Over Hamburgers at Ray’s

Last week BP’s embattled chief executive, Tony Hayward, was criticized for attending a yacht race (while, of course, his oil continued to gush into the Gulf waters).

This week, in the picture below, we see President Obama at Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington, Va.  enjoying a hamburger and fries with President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia.

While the two presidents chatted, clearly enjoying themselves and the burgers while gently readying themselves for the G-20 Summit meeting this weekend in Toronto, wars in the North Caucasus and Afghanistan continued to rage.

Of the three, the millions of barrels of oil spewing into Gulf waters, the fighting verging onto civil war in Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, and the other North Caucasus republics, and in Afghanistan the seemingly inexhaustible Taliban fighters tying down some 100,000 American troops onto bloody, inhospitable lands, while simultaneously  terrorizing the long brutalized (and terrorized) Afghan population, — the oil may well be the least destructive.

In any case the leaders of our world probably do just as well to enjoy themselves, at yacht races and at Ray’s Hell Burger. For there’s probably nothing they can do, no steps they might take, by what, by remaining on the job, —by Tony’s remaining on a BP platform in the Gulf, to improve either these sores of our civilization, or any number of others.

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