Stealing Fire

A world of trouble...entropy of the heart...masked anxiety...calm panic...insufficiency of human solutions for human problems...genetic criminality...a masquerade of civilization raining bombs of steel and fire on the "uncivilized"...terrorism of an uttered curse...techno-governments...robot populations...holy war...Predator diplomacy… millions of refugees…the crime of silence…acceptance...stealing fire.

I’m fascinated by President Barack Obama…never seen anything like him…he does his job with grace and certainty…an uncultured southern redneck shouts “You lie!” at The President of the United States of America …reporting Constitutionally before Congress assembled…President Obama snaps “I do not!” and never breaks stride…gracefully he accepts an insincere apology and dismisses the distraction… he won’t let it divert him from serious business…who can fault him?

So-called Republicans sulk and get nasty. It didn’t work. They are bad losers.

Their disrespect is serious. Not since Lincoln has an obdurate, self-righteous opposition minority hated a President so much. Everybody knows it’s his race and not his supposed “socialism” which is their real grievance. Congressman Joe Wilson might as well have shouted, “You lie, nigger!” Everybody knew what he meant. He never would have yelled that at a white President. Racist sickos from Lake Charles to Sandpoint applauded or approved.

But what an outrage it was for those who love America, and know the better angels of our history; to see an ignorant drunk defile such an established tradition and custom, personal courtesy to the President of the United States of America, when he Constitutionally addresses Congress. As much as I disliked any President in my lifetime—and Reagan owns that honor—I never would have shouted such a thing to him in Congress…though I gave him the finger in public demonstrations. We all hungered to call him a liar privately, to back him up to an intellectual wall show the proof and say "You're a goddamned liar, Mr. President."

The worst kind of liar is one who believes his own lies, and Ronald Reagan was the most-convincing liar I never met...we stood with our jaws hanging open as we watched the American people fawn over him.

Grandiosity rising…Lou Dobbs, Glen Beck, and Sarah Palin…sudden self-invented stars… command the attention of some of our perverted Media…but Palin isn’t even slightly amusing…Dobbs is dull and Beck is a mental cripple…everyday another report…Dobbs and Beck and Palin…promoted by flatterers…are running for President...they should duel with guns…Palin everybody knows applied for the position the moment she and McCain crashed in flames…every culturally-deprived redneck and romance-reading housewife from Maine to California shouted “Yahoo!” when she declared herself an everyday sort of know-nothing just like them. She field-dresses moose and shops at Wal-Mart too…she doesn't even know the names of the magazines she doesn't read...her daughter is just as fucked-up as their daughter…her real claim to fame?...she doesn’t mind getting bloody…the image of a female Teddy Roosevelt…and the Viagra crowd wants to bang her of course. They’d sell their Harleys for the chance.

Elect her President then. It would be a fine joke. I’ve maintained since Nixon that the American people usually get what they deserve, and that they bring hard times on themselves. I also maintain that the harder it is for the American people, the better it is, because they won’t get off their selfish asses until their backs are to the wall and flames are scorching their butts. Sarah Palin will have their backs glued to the wall within a day of settling into the Oval Office. But the American people are quite unpredictable when things get tough.

And then look out. It will be either a lynching party, or Eisenhower storming Normandy. It can go either way. Question: are these hard times the expression of the Collective Unconscious for self-correction? Let’s fuck it up so bad we’ll have to change it. The Unconscious might have its own weird logic. I'll give myself cancer and maybe it will encourage me to quit smoking.

The war continues of course and it is the most-serious business…is it working?...can we really win all optimists are asking...Admiral Mike Mullen Pentagon Chief of the Generals babysits Pakistan…he’s probably bought a condo there…is obviously running the war for them…please step aside…this man is a real Admiral...he's been to the best war colleges in the world...he rather knows how to run a war…Pakistan militarists deny it but they’ve bowed to his superior knowledge…or his deep pockets…now they’ve taken on the Pakistani Taliban in their strongholds. The Talibani are ecstatic...come on in, said the spider to the fly.

”We’re neck-deep in the Big Muddy/And the big fool says to push on”...”it's an unprecedented war inside a nuclear-armed State.

Talibani feel like the Indians at Little Big Horn…Black Elk said that Indians could hardly believe Custer was so foolish as to attack 10,000 of them in their strongest encampment…his supreme arrogance enraged them…they swarmed his puny troop like killer bees and joyously killed them all…recent archaeological digs reveal the soldiers ran like rabbits…a revenge for the buffalo in the Land of the Greasy Grass...a vindication of the Rights of Man.

The only soldier to survive, John Martin was delivering a message when Custer was defeated.

