Far-eastern midnight had settled deeply outside the windows of room 322 of the Tokyu Capitol Hotel when I caught The Pretty Bottle once again in the time-tested way of our reach for insights pried from each others’ fully-flexed but post-gig relaxing brains.

James "Jid" O’Brien and I know the drill quite well, having wrung it out many, many times together over the past decade; crack, sip, cap, and toss a seven-fifty of Crown Royal around the room, completely confident of hands as deftly sure as the minds that drive them.

Jid is a monitor engineer: a uniquely crazy species of road-dog whose psychic stability is open to instant suspicion simply because of his work. (Only crazy people mix stage audio because they’re open to every sort of assault from very touchy artists who’re usually touched by the dangers of "making everything louder than everything else".) He is, however, so good at it - and also so professionally confident - that nobody has ever thrown a microphone stand or any other sort of abuse toward his stage-right desk in all the time I’ve known him. Besides: he wouldn’t stand for it ("Hey, I don’t give a shit. Let ‘em try it. I was out of work when I got here."), and everybody knows it. That’s important. Someone that adept in such a dangerous milieu is okay by me. I would march straight to the gates of Hell with my mate "The Bronx Flash", and rely on his surveys of the route.

Michael Hoskin, the triple-saxophone-blower and percussion doctor, is a bit new to our particular squeeze of intellectual essence, but nervy enough to jump in with both feet and a smoldering Havana, and bright enough to play a tall stack of mind-chips at the table. Michael is a lurker: a black man of distinctive phenotype with his slight build, bald head, owlish countenance behind horn-rimmed glasses, and magnetically-quiet demeanor; after a certain interval the room will invariably await his pronouncements on matters at hand. After all, if he’s hanging, it’s for a reason, and one eventually wants to know what it is.

CNN and BBC were bouncing back & forth on the room’s viddie, in time to the flight of the bottle. A fishy-eye turned to the flaming wreck of an F-117 brought conjecture on the urgency and travel-mode of Russian and Chinese agents to the scene in order to mine technology from the windfall.

"Whaddya think, fellas? Camel-train across the Kandahar? ‘If I gotta walk, crawl, or hitch-hike, I’m gonna get there the same… I’m goin’ out to Serbia; they gotta crazy little jet there, and I’m goin’ to get me one…’ "

While Jid worked the cap and licked his mustache, Michael nodded the Havana sagely. "No doubt," he opined with characteristic verbosity.

The room got very quiet.

Stretching the subject along with muscles in a short walk to the window looking out on the Japanese capitol building a block away, I solemnly informed them with ponderous redundance: "I worry about America, men."

Jid laughed out loud.

I didn’t look back. "I’m telling you: it’s my mission in life."

He laughed again, "No, it’s not."

Michael blew through the Havana, "Oh, yes it is." Michael was newly getting something that ten years of friendship have attenuated in Jid’s view; "He was born to it."

"Okay," Jid agreed, refocusing his view to the hard facts, "but somebody has to do it." The bottle sailed.

"You’re goddamned right," I said after a spin of the cap. I get to talk to him like that because he’s used to it and man-enough to take it for what it is: a diamond-hard kernel of passionate patriotism remaining in the ground-up dust of a century’s vicissitudes washing my country’s blood and treasures across the world like a handful of pig-feed casually tossed at nothing worth breeding or sustaining.

I might have said that I can’t believe we’re looking at the beginning of the Twentieth Century all over again - but from the other end, and with The Lying Bastard playing some ghastly and symmetrical inversion of Tsar Nicholas II: every bit as shockingly lame at his alleged "job", albeit with a cynical purpose hijacked from that monarch’s cousin at Berlin which would have chastened even Kaiser Wilhelm’s remaining sense of decency. Willy played Nicky like a fish on a line, but the latter actually prayed for that, whereas Bill The Abnerian lately has an ostensible world-forum of "leadership" busily baiting each others’ hooks in an arcade-game version of Catch The Peace Prize, with little old ladies frantically schooling over international borders one short pulse ahead of the sharks into the very real tank of Albania. (Cue the stand-off weapons, and don’t mind the cluster-bombs. Nothin’ to it: it’s marketable video.)

I might have said "I can’t believe it," but the shitty fact is that I certainly can.

It was left to the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova to point out the onset of "the real twentieth century" - the guns of August 1914 - apart from its meaningless calendar notation. Poetry is a rotten job when devoted to politics: it sings where none care to dance, and the whole effort would be better brought to Chicago for instruction at the feet of 12-bar blues, but that’s a Western outlook appealing essentially only to Romanticism: the idea that someone, somewhere, can grasp the fact and implications of a good man feeling bad. True Russians have never had much use for prayers to their fellow men, though. They generally prefer deities. That’s why insights such as Akhmatova’s get trampled in the rush of human follies and it takes a whole century of pompous ignorance to illustrate - yet again - the stark bloody nonsense of "intervention" into something like Balkan "affairs".

Mustard gas and machine guns = GPS weapons and stealth technology, and it’s all the same after eighty-five years: there is a better rat-trap to drop into the fray (never mind Vietnam or Afghanistan), and the world will beat a path to Milosevic’s ass to deliver a more polished jack-boot kick. After all; squeaky punks like Tony Blair need not be concerned with "The Legacy" dominating iconic rituals under the portrait of Nixon while midnight steals through the halls of the White House. The Lying Bastard surely looks good in the effort at piece-meal miming everything he could never be and purloined from the questionable best of nonetheless extremely dubious characters: first Kennedy, and now The Dark One who unraveled a slender thread of redemption from the yawning gulp of historic dishonor while playing to the inside flush of foreign policy.

"Foreign policy." I’ll say. That’s the damned truth.

What next? Wholesale purchase of Siberia - complete with full Gulag accessory kit and posed-up as essential to "global markets" — photographed in Jeffersonian wig and black satin ribbon?

Your guess is as good as mine, but the mirrors of history keep getting darker and more Escheroid - the elements more randomly twisted and juxtaposed without sensible fit - as events define times in ways that no mere calendar possibly can, and all these motherfuckers have now stepped to the forefront of political fashion wearing the same spiked-helmets and power-neckties.

Some things always seem to change in the very same ways, no matter from which end of the century one views them.