The dog barks...

Listening to a program on steam radio, I heard the phrase "The dog barks, but the caravan moves on."

Perhaps it was being recently introduced to a young woman, Cassandra, that caused me to reflect upon her Trojan namesake who was cursed by the Gods to have prescience yet to have no one believe her.

There is a weary inevitableness about history as it unfolds. We are, at worse, like flies in amber and, at best, like the camels that plod their dusty way from caravanserai to caravanserai. The trail has been cut previously and all that remains is to repeat it.

So shall relations with the Chinese, the development of Islam, nationalist aspirations of Kurdistan, Tibet, or Palestine run on predestined tracks mindlessly set up in previous colonial times and we will probably bark like dogs, except Cassandra...

But the caravan will move on...