I came across this at Antiwar.com, and thought I'd share it with you. It's quite terrifying. I only ask, rhetorically, Does it presage a world war?
One prays not. One prays till one's knees are ground to dust, not. And in my heart, I don't think a world war can happen. But in my heart of hearts, when I hear that India, China and Russia are angling for a "multipolar world" free of American influence - an influence, I cannot stress enough, which has been the reality for the my entire life, yours, yours, everyone's; we're used to a world living under America's lampshade, we're used to being the lords of the international manor - and, further, contemplate Putin's speech over the weekend castigating America, really tearing America's guts out, well, I can't help but think that those countries are doing what was absolutely etched in stone, what they were going to do and nobody saw it coming, really: they were going to use up a lot of resources. And America is used to using those resources. Beyond used to it. America absolutely desperately and vitally fucking needs those resources. We have a great fiction, you see, powered exclusively by resources the world over...
We are on brinks, right now. War with Iran is all but certain. There are precedents for what's almost definitely going to happen - it's called war, involving a lot of the world - but there aren't precedents for the possible levels of carnage. I mean, imagine the "frothy marvels, singing their songs/the ones the wind blows through the bombs" (Sanger) of nuclear weapons going off. That's the rather unfortunate world we are heading toward, full speed ahead. I think we are in the grip of a rather poetic version of hard times - no; that's not right. It's not a grip yet. It's a grip that seeks bone, because from bone, powder, and from that powder, immortality...yesterday I wrote about what motivates people like John McCain and Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton in the desperate lunge toward the presidency, namely, the four prongs that make up power: privilege, status, prestige and wealth. Then, if horrifying shit goes down and scythes and shotguns rule the day, and bombings are daily realities, if you're president, you're safe. You are in there. And you're in there if you're a good 'n high Senator, or a Supreme Court judge. You are part of the landowner's class. You are in charge of the New Serfs™ - you know, the good 90% that don't own the country lock, stock and barrel, that dance on your strings per your whims. Post-hideous nuclear (or other) nightmare, you're safe with the best doctors in an impenetrable place, all the latest weapons ringing your ass but proper. You are bug-in-a-fucking-rug mother's milk safe. And the New Serfs™? Slaughtering each other, sectarian like. Doing it up Hobbesian style. Doing it up, as Burroughs said, real tasty.
Now, pre-horrifying nuclear (or other) tragedy, just open Whole Foods stores and keep the material things a-coming, 'cause that'll keep the New Serfs™ straight in line. They were groomed, for generations, to consume; nobody consumes like the New Serfs™. So just keep those distractions and entertainments and laughs and gadgets and movies and music and pop trash and suburban tragedies a-coming, and you can lounge the days away, you lucky politicians. You "god-bedreamed things of yore" (Reynolds, on a bender with Johnson) are suprahuman, beyond our grasp or measuring. Your dynasties are real, and set up for a reason, and it is truly as it seems.
I'll end this with a poet I like named Cramden - a professional poet, if you can believe it (on the city payroll yet!). His story is worth 10,000 diaries. Anyway, sometimes he asks me to turn his verse into prose "because it seems too real, and I can't take it." He wanted me to do that with this poem, but I refused. Here it is as it was written:
Seven shadows on the door
in the sun's
crucifying heat.
We lean on our armor,
smoke rising
from our eyes.
On the dash,
Franklin's postcard,
from his mother. Seems she'd
found a poem he'd written
in a drawer
and burst into hot tears.
"It's okay though,"
she said,
in the postcard on the dash.
"You're alive, that's all I know."
And he was alive,
until the sniper fired,
and his head was
blown from his shoulders.
"War, always my death" - Timmy, to Hector