What horseshit.
$50,000 for a dead child. And $11,000 for one who is merely "injured."
What horseshit.
My daughter, injured, gravely, permanently, for the rest of her life, not intentionally, but through but the way of the world, awarded $500,000.
Not, in her case, nearly enough.
But. Still.
Some drunken crazed racist asshat fires a bullet through her head, she winks into extinction, and she is paid off as if she is worth but $50,000?
No.
This nation is a goddam stinking morgue.
I don't have the time or the space, at this place in my life, to really do this, the way it should be done.
I will instead just proffer something I worked at, some several many months ago.
An intro, I wrote then, only. For something intended, then, eventually, to wind out at tens of thousands of words. But seems now, maybe, right, for the stinking-death-uber-alles place, in which this nation now dwells.
To begin, we must enter a time machine, and retreat to:
September 16, 2001: in those first heady, halcyon days of the War On Terra, George II stepped out of his helicopter onto the South Lawn of the White House, there to inform the scribblers assembled:
[W]e need to be alert to the fact that these evil-doers exist. We haven't seen this kind of barbarism in a long period of time. No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in the same day to fly their aircraft—fly U.S. aircraft into buildings full of innocent people—and show no remorse. This is a new kind of—a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.
The crusader spirit was then atavistically rampant across the land. Recall that on the evening of September 11, members of Congress publicly called upon the crusader deity to bless and preserve the nation,
singing "God Bless America" on the steps of the US Capitol.
George II was particularly enamored of the crusader notion. This a man who ran for president because his god told him to. Who doesn't much listen to other human beings—yea, verily, not even his own father—but instead takes counsel from his "higher Father."
Who in early 2003, appealing to their "common faith," informed French President Jacques Chirac that Iraq must be invaded and conquered to thwart "Gog and Magog": "[t]he biblical prophecies are being fulfilled; [t]his confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies[.]"
Who later in 2003 delivered a similar message to Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath: "I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.' And I did."
Who had wanted to be "a war president," and who now, by golly, was; his sacred task, as he framed it, also there on September 16, 2001, to "rid the world of the evil-doers."
Party.
However, some in the court of George II, those who had read and understood history books, were nervous about the "crusade" business.
They accepted that they could never get George II off his "evil" fixation (the man a binary-encaged Manichean, either/or to the bone; see, as example, "[e]ither you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"). But "crusade," they knew, would tend to seriously rile several hundred million people, people already inclined to regard the United States as a sort of witless Baby Huey, piously believing itself under the protection of an Almighty Beard-Winged Celestial Paperweight, as it lumbered about the globe raining bombs upon whomever it decreed to be Wrong.
These several hundred million people retained a historical memory of crusaders as a motley crew of true believers, opportunists, looters, and fifteen-cylinder freak-flag-flying nutters, who, over the course of some 200 years, periodically boiled out of Europe to rampage south on a mission to "free the holy places." They were beaten like gongs, these crusaders, every time, but they left behind a lot of bad memories.
Besides bent on butchering Muslims, or anyone else perceived as Weird or Brown, these crusaders would occasionally pause at their labors to slaughter Jews and "Eastern" Christians. They uprooted, stole, and carted away anything and everything that weighed less than the Pyramids. They evinced a peculiar fondness for eating the dead bodies of their enemies.
And so on.
As Arab historian Osama Ibn Mungidh wrote, crusaders were regarded as "beasts superior in courage and fighting ardor but in nothing else, just as animals are superior in strength and aggression."
And they did all this, these crusaders, for the greater glory of their god.
In Arabic, the word for "crusader" is still clearly seen to contain as root word "cross." Arabic speakers, then, know exactly what the word "crusade" invokes: holy war on behalf of the Sauloid conception of Jesus of Nazareth.
As George Saliba, a scholar of medieval Islamic history at Columbia University in New York, observed in the wake of George II's September 16, 2001 pronouncement of his new crusade: "It says, 'I will recruit God to my side.'"
Too, Osama bin Laden had already monikered his outfit "The World Islamic Front Against Jews And Crusaders."
George II, then, with his South Lawn mouthings, blundered eyes wide shut right into that: "We Are The Crusaders You've Been Waiting For."
Finally, there existed Mean People, like Sheikh Yassin of Hamas, ready to remind these new, would-be crusaders, that they should "look back at the experience of the crusades. In the end, they were defeated."
And so those in the court of George II who had read history books, persuaded the rest that it would be best to can the "crusade" talk. Put a cork in it. George II, and his people, were, over the course of their War On Terra, mostly content to sound instead numberless variations on "evil." The fuller Reality—that these people did indeed believe themselves on crusade—was shut up in a box.
