What was it that had a great fall? Was it an egg as in the rhyme, or was it that region of the world we call the Middle East when the “lands” (lands, never having become countries or nations) are lying scattered about at the bottom of the wall and all the West’s armies and all the West’s men can not put them back together again.

But we do go on trying, don’t we, as earlier in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as now when France’s Hollande sends his men and horses into Mali.

We might ask isn’t it almost our nature in spite of the Second Law to at least try to make things right, make them whole (again?)?

But what if we can’t possibly do that, make things whole, put the pieces back together, no more than the pieces of the egg? What if things have to remain forever apart?

And furthermore, what would be so wrong if we were just to let things go? Would the situation be any worse than it is now, in Mali or Pakistan? And in fact isn’t this how the favored few have always lived allowing most things to remain broken and scattered at the bottom of the wall?

Of the fallen nature of our world there is no lack of evidence. Of the MIddle East the evidence is a daily, often an hourly occurrence. It’s as if things were somehow not scattered enough and the suicide’s bomb was needed to blow things even further apart.

For nothing holds the Middle East together now other than the arbitrary division lines on a map. That men, and Middle Eastern men, and women, are of one and the same species seems to have been completely forgotten if ever known in that region of the world.

And the whole region from Mali through Egypt all the way to Pakistan seems now to be nothing more than disparate pieces of lands and peoples that no longer fit together if once they ever did.