The Monster Won't Be Televised

I never could stand that John Kerry. As soon as the senator was nominated I said Good God. What a pompous horse's ass. I'll never forget that rich son of a bitch sitting before the Fulbright Foreign Affairs Committee, telling about soldiers and marines "cutting off ears" and "pulling out teeth" for souvenirs. What an asshole. Not a word about some of the senators sitting on that committee, who voted and kept voting for the war and every supportive measure. Not a word about Walter Rostow or Robert McNamara or McGeorge Bundy, or the other smartass muckedy-mucks who made the war in the first place, including his great friend John F. Kennedy. Even Fulbright himself had been a big supporter, though he turned against it eventually--sort of. Only Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska had the foresight and guts to vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, one of the biggest lies in history, giving the President authority for 24-hour bombing of North Vietnam; a tactic they knew would fail. Bombed populations only become infuriated and go underground. World War Two proved that.

The North Vietnamese were better-organized than an ant colony, because they had been through the shit with the French and knew Americans would attack them next. Americans who still think we lost the war because of our own mistakes won't admit or even think about the intelligence and skill of the Vietnamese communists, in anticipating and preparing for their every move, and exploiting their every mistake. They were ready to fight a hundred-year war and lose 29 million people and said so. Nobody took them seriously until they had shot down 49 B-52s, 300 Phantom jets, and 3,000 helicopters, and killed (supposedly) 58,000 Americans. Even then we blamed it all on the Soviets and Chinese. It was like the British blaming the French and the Dutch for the American Revolution; as if the Vietnamese had nothing to do with it.

When the NVA moved SAM missile batteries and tanks into South Vietnam, it was all over for American "air superiority" in the South. After all the war was against the South. Even the retarded American government knew it couldn't invade the North, because then it really would have gotten an ass-kicking.



Three-point-five million Vietnamese human beings bombed shot burned garroted stabbed beaten thrown from helicopters and starved to death, just in Vietnam; another million "wasted" in Laos in a "secret war" that lasted ten years and halved the country's population. Then two-point-five million more in Pol Pot's atrocity in Cambodia, which we unleashed with a "secret bombing campaign" of at least two years, which destroyed traditional village infrastructure, and let uncultured teenaged murderers run amok over a hitherto peaceful and orderly society.

And not one official investigation by the Congress or any other legal body into the causes and conduct of the war, or charges against the guilty bastards who had sounded the battle charge. Much less a trial and a hanging. The American people? They didn't want to hear it and still don't; to which I say, tough shit.

What an arrogant lot of ignorant intellectual cowards most of the American people are. They don't know shit and don't want to know. Most of them are near-slaves of one sort or another, afraid to open their mouths when they do disagree, because they will surely lose their jobs, families, friends and whatever else one loses when one is out of favor work money and luck in a "democracy."



Yes, yes, I know, there are millions opposed and hundreds of thousands actively working to change it all...still outnumbered by the complacent selfish overworked frightened aforementioned Ignorami, and by half-committed distracted disordered reckless and sadface clowns like me.

And now the same thing is happening in Afghanistan, not to mention what is still going down in Iraq, where we invaded how many years ago? And how many Iraqis dead wounded homeless jobless and infuriated? Nobody knows it appears. It could be 500,000 or a million or more; ho hum who's counting and what's for dinner dear? The poor are poorer, the homeless are colder, and war-makers are buying extra houses and stocking them with toys. Yet everyone is beyond reproach. We are all fine people. Future psychological and physical impairment of a whole generation of Iraqi youth doesn't compute because it isn't considered. Or maybe it was by the monsters of war.

Despite the boastful energy-wasting embarrassing glitter of a thousand Times Squares, Americans are dressed for mourning. Why else do they wear so much black? I nearly run over a dozen of them a night, as they flit before my taxi like blurry shadows, without contrast to black streets beneath a black sky. The bright colors of the Sixties are barely remembered in New York. I get a feeling sometimes everybody is in hiding. I try to look in their eyes and most of them look away. The only ones who look back steadily are those who know they are in prison, no where to go, nothing to lose, and having to deal with whatever comes before their eyes.

In case you didn't know this now you do. In case you did it's a reminder: Beneath the benign masks of the oh-so-concerned government officials, devoted to the point of rabidity to "protecting American lives," "defending freedom" and "the American way of life" (luxury pride and ignorance,) a stinking monster of uncanny proportions squats over a perfumed sewer, hydra-headed, uglier than Pat Robertson, dripping with choking raw blood and pustulent rottenness from blasted human guts. I've seen it; a lot of us have seen it.

The monster shits landmines with a satanic smile, seems immortal, is accepted as normal, and is completely insane. A domestic house cat has more conscience. A tiger has more compassion. Maybe you saw it once and couldn't believe your eyes. Maybe you saw it and forgot. Maybe you never saw it at all. Just wait. You will. You'll see.

But it won't be on television this time.