The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
May 29th
WAR
is DAMN HEALTHY for POLITICIANS and CERTAIN OTHERS of the MARCHING DEAD!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
First thing young
pols learn to do is play the V-chip, seeing as Americans are dog-bedazzled with
the fireworks of war and crime... one might almost call the violence our
pornography of virtue. (Some Damnocrats as blame the
high school shootings on it even want to pry the guns out of the cold, yet
still sentient hands of whomever survives the ongoing
Wayne LaPierre - Ollie North putsch over there at Not
Really Animated!) Him as manages and
massages this bloodlusty instinct is well along the
road to election and re-elections in certain portions of the country if no
longer at the end of the road, the White House (tho’,
if not, a plush sinecure as a defense or NRA lobbyist).
The greater the
participatory distance from real wars, as World War II, (arguably Korea and
Vietnam, less so Iraq I and II, Afghanistan, Yemen and Costa Rica) and lower
the real crime rate plunges (except as rages in a few, easily identifiable and
avoidable no-man's lands and a carefully calibrated atrocity indices such as
Buffalo and Uvalde)... the greater swells public fascination as almost starts
bleeding over into hope for a murderous future and impotent rage when President
Joe sticks to his NATO protocols and let Mad Vlad Putin
continue his massacres in the Ukraine. Face it, we're bored... bored and
envious sheltering in place while watching all those dashing cops and robbers,
car crashes and explosions, SEALs and spies and coroners as style and profile
from our television and… when and if they ever open again… our movie screens. Even the villains… when they’re so fuckin’
suave…
Sam Spade. Perry
Mason. James Bond. Tony Manuzzo. John Wayne... John
Wayne Gacy, too, even that Doctor Evil, from that
Wayne’s World/Austin Powers IV mashup, with his recently departed midget
sidekick replaced by that guy from “Game of Thrones” as finally took a
seven-figure paycheck to cut his hair. These digital titans… well, maybe not the
little person… they sneer at our scrimping, saving little lives and squandered
dreams, our afflicted families, our inability to go for the gusto as now has
been reduced to going to stand in line for a sno-cone
at the maskless beach (see current take on masculinity, risk and
responsible-ness from the folks at a DJI two-some years ago).
When they cross over
into the half-world of real people, as seen on news and tabloid TV, we envy their
celebrity. It's been said that tragedy recurs as farce... in life and
gubernatorial affairs as in TV... the male modlish guy
with the talk show Republican ex followin’ Moonbeam, followin’Conan the Barbarian followin'
Mister-Who-Cares, the Impeachment-boy followin’
Duke and the Nannigator and Moonbeam, again, as guv'nors of Kahlifornya, and himself
set up to be challenged, stage left, by the blonde from the sitcom in while the
guy from Law and Order Somewhere reaches for the elephant’s brass ring. New York, where Weiner and Weinstein and
Spitzer the spritzer were taken seriously, like that
vomiting lesbian in the primaries (to the Big Apple’s credit, they proved a
little smarter than in Toronto). Al
Qaida (which came as no surprise to those of us as who'd grown up with SMERSH
and THRUSH) devolving into loser amalgams of Maxwell Smart and Johnny
Knoxville, blowing up shoes. underwear and toupees and being disrespected on
their own home turf by ISIS, which was slicker and younger, more thickly
bearded and Internet savvy enough to push aside the old Moustache Moustafas, but proving stupid enough to declare a Caliphate
where they could be pinned down and more or less wiped out, theretofore
replaced by lone wolf teenagers contaminated by too much social media exposure.
Our press-ganged National Guarders goin' into the seventh year of two-year hitches get killed
down in Central America on account of Presidents Trump and the Congress not
raising the budget to hire more boots on the ground; Sleepy Joe rails “stay the
course” and Americans buying yellow ribbon "Support Our Troops" refrigerator
magnets which – as turn out, when turned over, to be made over in China?