I’ve been reading Securing Helmand by Jeffrey Dressler of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) about Marine Corps operations since 2008 in Helmand Province west of Kandahar…I recommend it for any wanting to get into details of this war. Helmand Province is the main poppy-growing region of Afghanistan...the biggest heroin suppliers in the world…and I'm finding with Google Earth the pretty red poppies in dark green fields…it would take a brigade to burn them out…and a division to prevent re-planting...my there’s a lot of poppies. They make some people fabulously wealthy and turn millions into sleepwalkers…but look at the jobs they provide and the infusion of cash into the economy.

“It’s only business.”

Helmand is Afghanistan’s biggest province and the size of West Virginia … snow-capped mountains snake down from the north like coral reefs to rocky hills and level plains by raging rivers in deep warm valleys which is the breadbasket of Afghanistan…the mountains dig like claws into the ancient enduring landscape…thousands of squared-off fields of lucrative crops near the river…the country’s longest river…an ancient smuggling route to and from Baluchistan and Pakistan to the south…Taliban will fight like hell to keep the money Helmand Province produces…this year they are re-starting military actions in the north to interdict a new supply route and draw forces from Helmand with the harvest season approaching...but the honest marines say opium is only one of many sources of Taliban revenue …they won’t shrivel up without it…they tax other crops and other things too just like the Vietcong...our allies and business partners the Saudi family for example give them money too… General McCrystal doesn’t go in for poppy-eradication…it might upset the farmers…no one mentions that eradication would reduce the heroin supply for millions of others and US consumers around the planet.

Nobody but I...and I am who? promotes the notion of sending a couple of thousand American farmers with tractors and seeds to plow and supplant wheat vegetables and fruit for the poison poppies. Poppy farmers like farmers everywhere only want to make an honest living and be left alone. And here’s the topper: extensive irrigation canals in Helmand’s lush valleys were dug by the United States in the 1950s. You can see them from the sky of Google Earth. It looks so peaceful down there.

Good luck marines! I dig you guys, but I have to tell you the truth: many of you will end up addicted to something and sleeping on the streets or in prison…the suicides of course are already out of hand… spouse-abuse is an epidemic…many of you will end up divorced and hated by your kids…you can’t go around killing people and watching your friends torn apart and come home healthy and whole…that only happens in the movies…I know some of you guys…still young and starting vigorous businesses…computer-repair startups and software companies for example...making money with former military skills…drinking and coking it up every night and lying like hell about everything anymore…still fist-fighting like in the Service…you won't heed warnings either…I was probably just as confidently arrogant when I got out of the Crotch. Blessedly, I hadn’t been in a war and had less to feel guilty about then.

Don’t you wish our babysitting televisions would show us the actual wounds? Let's have some real reality tv…show the kids what bullets and bombs really do to human bodies…people don’t explode and tear along anatomical lines…let us hear the grunts of shock...the cries of surprise...the moans and screams of agony…a man burns like any other meat in a fire…the flesh turns black and the exposed meat splits and looks almost edible…so show us the burned flesh flopping from the cooked pink muscle hanging in the tree…show us the eyeball with half a face attached and lying in concrete dust…yes show the whole picture…it’s the only way kids are going to learn that war isn’t a video game…show it until they throw up…show it until their parents throw up…the only way to end war is to make people hate it...it took millions dead and two world wars before Europeans finally got wise…there’s little room for love in the antiwar game…there’s only one true love anyway and it ain’t human…you have to not so much love people as hate war to bring an end to it. You must be disgusted by it. War is the most-horrible thing we do. “War is hell.” We keep forgetting it. We avoid the sordid details to our own peril. We live in the heart of the hell of war and don’t even know it. But some do. Some know that hell is of our own construction.

“…half the story has never been told/but now you see the light/you better stand up for your rights/most people say, great God will come from the sky/take away everything, and make everybody feel high/but if you know what life is worth/you will look for yours on earth”…

Ah, hell war, and hate; there they are again. Do I hate? I don’t think so. I can’t think of anybody I hate…I don’t let myself feel that one emotion. It’s too dangerous. I can see how a Jew can hate Hitler and a Palestinian hate a Jew and so on…but I don’t feel that myself…there’s nobody I want to destroy even if they’ve already been destroyed…there are things I’d like to change though…but I know you can never destroy an idea…ideas continue living in your own head even if you kill everybody who thinks them…ideas are as Eternal as you are…and you can’t make lovey-dovey with a homicidal maniac so how can you negotiate? It's an insoluble contradiction even a paradox…Cormac McCarthy couldn’t make the Taliban war any more despicable bleak or uglier...I believe reports of rapes of women and male captives…especially of boys…well what do you expect?...a religion that prevents boys from knowing girls by means of violent death?…what did you think?...a religion that stones a woman for showing her face? Onanism must be endemic…masturbation and sadistic sex the common affair of deprived males growing up. The men don’t understand the women at all. The women understand them only too well.

