"And Now...For Something Completely Different...."

When it comes to relevant and precisely focused perspective on the state of the world, the first name that comes to your mind probably isn’t Monty Python.

But, believe it or not, it’s the first name that occurs to me.

It happened again this morning as I was reading through the latest news about the terrorist attacks in India.

And while I’m willing to concede the point that oversimplifying things can be a slippery slope, I think that the Python guys have, at least, distilled the chaos and darkness down to a pretty legitimate essence.

It was during a “reunion” festival at Aspen some years ago, when all the still living Pythons were taking questions from the audience.

I don’t recall the exact question or even the premise of it, but I do remember, some ten plus years later, the answer, give or take a word.

Terry Jones, on the subject of warfare and its constant presence on our planet:

“All religions believe that they are going to heaven. They just keep killing us and each other in the argument over which is the best way to get there.”

The temptation, of course, is to find some complex way to put that.

Because the sheer simplicity is almost too much to absorb.

And even the youngest school child would be inclined to sum up the whole cause and effect relationship in a single word.

Stupid.

And while the strategists and the politicians and the pundits and even the poets will continue to look for the answer to the riddle inside the enigma, I hold that the Python perspective really cant be improved upon.

Sometimes a dead parrot is just a dead parrot.

And stupid is just stupid.