Few years back, when
Iraquagmire Two was new, someone said why not make
honest ribbons of 'em by hiring two million laid off Red Army Chinese as
mercenaries at ten cents on the dollar - oh yeah, it was me! Had 'em a good laugh, back then, not laughin'
now with the scrimpin' an' dividin'
between the detritus of Dubyama's wars of choice, Mad
Vlad and Oui Xi’s wars of
conquest, Brump’s blundering on the homefront and consequences like the six goin’
on seven dollar gas on account of Ukraine rising to nine amidst the pipeline sabotagin’ beneath the Baltic and among the Sunnis (or, maybe,
the Russians) in Saudi Arabia and those other little places on the Gulf boycottin’ over the Trumpster and
Putin cuttin’ that not-so-secret deal to pitch the Kurds
against the Turks a’fore they could. President Biden calls
it payback for chopping up that newspaper guy from Bozo’s Washington Post while
he flails around in the dark, trying to grow and throw more mushroom-money at
people without repealing Trump’s tax cuts for the billionaires, thanks to a few
DINOs in his own party…
And then there’s the ten buck a dozen eggs, the homeless Joneses on
every corner due to rents rising twice as fast as wages, the ADHD and flu drug shortage,
baby formula and... as ever... the plague (now
complemented by something called the RSVP, as well as goddam
Monkeypox!).
The greatest and
strongest life,
Our mojo, as Dr. Evil
might call it.
We march off to war
in Iraq, Afghanistan and Costa Rica with pushbuttons, doublecrossed
Kurds and fifth deployment National Guardsmen, drones and Haitian mercenaries, we
kick ass, then get bogged down in Syrian "nation building" so that Iraniacs and the Russians have to pull our nuts out'n the fire while they’re snarfing up all of that
confidential military loot we left behind; vote agin'
raising taxes to fight these wars so see our dollar racing those euros to the
bottom, below even the effin’ Canadians, then simper:
"Is that all there is?" When
tension over the plague passes the boiling point, we send our armies of
occupation back to roam ‘round shooting people and getting blown up by IEDs as
cost maybe a dollar to make while all the poor, as lost their doctors and their
feet and food, start up to riotin’ agin’ the fifteen National Guardsmen still left to police
and protect America.
We don't want to pay for prisons, but still love our Wars
on Crime, drugs, gay bridegrooms 'n Mexican gardeners, as well as all these other
wars Washington's so fond of declaring: on cancer, illiteracy, sugary sodas,
litigation, Doctors Seuss and Fauci (whom the
“responsible” Republican Congress is trying to send to prison… ultimately the incumbent President’s asinine "War on
Violence". So we contract with the
private prison gangs to bury the Covid Omega Variant
dead and write more IOUs to pay the tab. The partisan parties plot partisan sorties,
assassinating SCOTUS judges, then filibustering spiteful nominees (like Roy
Moore, for one) as aren’t fit to be judges anyway and kick cans on down the
road, bringing back the chain gangs and coat hanger abortions...
To be fair,
sometimes Entropy trips over said empty can, falls down and breaks its hip. Texas is the latest state to
revoke their red light cameras because drivers breaking to screeching stops caused
more rear-end accidents than ever transpired at Neverland. And Georgia’s brief anti-jaywalking crackdown
filled local jails with so many stumblebum 2AM pedestrians sentenced to twenty
days of three hots and a cot that dangerous criminals
had to be released to accommodate them and counties started going broke even
before some of these… as had families rich enough to hire lawyers… died of
plague in their cells, engendering lawsuits so numerous that our courts won’t
be able to sort them out until 2027.
Don Jones may tout tort
reform and bother‘bout insurance
re-regulation; tough and sensible policies on crime, universal national
service and prudent deployment of our military forces, fixing the
deficit by tax increases and service
cuts. Never let America, again, be afraid to ask... 'Why not the both?'