Onanism: Masturbation; coitus interruptus; self-gratification; onanistic. (for those unfamiliar with the term.)

The American people are too disengaged from the actual war to understand how war is destroying them…they don’t see it…or maybe they sense it when reading layoff notices and filing job applications…when they read bulletin boards over the shoulders of dozens of other job-seekers…when their cars are towed because they couldn’t afford auto insurance anymore…when $10 barely buys a meal…when they learn that the war has already cost nearly a trillion dollars…or maybe they know it but shrug it off like other things they can’t do anything about.

The whole war is a Great Masturbation. After the orgasm, exhaustion; a vague sense of disquiet, and time-wasted.

And what to do? Don’t ask me. I don’t know what to do other than protest and keep on keeping on.

That’s why President Barack Obama fascinates me…he seems to think that he knows what he's doing…he never quits…I think he intends to give them a thrashing, build some infrastructure, deliver a stern lecture, and leave…he’s moves on the world stage with the confidence of a tuned athlete in and out of every event with perfect balance proper words and subtle humor...he keeps me laughing even when I'm dissatisfied with the policy…the opposition whipped up by the hatemongering right wing media gets nastier everyday…but he doesn’t lose his cool…he’s the President…he’s in charge…he has to set a good example...he never returns an insult…he won’t lower himself or the Office…he tells it like it is: FOX isn’t a news organization…it’s a political organization…why should he let them in the White House?…who elected FOX? …the brave and direct honesty of it blows my mind. The applause of millions.

Lou Dobbs and Glen Beck take the hint and choose a logical path past the dilemma of exclusion…he won’t let them in the White House so they want his job… they’re running for President! Ha, ha! It’s a hoot…every dumbass in the country will vote for them…or for Sarah…if they can get out of the saloon that day…Yee haw I’m proud to be a redneck from Brokeback Butte…” Look honey, she’s just like us. She don’t know shit.” The joke is that it will turn the Republican Party into a banana-split with nuts and whipped cream.

I have a real old friend from the Marine Corps who thinks Michele Obama is the ugliest First Lady in history. Go figure. I can’t help but laugh at his poor dumb racist ass; that the only thing he sees is the color of her skin, and thinks it ugly…whew…talk about retarded; but I love him anyway. I good-naturedly answered that she’s the most-beautiful woman I ever saw in the White House. I pointed out her genuine smile and obvious love for her family, her generous heart, concern for others, and intelligent discourse. I said I even felt some love for her. My friend laughed it off saying he always knew I was nuts. Then I told him Obama is the best President I ever saw, and that confirmed it for him. We’re still friends though. I’m not a fanatic; I can’t let politics interfere with friendship. I might be nuts, but I know which side my bread is buttered on, and my friends are few-enough already.

Obama’s foes are attacking from every side. Any little thing will do. The daily lies of “death panels”…”socialism”…”dictator”…”tyranny”…”traitor”…"communist"...”legal citizenship”…and yesterday a criticism of his "irritating" overuse of the term, “unprecedented.” They call his speeches “lectures;” and wish they could lecture so well. But they can’t burn him down because he’s stolen their fire. Now he has the flame…he is the flame…and,

“He’s the strongest nigger in the world.” (Rush Limbaugh; quoted by an anonymous source on the internet.)

They can’t get over it, and it scares the hell out of them. Ha, ha! Ha, ha!

I never had so much fun playing armchair politician.

Comments

Anonymous said…
How can you agree with a president that won't get us out of the Afghan War? The war you claim to hate. The innocent dying everyday? Is he really different than any other president other than his skin color? Look deeper than skin color that you claim others only see.
And about Fox News--it is called freedom of the press. Is that a freedom you want gone? It does not matter if you agree with that news media or not--it is about freedom. A freedom that men died for us to have. If it were a "liberal" news media or radio news that was told the same, would you feel differently? I suggest you pull your head out and listen, really listen to what is being said and the freedoms that can be so easily lost, yet those who died, died in vain.
Mike Havenar said…
FOX makes no pretense to objectivity; it is clearly a political network. Its lies are easily researched and found false. And it is not about "freedom of the press" because FOX is NOT the press. Neither is it about freedom, or honoring the men and women who fight and die. Yes I hate war. I also know enough about the process to understand that a precipitous withdrawal at this point would leave a worse situation. It also would further splinter our political pocess, leaving space for a genuine nut to take over. Infrastructure in Afghanistan needs rebuilding before we leave, because we have done almost nothing in that regard for the Afghans; and after all, we and the Soviet Union caused the destruction. My mind is open. I don't tolerate lies from liberals any more than from conservatives. Read back in the blog and you will find plenty of contempt for liberals.
Essay said…
Thanks for sharing, your blog is worth reading, nice post. Keep it up.

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