Sack trucks and the Ukrainian war
UKRAINE. SHAKESPEARE. LOVE. LOGISTICS. The want-wits of Evere
Image: NATO’s headquarter building in Evere, Brussels.
I just used a sack truck to move Billie. Or are they Quadrat? Whatever they’re called, I moved them with a sack truck. Kurt gave a hand, but the sack truck did the heavy heaving.
Sack trucks are designed to move sacks. To be fully accurate, they’re designed to help people move sacks. For sacks, on their own, move not, even with a sack truck to hand. But, put to a stretch, my sack truck will move Billie, Quadrat or whatever they happen to be called (when they’re to be moved, they get called a lot of things their manufacturer never called them).
Midpoint during the operation a thought flitted into my mind and remained to dwell awhile till the operation was completed. It was this: there are times in life when a second pair of hands is a godsend. A sack truck is in many ways a second pair of hands. And it is considerably more cost-effective than a live-in partner can be. One day, perhaps, in a near or distant future, my sack truck will give up the ghost and ascend in stately fashion to that great palette warehouse in the sky. And I, at that moment, will pop to the hardware store and purchase a new one. The sack truck is the epitome of utility, practicality, usefulness and cost-effectiveness, certainly as compared to the classic live-in partner. There are some live-in partners that the sack truck can beat hands-down in others of its many attributes, if not all. But it never loved me. And the question dwells still in the mind: did any live-in partner, either?
Whether or not they did, ever did, sometimes did or thought they did, they were not here, not a one of them, when Billie Quadrat needed shifting. Kurt was, but he doesn’t love me. And I’d turf him out if he did.
No one can regulate another’s love for them, yet we try. Boy, do we try. Want to see me again? I’ll come. Twelve-hundred kilometre roundtrip for a weekend, I’ll come. I shall shower you with generosity to show my goodwill. I will counsel you and weep with you at life’s misfortunes. I will beg, borrow and steal for you and, when you’ve had enough, or even everything, then you will declare your homesickness and, in a trice, you shall be gone. Being gone is best done in a trice.
How cynical! How dare I measure the heartest-felt sentiment of mankind against the demon lucre! What price love? How can anyone even conceive the question?
Love is priceless, when it is given. Love is a burden when it is bought. And love is a deadweight when reclaimed.
If I were pushed to it, as a sack truck is occasionally pushed to the ultimate sack-truck challenge, I could profess a love for Ukraine. It is a not a love that asks no questions; it, too, may not stand the test; it falls short of laying upon the altar the dearest and the best, and I would caution against its never faltering; against whether it’ll pay the price; against whether, for Ukraine, I would make undaunted the final sacrifice.
But it is salient enough to lead my eyes daily to the war headlines. To glow in admiration for its president. And its people. And to cast sad eyes at its detractors. When we avow love for a country, we must never forget that, just as in a personal relationship, we are rooted in the world of politics.
In the board game Careers, players must secretly write down their life ambitions before playing in such a way as, they hope, will maximise their achievement and allow them to fulfil their ideals, which are three in number: fame, fortune and love. The winner is not the player who achieves the greatest love, for, if they have not selected love as their life’s goal, then no amount of love will compensate for a lack of fame or fortune. Those who pursue only fortune may justifiably eschew love, for it brings them nothing in terms of ambition. Fame, it must be noted, is not synonymous with fortune, neither in Careers, nor in careers. Careers is a game of chance, as if we didn’t know.
The word politics derives from the word politic, whose definition contains references to shrewdness, prudence, practicality, tact, diplomacy, contriving and expediency. It’s a definition that is lacking one word that one might almost believe to be a slack omission but, on reflection, is perhaps justly absent: doing that which is right. In not just dictionary terms, politics has nothing to do with doing what is right, unless doing what is right happens also to fit the rest of the definition.
War is Ukrainian politics right now. Views differ on whether it is conducting its politics with right on its side: its enemy, at least, demurs. In Ukraine, it is right for it to defend itself. Other nations say so, and back up their saying so with action. Being Japan, supplying helmets, or America, supplying HIMARS. But they will not allow Ukraine to take the war to Russia, as Russia has done to Ukraine, for fear that taking the war to Russia will take the war to NATO. NATO says it is not politic for Ukraine to join its band of brothers, not whilst the bullets are flying. That, they say, is not right. Because NATO doesn’t want to be involved. I think that that stance, whether it be political, politic or just a stance, should be raising questions in the minds of Finns, Swedes and, even, Russians.
NATO will defend the rights of member nations if any one of them is attacked. But not if it becomes a member whilst under attack. There is a theological argument in there that explains why there can never be any absolute hard proof of the existence of God, for, if we knew exactly how God works, we’d push His patience to the limits of what we then knew His grace to consist of — NATO is an insurance company that requires a clean no-claims bonus in order to grant cover. Comparing a supranational security body to an insurance company is a far-from-flattering comparison, and, lest flattery be misconstrued as being implied, let me banish the impression. For NATO has recently proved it an apt allusion. As by every sack truck in the world, I have been never more loved by an insurance company.
And, if NATO itself should find repugnant its insurance-like simile, it may nonetheless instead choose the path of love. Then, if love be without its faculties, let it choose investment, the flow-pipe of lucre: which promises all, with the potential to deliver naught. That much, at least, love and money have in common. The Russo-Ukrainian War may be a game of cat and mouse there, where it is being fought, and that’s not just in Donbas, as Russia’s missile strikes show. But the cats and the mice, they do likewise play in Evere and, ever, everywhere else.
Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice opens with Antonio at his wits’ end with sadness: it wearies him and, thereby, wearies his comrades: “But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, what stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn; and such a want-wit sadness makes of me, that I have much ado to know myself.”
It’s framed as dialogue, but it’s really soliloquy, to bring the audience up to pace. Those who truly are sad know exactly why they’re sad.