Still, all these remain
substitutes, and pretty pallid ones, for the real deal. "The plain truth
is that people want war..." opined
William James, a century back, "...it is the final bouquet of life's
fireworks. The born soldier wants it hot and actual. The non-combatant wants it
in the background, and always as an open possibility, to feed his imagination.
War is human nature at its uttermost. We are here to do our uttermost. It is a
sacrament. Society would rot without the mystical blood-payment." (On the other hand, maybe it was Tulsi Gabbard!)
Thing is about war
is... you need enemies, preferably semi-competent ones as have the
decency to stand and fight and die, courageously (though your PR propaganda
folks never say so), maybe five or ten minutes away from the late-nite news, leaving room for wrap-up, a homecoming kiss and
commercial. Instead, George III (the American one as followed his Dad and, back
when, the British monarch as dressed his troops in bright red and had them
ordered to march in formation against the colonial resistance at Yorktown)
instituted his doctrine of random intervention as his Weapon of Mass
Distraction, but we declined to provide our troops in Baghdad with decent body
armor and, once their limbs got blown off, Pentagon bean-counters started
billing our wounded soldiers for their treatment and the families of the dead
for their last plane trip to the airport side by the President’s bunker in
Dover, Delaware. That's left us colonies of amputee vets, living under bridges
and in their cars and an understandable shortage in warm bodies willing to be
voluntarily sent off to die in hot places, despite all those free cheeseburgers
and chicken salads on Veterans’ Day. And
when those as come home all shot and bombed-up try to get into a V.A. hospital,
we crucify the truth-tellers as compare the process to those lines at
Disneyland. See no evil, hear no evil,
speak no evil!
Today’s Angry Young Men
would rather march around our State Capitols, vowing determination to fight for
their right to party. At
close quarters, and maskless.
The big-O did something
right a few years back… or, rather, his Navy Seals did… I do believe that
Admiral McRaven drilled that other big-O, no matter what Donald Trump says to
justify his inability to stop the terrorists beyond calling them “lone wolves”
(as if lone wolves won’t pick off a lone sheep or piggy, puppy or human infant
now and again). Meanwhile the oilies are raising their prices, not ‘cause of scarcity, they
say, but “fear”. (Not to mention Article
42 that Muscat Pact signed down there in Oh-Man between the Russians and the Saudies and Iran, Iraq and Venezuela – Norway and Brunei
and other places where the oil gushes up out of the ground when you try to dig
a grave. At least Canada stayed on our
side, tho’ the temptation not to do so must have been
fierce,) So the number one agent of
fear sleeps with the fishies – does Johnny Jihad go
back to his cave, do gas prices stay down? The suits send our troops running in and out of
Iraq and Afghanistan like Redcoats from New Orleans into Central America without
our getting even a single 99-year lease on a base to keep an eye on what needs keepin’ an eye on… do the goons at the airports and subways
platforms stop probing Granny out’n the fear, and the
desire not to be seen as profilin’ anyone – least of young, foreign males with
fuzzy beards, wearing big, bulky overcoats in July and holding passports from
the imaginary Gaza Republic?
"Too many are
leaving the services," warns retired Colonel Robert Simpson, "too few
going in. Time, money and efficiency go down the drain as new people must be
trained for the same duties, over and over."
Colonel Simpson, not
unlike a growing contingent of both far-left and far-right Congressmen,
advocates bringing back the draft, which I have ambivalence about... altho', as Clarence Page suggested in the Chicago Tribune,
it would turn Congressional trips home "into a far more bracing
experience". Given our hatred of our own kids, especially those as don't
qualify for deferments by reason of poverty, color or lack of brains (or a lack
of money to train what brains they have), I suspect gumment
would find or make more wars somewheres, to consume
those whose student loans have been interested away to Valhalla now that the
Coronavirus gates are open again while such jobs as pay survival wages or
better are lost to the pandemic have flown off to said hot places or else to
Robbie the Robot... I do think a twelve (or, if the Bidencession
continues, twenty-four) month toe-in-the-water compulsory national service
hitch following their last year of high school would do a world
of good to all of America's shiftless youth – them going on that
pipeline to Princeton, to Popeye’s or to prisons. Some would, then, choose to
stay on and receive college tuition credits for further service on a
one-year-to-one basis and maybe learn the actual tools of warcraft, or go back
to their communities trained and organized to serve on local vigilance
committees (heck, call ‘em militias since the donkeys and the elephants already
do), such as are growing out of the CNC as opposed to some of… well, Austin’s a
friend but some of his prouder boys burning down mosques without probable cause
- that gets troubling. This would
honor our Second Amendment, not as exists in the addled minds of some folks too
long in DeeCee or Hayden Lake or the Upper Peninsula
of Michigan, but as was actually writ...