Occasionally, of course, a particularly fervent crusader would come flying right out of the box. As when General William Boykin, former functionary of the Delta Force sickness, crusader in Iran, Panama, Grenada, Columbia, Somalia, Iraq, and points unknown, partial architect of the War on Terra mutation of the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program, did wander the land, informing the faithful of such Essential Truths as the decision of De Lord to deliberately place George II in the White House, for "we're a Christian nation[,] and the enemy is a guy named Satan," and, as he told one Somali Muslim, "I kn[o]w my God [i]s bigger than [yours]. I kn[o]w that my God [i]s a real God, and [yours] [i]s an idol."
Or when we are recurrently reminded that the US military is rotten with Christian dominionists, spiritual heirs of the fifteen-cylinder freak-flag-flying nutters who rampaged across the "Holy Land," all those centuries ago.
For, in truth, it's all kabuki: that the United States, in its War on Terra, is not a crusader nation. All bollocks. Crusaders they are, crusaders forever shall they be.
We learned most recently that the crusader spirit still animates the War on Terra in the August 8 New Yorker, in Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden."
This piece informs us on three essential matters.
First, as touched on here, the nation's military, and its intelligence agencies, are today as one. The wall of separation that once divided the two has, like the wall of separation intended to divide church from state, crumbled into dust.
Though purportedly a military operation, the Abbottabad assassination of Osama bin Laden was run out of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. This, it seems, was hardly anything new.
"These people grew up together," a senior Defense Department official told Schmidle. "We are in each other's systems, we speak each other's language."
Former CIA Assistant General Counsel John Radsan told Schmidle that the bin Laden raid marked "a complete incorporation of [special forces] into a CIA operation." And, vice versa.
Second, and notwithstanding the bumbling, three-legged messaging hobbling out of the White House at the time, the assault on bin Laden's home in Abbottabad was quite definitely an assassination mission. When bin Laden was shot (in the chest) and killed (bullet blasting open his brain), this is how it was:
A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden's chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed.
"There was never any question of detaining or capturing him," a special-operations officer told Schmidle. "No one wanted detainees."
Third, bin Laden was assassinated by a crusader.
The first round, a 5.56mm bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, "For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo." After a pause, he added, "Geronimo E.K.I.A."—"enemy killed in action."
"For God and country."
So what, exactly, makes this crusader, who killed bin Laden, any different from a Muslim who takes life with "Allahu Akbar" on his lips?
Nothing. There is no difference. They are the same.
One kills a human being, who did exist, on behalf of one variant of the Almighty Beard-Winged Celestial Paperweight, who never existed.
The other kills a human being, who did exist, on behalf of another variant of the Almighty Beard-Winged Celestial Paperweight, who never existed.
But perhaps—maybe you're thinking—this crusader who killed bin Laden was some sort of rogue element, a non-representative Christianist freakazoid, not reflective of the military as a whole.
No. So sorry.
For according to Schmidle, the unit containing the crusader who killed bin Laden consists of but 300 people. Nearly 50, or one-sixth, were deployed, in some capacity, on the mission to assassinate bin Laden.
And on May 6 of last year, President Obama met with all those people. At which time they presented Obama with an American flag: three-by-five, stretched, ironed, and framed. They had affixed their signatures to the back. On the front were the words: "From The Joint Task Force Operation Neptune's Spear, 01 May 2011: 'For God And Country. Geronimo.'"
And so we see: they're all crusaders. Every one. Indistinguishable from those waging war with souls aflame for Allahu Akbar.
Crusaders killing for one variant of the Almighty Beard-Winged Celestial Paperweight; jihadists killing for another.
No difference. None at all. They are the same.
Obama told the crusaders assembled that he would stash their relic "somewhere private and meaningful to me."
Wrong.
What he should do, is stuff their relic into an old tire, haul the tire out onto the White House lawn, douse it with lighter fluid, and set it on fire.
It is time to end the US military.
There is no reason for it.
The United States is at peace with its neighbors, Canada and Mexico. Therefore, it does not need an army. So the army should be eliminated.
The Founders did not, anyway, intend this country to maintain a standing army. Which is why the Constitution specifically prohibits army appropriations of more than two years. No such prohibition, on any other expenditure, appears anywhere in that document. This was something they felt strongly about. Strongly about it also should we feel.
As the only legitimate use for an air force is in support of ground troops, the Air Force should be eliminated as well.
The Marines need to be folded back into the Navy, from whence they came; Marines are support troops for, and crazed amphibious invaders from, ships; that's all they are; that they are sent to fight in landlocked countries like Afghanistan, is madness.
Since the US already possesses a Coast Guard, perfectly capable of patrolling the waters of the continental United States (Alaska and Hawaii are imperial possessions, and should be encouraged to break free, as should all overseas territories, possessions, protectorates, and the like), the US should go ahead and get rid of the Navy, too. Marines and all. Make a clean sweep.
