Chapter Nine: Malinali’s Prayer

When Malinali finished her story, Cortez spoke to her directly. She had learned enough Spanish to mostly understand him.

“Doña Marina, you know now that I am a man, and not this Mesheeka god, yes?”

She nodded.

“Yet the Mesheeka king does not think I am a man just like him - he believes instead that I could actually be one of his gods?”

She nodded again.

Cortez crossed himself. He looked at Aguilar. “These Mesheeka are stranger and more evil than I thought possible, Jeronimo. Their religion is the worship of Satan himself, the gods they worship are devils - except for one god, this Quetzacoatl, who preaches good not evil. And it is him they are afraid of, it is him they have somehow confused with me. What is it they are afraid of?”

Aguilar shrugged. Cortez’s dark eyes shifted to Malinali.

The long-simmering struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran for Mid-East supremacy has escalated to a dangerous new level as the two sides fight for control of Yemen, reminding markets that the epicenter of global oil supply remains a powder keg.

Brent oil prices spiked 6% to $58 a barrel after a Saudi-led coalition of ten Sunni Muslim states mobilized 150,000 troops and launched air strikes against the Iranian-backed Houthi militias in Yemen, prompting a furious riposte from Tehran.

Analysts expect crude prices to command a new "geo-political premium" as it becomes clear that Saudi Arabia has lost control over the Yemen peninsular and faces a failed state on its 1,800 km southern border, where Al Qaeda can operate with near impunity.

The Saudis face an impossible dilemma. The harder they hit the Houthis, the greater the danger of a power vacuum that can only benefit Al Qaeda and Islamic State groupings that already control central Yemen. They are among the most lethal of the various Al Qaeda franchises. A cell from that area was responsible for the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.

Yemen is the latest country swept up an epic struggle for mastery between the Sunnis and Shias across the Middle East that some have compared to the Catholic-Protestant blood-letting of the Thirty Years War in 17th Century Europe.  Could this struggle end up tearing Saudi Arabia apart?

When you're in a situation and you feel like reacting with anger, or fear, or hurt feelings - anything that feels like it's an automatic, purely emotional response - you have a choice as to what to do about it. You can react, or you can choose to do something different. This choice is our capacity for self-regulation and self-control, and it is fundamental to what makes us human.

Stephen Covey, in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families, talks about this as the "pause button."

If you feel yourself swept up into a tide of emotion, in reaction to something somebody has said or done, you may want to express your feelings, or you may not. The pause button is our conscious awareness; it is our capacity to feel something, to feel a reaction coming on, and to think about it before we act on it.

One of the common features of criminals is that they do not use this very well. They tend to think in terms of short term, immediate gratification. They are tuned in to basic reactions of pleasure and pain, and have not developed their capacity to stop before they act, and consider what they really want to do; what would really make their life better over the long term.

Liberals can be like this too.

"Right on track, Jack."  That's what one of the main campaign managers of The Man Who Wasn't There told me today.

He and his colleagues are happy, happy guys n' gals.  "This is going exactly as expected," they exude.  "And it's a strategy that has never been tried before.  If it works like we think it's going to, the world will think we're bloody geniuses."

Pause, after a bemused glance is directed at them.

"Yeah, well, right, it's the boss's strategy, so, okay,  he's actually the genius."

"The boss," the man who wasn't there in Iowa, Wyoming, and New Hampshire, the man who won't be there in Michigan, Nevada, or South Carolina, is, of course...