LI has read, on many a liberal site, immediate complaints that whenever somebody prominent like Senator Harry Reid says we are losing the war, conservatives immediately claim that this damages the morale of the troops. Here’s Talking points memo getting indignant with CNN. The push back is always vaguely about supporting the troops.
Actually, I have no idea why liberals should complain about this. I fucking hope it damages the morale of the troops. I would hope that, eventually, the volunteer forces that trusted their country to use them wisely, instead of as an array of crash test dummies, would revolt. I hope they strike. I hope they increasingly refuse to serve. I hope they link up with the Iraqi population and say basta! We need to leave this country, and fuck our leadership and fuck yours for not making that possible, but increasingly putting us in a hole. I hope they have gone past discouraged to a righteous, revolutionary anger that would sweep away the whole sick and senile war culture machinery, disentangle us from the merchants of death, lead to a future in which America stops being an imperial power, unplugs our society and economy from war as our mainstay and guide, and faces the real environmental problems that will either kill us all or … vide bathroom Nietzsche … make us stronger. Stronger, that is, a loving, affectionate, cultured, hedonistic people – ah, just the kind of people who are everything the right hates: feminized, non-macho, caring, all of that shit.
Now, I doubt my hopes will be realized and I imagine discouragement comes out of the barrel of a mortar firing cannon more than a senator's speech. The soldiers, like the marks in a massive con game, are for the most part you, self-selected for their faith in a certain kind of patriarchal authority, and inclined to find targets for their anger that are shaped in the peckerwood superstitions that are undoing this country. I understand why that is so. But one hopes that someday, through that thick icing of crap that surrounds the war culture mindset, some piercing word will go, some realization not only that the Iraq war is lost but that it was unjust to begin with, continued with shameless and criminal negligence in order to extract the least amount of sacrifice from the coddled upper and upper middle class, was born in the vanity of a subpar golf pro president and the senile power wanderlust of his sidekick/bully/vp, and is being continued solely in order that the demented elite can postpone that inevitable moment when they lose face.
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Cowboy Junkies - Sweet Jane
ReplyDeleteNorth, there's a shot of nostalgia. I listened to that in, what, 93, 94, in my little cubicle at Santa Fe Abstract, when I was a searcher. Oh, days of boredom, liquid lunches with a gal named Anna, and the odd patronage of a boss who never seemed to want to fire me, no matter how late I stumbled in or how, uh, disheveled my afternoon appearance was - thus forcing me to quit!
ReplyDeleteI meant "roger" of course.
ReplyDeleteI just want to say, riger, this is one of my favorite posts. Bravo! A pox on American machisimo.
ReplyDeleteBrian, Thanks. It sorta come out of an amazed and shocked reaction to the Rightwing meme that the Virginia Tech victims were pussies. They didn't karate chop the shooter. Etc, etc. I find that so abysmally stupid, so lacking in the core conservative virtue - a sense of the mixed motives of human nature, otherwise known as common sense - that I give up. We are no longer talking about an arguable point of view, but an attitude most people outgrow by the age of fifteen.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I want to embrace being a pussy. I am a pussy. I want pussification to continue apace. And as a part of that process, casting my eye on the guys and gals in the U.S. army in Iraq, I can only suggest to them: don't take it anymore! don't be victims of people who are this abysmally stupid! grow up! get out! revolt!