If such a thing were to be accomplished in stages, of course the Marines would be the first to go. As Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a more or less decorated veteran of the United States armed forces, observed in 1987, upon the revelation that Marine guards at the US embassy in Moscow had been responsible for the most humiliating foul-up in the entire Clouseau-like history of American "intelligence":
The whole Marine Corps should be disbanded, finished off with other useless relics like the Sea-Bees, Hitler Youth and the Lafayette Esquadrille. The USMC has been useless as tits on a boar hog since 1951, when they led the famous “Inchon Landing” for Gen. Douglas MacArthur and saved America from total disgrace in Korea.
That was [60] years ago, and since then they have done little more than hang around foreign embassies like drunken peacocks and get the nation into trouble. The US Army’s 1st Airborne Division could eat the whole Marine Corps for breakfast and take the rest of the day off for beer and volleyball. The only solution to the “Marine problem” now is to croak the whole corps.
Abolishing the Marines would have no real effect on national military preparedness, and it would cut [billions] off the bloated national defense budget—which now must include the billions it will cost to raze the entire new US Embassy compound in Moscow and build another one—a huge concrete igloo with no windows, or maybe a deep underground bunker like the ones Albert Speer used to build. All we really need over there is a roomy place with no bugs or spies or sex-crazed whiskey-wild women from the KGB, or even the ghost of a US Marine. Res ipsa loquitur.
It will be a tall order, eliminating the US military. Because American culture is permeated with invocations of the will to slaughter. It is embraced in this nation, the will to slaughter, the military, lovingly. Ecstatically.
In early 1977, two films were in post-production at a film studio in England.
The first was Cross of Iron, which Orson Welles later pronounced, correctly, the finest anti-war film ever made. But when it was released, no one wanted to see it—except in Germany, where it was perceived, wrongly, as a vindication of the German army.
Down the hall from the Cross of Iron editing crew labored the Mordorites who inflicted upon the world Star Wars. A film that ebulliently spread mass sunny slaughter into outer space. That offered a final sequence which, as German director Wim Wenders noted, with no little outrage, aped frame-for-frame a celebrated portion of Triumph of the Will.
A film that opened with the obliteration of an entire world, and all the creatures on it, an event which the filmmakers asked the audience to accept with less emotion than the later Perils-of-Pauline tribulations of a pair of bumbling robots.
Nick an R2, and the heartstrings are tugged. Exterminate a planet, and the billions of people upon it, and blithely chew the snack-bar cud. So you’ll be ready, the day that they come for you, to tell you that it’s time to drag or be dragged, out on the killing floor.
Wenders, from his 1984 "The American Dream":
ENTERTAINMENT
The American State philosophy.
Entertainment: advertisement for America.
The German word for that is hardly comparable.
"Unterhaltung" is something nice.
"Entertainment" is a totalitarian thing.
The entertainment industry is probably already
the next biggest sector of the American economy
after armaments, so it's only logical
to suppose that one day
it will become the biggest economic factor bar none.
The more impossible and unthinkable wars become,
world-wide ones in particular,
the more evident world-wide entertainment will appear
as the "continuation of politics by other means."
A film like Star Wars, truly "entertaining,"
makes that perfectly clear, not only
because it's about war, not only
because it supplies new images of war
and a new mythology of war
to a whole generation of children "world-wide,"
but also
because in the end it reveals, in all innocence,
where those images come from and where they belong:
the final sequence is a faithful copy
of a sequence from Hitler's greatest propaganda film
Triumph of the Will.
See, the Triumph Of The Hope:
Wenders: a vision of the planet, in the event it does collapse, from a film seen in full-length, even 20 years after, only in Italy:
Meanwhile, a truly Real place:
It was never really my intention to make any sense in this Diary.
Post. Article. Piece. Scribbling. Effluvium. Rorshach blot. Whatever.
I'm elsewhere. Striving for the ship to come in.
However, as long as we're here, it should be noted that once the United States rids itself of its military, it will next must needs rid itself of itself.
In the long view, Europeans have not been on the North American continent all that long. And they should never have come here to begin with.
Terrence Malick knows about this. He made a film about it. New World.
At that film's close, inconstant adventurer John Smith encounters the woman he used, abused, lied to, and abandoned. After she had merely provided him with everything he might ever want or need. He had gone off from her in search of more land, more plunder, more conquest, more "glory"—in the paradise of "the Indies." Now, he has returned to chat her up.
Malick in his film never names this woman: she is meant to represent the North American continent.
Now, at film's end, she is tamed and tortured, spirit stifled, English-corseted. And dying.
She has not a word to say to her one-time, would-be beau. Until Smith asks:
"Did I make a mistake in coming here?"
To which she replies: "Did you find your Indies, John?"
"I may," he admits, "have sailed past them."
Absolutely goddam right.