fighting to keep the
bike upright in my snow-addled state, I imagined a state-of-the-union
address (delivered in an MLK-like southern Baptist orator's voice) on
the new US doctrine of "preemptive compassion." It was a nice
fantasy.
I believe that a lot of domestic and international problems could be
addressed by a policy of providing decent opportunities for
nutrition, health care, and social justice, and effective humanitarian
crisis-response interventions. But you would still have the problem
of megalomaniacal nutbars bent on screwing things up for their own
ends. How do we address this?
It occurred to me that if we required that all world leaders spend at
least one night a week getting properly laid, it might go a long way
towards taking the edge off of some of the craziness. I guess you
could call this the "Clinton/JFK doctrine."