"A well-regulated militia, being necessary
to the security of a
We, let alone the
decadent Euros, Chinese germ cookers, Russian cyberhackers,
fanatic Islamaniacs and the rest of the world, should
never be allowed to forget: we're those f*****g
Americans, as wrote the damn Constitution after busting loose from
England at its noontime of colonial epoch, knocked out Germany twice and
outlasted the Soviet Communism in a seventy round… year-round… bare-knuckles
brawl. We are the world's last empire... three times the
megatonnage of the non-Soviet rest of the world, combined, and an economic
engine that still (despite an amazing forty-plus year experiment… since the
twenty second of November more’n half a century ago…
in downsizing, devolution, dyscompetency and distress
that's left our dollar pegged at forty-six Eurocents – (and that with the Frexit ahead in the polls over there, the Euro down to
about a quarter of its former self since the Spanish Civil War II broke hot and
the Irish apparently following Portugal, Italy and Greece into receivership)
remains the envy of most of our adversaries.
What the blue hell are
we doing... letting U.N. blue berets in to patrol our streets,
as if we were Kosovars or Ugandans or rubble-dwelling patriots of Kherson? Waddling
blind into Iraq because one President was pissed because Saddam put out a
contract on his father (not that I'm against family loyalty) and wanting to
show up the old man by marching into Baghdad only to have to watch the Big O dither,
The Donald collaborate with Russia to let ISISists and
Iraniacs carve up that property over the graves of
thousands of dead Americans and hundreds of thousands of dead civilians once the
polls started turnin’ sour while President Biden is sniffing
the poisoned posies of liberalism - carving up Third World hellholes being our
specialty/ Why not have a Sunni nation
aligned with the Saudis, a Shiite bunch cozy with Tehran and, for Allah’s sake,
don’t the Kurds deserve their own plot of land, no matter how Turkey might
gobble? Letting shyster attorneys,
ravenous Wall Street termites and thieving HMOs rampage up and down our country
like students on Spring Break! The rest of the world's our poodle... and it's
time we shaved their butts, tied a purty yellow
ribbon ‘round their throats, then made them sit up and beg!
But, first, we have to
suck in our bellies and raise the funds necessary to police this godawful
untidy world. And, I'll nominate our war-profiteering media to go to the head
of the line for tax increases... our networks, Fox News and CNN, the both, the
advertising jerkoffs, social mediocrities and videogame moguls and them as
import them yellow magnets and little plastic "Jungle Squall" or
“Wachovia Forever” soldiers from Beijing.
And, lest you
forget, come my first Thanksgiving Day in office,
a year from nowabouts, I will personally take an axe
to the neck of that overfed, complacent donated Presidential turkey like them
rescue birds defecating all over the floors of nursing homes or the two of ‘em soilin’ up the carpets at that Washington DC hotel before
they join that flock now gobblin’ their lives away on
George Washington’s old spread. No more pardons for Bread and Butter, Peanut
Butter, Jelly, Relish or Sauerkraut! And, post an inscription up above the entrances
to all our military bases as recalls the unsavory lesson my Pa taught when I
was young and arrogant, potting weasels and sparrows out behind the barn and
forcing me to devour my prizes... "Eat What You Kill!"
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