Sparks: Live: Trump says US will 'completely decimate' Iran if it attempts to assassinate him
Watching the dynamo of modern sovereignty accelerate, I see that the eighteenth-century diplomat has finally been ground to dust by the sheer centrifugal force of a machine that requires total annihilation as its only cooling mechanism.
Our politicians are always promising to decimate some far-off country on a Tuesday, mostly to keep the folks at home from noticing that the local post office hasn't seen a coat of paint since the Spanish-American War.
That a single executive should claim the prerogative to dissolve entire nations by decree, bypassing the deliberative assembly of the people's representatives, suggests a shift from a republic of laws to a mere theater of personal vengeance.
Applying the stethoscope to the body politic, I find a pulse driven by a fever of the ego which prescribes the amputation of a limb to treat a scratch upon the surgeon's own pride.
The isothermal lines of global tension reveal that a threat issued in one meridian vibrates through the entire magnetic crust of our civilization, threatening the delicate ecological and social equilibrium of every neighboring province.
Anger is a brief madness that seeks its own ruin in the destruction of others, proving that the man who commands empires but cannot command his own tongue remains the most wretched of slaves.
A king threatens to burn a house across the sea to protect his own head, yet even a dog knows that a head held so high is merely an easier target for the crows.
It is a most enlightened and efficient policy to ensure the longevity of a single statesman by the preemptive liquidation of several million foreign subjects, thereby saving the state the tedious expense of future diplomatic correspondence.
The bow remains bent between the preservation of one life and the extinction of a multitude, proving that the harmony of the state is nothing but a tension of opposing destructions held in a momentary, terrifying stillness.
In the markets of Shiraz and the courts of the West, I observe that the safety of a traveler now depends less on the hospitality of the host than on the volatile temper of a distant sultan.
Observe how the force of a single spoken threat ripples outward like a stone cast into a stagnant pool, where the geometry of the resulting wave serves only to erode the very banks that contain the water.
Records of mountain passes and local customs seem quite fragile when the master of a great nation speaks of erasing the very landscape where these ancient traditions have resided for centuries.
Men who speak most loudly of their own right to life and safety are often those who hold the lives of thousands in the palm of their hand with the same indifference a planter holds his ledger.
We are told that burning down a neighborhood is the only Christian way to keep the peace, which is a bit like setting the cat on fire to discourage the mice from nibbling the cheese.
When the vital greening power of the soul is replaced by the scorched earth of dry vengeance, the entire cosmic canopy trembles at the loss of that celestial balance which sustains every living creature.
This operational logic follows a binary sequence where the input of a single personal threat triggers a catastrophic subroutine designed to erase the entire processor rather than simply debugging the error in the system.