Promise Not to Tell?

The subject of today's epistle: vocabulary.  We deal with synchronicity, serendipity, coincidence, karma.  Any one will do to describe my meeting with the NY Times (dead tree edition).  I don't make a point of reading the obit pages, they just come around on the guitar eventually.  If there's someone I've heard of (increasingly true as one ages), or someone who'd worked in some field that is of interest, I'll pay attention.

Today, there is a cartoon in the middle of the obit page, so it's hard to walk on by.  (The one on the page, isn't on the on-line page, but is the second slide in the linked slide show.)  It's a New Yorker cartoon, and quintessentially so.  Which drew me in, and what I found explicates the vocabulary. 

I'm glad I read the piece.  Mr. Cullum explains how it was that he became a cartoonist, although not a full-time professional one from the way I read it.  No matter; he clearly got The New Yorker, and vice versa.  He was a pilot by profession, having flown during Vietnam.  Ummm.  Do you sense something coming?

There's been minor kerfuffles the last few days:  WikiLeaks outing our stupidity, and Karzai himself doing so with the admission that he's on Iran's payroll.  Secrets are only secrets from the population who might object to decisions by the powerful, if only they knew what the people on the ground have long known.  We aren't keeping secrets from the enemy, only from ourselves.

The quote that matters:

In 1966 he was sent to Vietnam, where he flew 200 missions, most in support of ground-troop operations, but at one point he flew secret bombing runs over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. "Who these were secret from I'm still not sure," Mr. Cullum told Holy Cross magazine in 2006. "The North Vietnamese certainly knew it wasn't the Swiss bombing them."

Obama might consider this.