In 1983, or thereabouts, I read an article in Sports Illustrated on the best zoos in the United States. I believe they were, in no particular order, the Bronx Zoo, The National Zoo in Washington, and the San Diego Zoo. What I remembered for sure was that they said the best zoo was the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. I had just discovered the San Diego Zoo and thought it was the best zoo in the world, without, almost, any evidence and I wanted to see any zoo that was supposed to be even better. I did see it soon after and I was unimpressed (and a little dumbfounded). I’ve been wanting to see it again but, during the interim, I began to wonder if I had misremembered the whole thing. I tried looking it up on the internet a couple of times but couldn’t find anything.

The strange thing about the internet, however, is that, as time goes by, more old stuff rather than less old stuff ends up there. I couldn’t find the Sports Illustrated article but Google did lead me to an article in the January-February 1977 issue of American Education that discussed the Sports Illustrated article. Whenever I get a chance, I complain about local museums wanting to have a second or third class Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg rather than first-class local artists. Ironically, I didn’t appreciate that this nature museum is doing exactly that. It’s sort of embarrassing and it makes me wonder how many other times I’ve missed the point. The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum has no elephants or howler monkeys, it only has animals and plants that live near Tucson.

The site of the Museum is spectacular, even the drive to it is spectacular – once you leave the extended suburbs of Tucson – with the road winding over a low pass through a saguaro forest. Once we are at the Museum, the landscape seems to be in a natural environment and one of my first thoughts was that this area has a much richer – richer as in more plants and animals- environment than at home. But that is an illusion, this is really a distilled version of the local environment that is made breathtaking by the backdrop of the Avra Valley basin.

One of the downsides to civilization and its accouterments is that it covers up the natural environment. Travel to a city as small as Memphis or an even smaller city, like Chatanooga, and you don’t see the landscape. Even if you go to a local park, it is hard to get an idea of what the land was like before it was covered with our “improvements”. Tucson is different and every place should have a similar Natural Museum. In addition to the great site and lots of local plants and animals, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum has a terrific Birds of Prey show. The day we were there, they had three different kinds of raptors demonstrating three different hunting styles; Peregrine Falcons which cruise the area at ultra-high speeds, Barn Owls which quietly hunt alone, and Harris’s Hawks which hunt as a group. All of them were untethered – except for the golden handcuff of free meals – and they were captivating.

If the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum were all that Tucson had to offer, that would be enough but it also has the stunning Mission San Xavier del Bac and a vibrant art scene. The Mission was founded in 1692 but, the current building – in a sort of primitive, baroque style – wasn’t built until 1740. The only art gallery we had time to see, before hotting the road, was the Etherton Gallery, a suburb photography gallery but we plan on coming back (soon, I hope).

As an aside, one of the nice things I like about traveling is that it takes my mind off of the news. Especially political news. Most people we meet on the road aren’t as polarized as the media would have us believe and I think that the media is doing the country a disservice in constantly harping on our differences. When Trump hired John Bolton as his National Security Advisor, the media – at least the media I usually read, like the New York Times – went into a frenzy of dismay. “Bolton was going to push Trump into going to war with Iran.” seemed to be the main theme. Forget that all the evidence says that nobody pushes Trump into doing anything or that Trump campaigned on getting out of our constant wars. Then when Bolton quit – or Trump fired him, another thing they disagree on – the same people who were worried about Trump hiring Bolton were upset that he was being fired.

The example that set me off this time is Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos by Peter Bergen, a commentator at CNN. Time magazine has printed parts of the book as a long article in its December 16th issue and, in the article, Bergen complains: And then there was the manner in which Trump conducted himself personally. In an astonishing display of insensitivity, during a 2017 meeting about how to best prosecute the Afghan War, Trump said in Kelly’s presence that the young American soldiers who had died in Afghanistan had died for a worthless cause. Trump said “We got our boys who are being blown up every day for what? For nothing”.

By coincidence, the same day I saw the Time article, the New York Times, in an article dated December 9th, said: Thousands of pages of documents detailing the war in Afghanistan released by The Washington Post on Monday paint a stark picture of missteps and failures — and were delivered in the words of prominent American officials, many of whom publicly had said the mission was succeeding.

We have been fighting in Afghanistan for over eighteen years; during those 18 years, 2,372 United States Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines have been killed plus an additional 1,720 U.S. civilian contractors (what we used to call mercenaries). More importantly, over 111,000 Afghans have been killed. Trump is right, all these deaths have been for nothing. Nothing! Afghanistan is no closer to a Jeffersonian Democracy – or any democracy, really – than they were on December 10, 2001 (we are probably further away because the importance and power of the semi-democratic Loya jirga – a gathering of elders – have been reduced. A general’s job is to tell the Commander in Chief how to win the war they are put in command to win. If they don’t have the men and material to win, it is their job to tell their superiors. None of these generals did that. Either they thought we could win with what they had or could get which shows an astounding lack of judgment or they didn’t care in their rush to get promoted. Either way, they have failed the country and shouldn’t be heralded as successes.

Poor President Trump didn’t get on the cover of TIME for Person of the Year and he was upset. Like third-grader upset, so he took it out on the person who did make it, Greta Thunberg. On Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump Tweeted: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!”…Greta Thunberg@GretaThunberg scooped up Trump’s Tweet and owned it – and Trump – by making it her Twitter handle: A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.

I, personally, like AOC’s reaction. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez@AOCUS Representative,NY-14 (BX & Queens): “Because nothing says “mature temperament” like getting rankled by a 16 year old activist.”