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Over a glass of the Brown Stuff

January 9, 2026   ·   0 Comments

by CONSTANCE STRAFIELD

Start with a chocolate oat drink that has potassium, calcium, iron, your favourite vitamins like B12, phosphorus, and everybody’s favourite magnesium.

It even tastes nice and is how I start most of my days.

This morning, I thought we could ruminate for a while and talk a bit about the mad men in our current and collective midst. These are not people you know personally. They occupy media and maybe your nightmares.

Too many perfectly normal, interesting, humorous conversations can go awry in the antics of the mad men to the south and overseas that may frighten us. Is this the era of new colonization.

Alexander the Great set the pace for conquering lands. A military genius, leading his armies from his early 20s, he is still considered the greatest military leader of all time. Over 12 years until his death, Alexander led his troops to conquer much of the then known world from Macedonia. The entire western coast of the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt where he founded the city of Alexandria, and on to India.

He was stopped there by his own men who refused to continue, exhausted as they were from travel and battle.

New cities, improved cities, cities left in ruins, countless numbers of people dying by his conquest, Alexander left his mark and his legend as no one has since. 

Alexander was hailed as a god, a deity in many temples and cities. History has it that such titles led him into megalomania and that he became a little crazed by it by the time he died.

Alexander the Great lived from 356 to 323 BCE. Legends and myths grew around his name and the representations of Alexander in so many styles of art too numerous to count.

Has the cruel conqueror come to once again throw terror into the hearts of peaceful citizens in other lands? Just look around us at the invasions, kidnapping, threats of plans to confiscate fields and cities.

Since Alexander’s time, our inclination to follow his lead has grown as our global population and our weapons and tools in ferocity and efficiency. Our social morals and respect of nations has declined. 

It has all been managed by manipulated language, twisted to cast insidious fear with outright lies barely veiled.

That brown stuff must be a great wake-up drink with all the goodness in it. On a winter-soaked morning, one might read the news and see history’s face smiling grimly back and wonder what can be said to counter it.

There is one firm consolation: that of all the mad men close to home and everywhere else, not one of them is a genius. They are grasping for money, fame, and once I heard an invasion was born of boredom.

What do you do when you have the world and all the money and possessions and power for which you could ask? Keeping large numbers of people fearful might be fun. Making up stories with your pals about the reasons for your aggression and harm, creating terrorists and villains where there are none, in the minds of those willing to believe anything you say.

Yet, in all the aggression, the clear intentions are blunt instruments, not at all likely to succeed because somehow they will be stopped by those who will stand against them.

I finished my glass of brown stuff with satisfaction, flipping through the pages of my new year’s one day-per-page planner. I prefer paper and pen. Goodness only knows what my computer will move or lose or dump next.

The walls around my desk alcove are festooned with a collection of photocopied black and white photographs: family for the most part, but not smiling bunches of faces at a picnic. Random glimpses of time and place.

They remind me that we have always had mad men, all of whom lost what they had won and none of whom were geniuses.

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