That script shoots itself! Gimme 45 days.

They would not be satisfied if we built a Time Machine and got the troops out yesterday.

No, of course not, that would be silly.

If we had a time machine we would be busy using it to prevent Prescott Bush’s birth.

This day we rescue a world from Mysticism and Tyranny

let me fix that for you: “this day we rescue a world from one kind of mysticism and tyranny in the service of another type of mysticism and tyranny. but our kind is way better. ‘sooth, ‘s true. neener neener knee.”

this script you wrote, d., was twice as good as the one i am reading right now, btw. the writer of the one i’m reading was paid many hundreds of thousands for his is the other main difference.

Eat a hearty breakfast men- FOR TONIGHT WE DINE IN TACO BELL!

FOR TEH WHORE’D!!!

The surge is working?

Ahh, yes, that kind of “working.”

I can’t believe that after 4 years, the most powerful country in the world cannot even keep basic utilities online. Surely this can’t mean that we’re failing. No, this is something else entirely…

They hate us for our water.

Funny stuff, D. Aristophanes. It reminds me of the community theater my parents made me sit through when I was a kid.

On the Surge, here’s the AFP’s Joseph Krauss on the Baghdad neighborhood of Al-Hurriiya (7/25/07):

Ask anyone and they will tell you there is complete security in their corner of central Baghdad — no militias, no insurgents, no worries.

But no one calls this a victory for the five-month-old Baghdad security plan, and the US soldiers who police Al-Hurriya are convinced that most of its people are in the grip, or on the payroll, of a shadowy militia.

“The reason they say it’s safe is that all the Sunnis they worry about — neighbours they lived with for generations — are dead,” Lieutenant William Cone of the 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne said.

[…]

At the end of last year, before the battalion arrived, Shiite militias crept into the once-mixed area and launched a campaign of terror to drive Sunnis out.

“Over the course of a long weekend you had 200 Sunni families move out and 200 Shiite families move in,” said Lieutenant Colonel Brynt Parmeter of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, responsible for much of western Baghdad.

The influx of around 9,000 US soldiers — part of a capital-wide “troop surge” launched in February — temporarily froze the frontline just south of Al-Hurriya, halting a Shiite land-grab in the heart of the capital.

But the militias were never defeated and are now quietly consolidating their power.

Score another victory for the Surge. Is there anything it can’t do?

I don’t follow professional wrestling. Which one is The Surge?

To hell with the Surge, I’m in love with the Surb! He’s so damn dreamy!

I followed the link and felt like gouging my eyes out. Surber makes a big deal that the “Was invading Iraq the right thing to do” question went from a paltry 35% yes to a massive unstoppable 42% majority plurality minority (vs 61% to 54% against). Clearly it is time to declare victory (for the billionth time). Can we go home yet?

HG – yeah, and he doesn’t mention the margin of error on those polls, which could potentially make the 7% uptick in support even less. Lies, damn lies etc. and pundits (not just wingnuts) always gloss over the fact that the only way to look at these polls is in terms of a range of possible data.

Also, this:

Eat a hearty breakfast men- FOR TONIGHT WE DINE IN TACO BELL!

… is hilarious.

I bet whenever the cable news shows run that file footage of the three marines putting a bunch of rounds downrange in Faluja, this dude kneels behind the sofa with a soft-air M-4, killing the hell outta haji…

mikey

Huh. I initially misread the insert title as “Democrats SPIT on the War” and, y’know, I was hoping the new majority had actually grown a few hundred pair.

Ah, well.

The fact is, I spit on democrats, the way they spit on our returning soldiers and defund the war and their care all to be media biased.

D Aristophenes…you’re a genius. Very funny parody on the 300 (I think), which I haven’t seen.
This elevation of Petraeus to a military genius and all-wise prognostator instigated by the WH and the right and picked up willingly and subserviently by the MSM, is a relflection of our nation’s addiction to hero worship and willingness to believe in their “Leader”.

Maybe you get get a play based on this parody played somewhere off Broadway! Call it The Seducers!

…defund the war and their care all to be media biased.

Oh shit. Gary’s been getting remedial english tutoring from Pastor Swank.

Did he touch you, Gary? Young man! Did he TOUCH you?

mikey

Oh shit. Gary’s been getting remedial english tutoring from Pastor Swank.

Pastor Swank should know better, being a Man of the Good Book, which, you will recall, has something to say about the blind leading the blind.

By the way, why is it wingnuts are taking to Sword n’ Sandal pictures now? A racist neighbor of mine, while I watched movies about muscular Gladiators rescuing the Emperor of Rome’s daughter, once said “Ahhh, I see you’re watching Wop movies. No wonder this house smells like pesto sauce.”

Why have they changed on that, I wonder?

I think it’s perfectly clear why: only one man can save America in Iraq now!

GORDON SCOTT!

Yes, other Tarzans may have been better actors, but loincloth-clad Gordon Scott was by far the Jewishest. Don’t forget the classic ROMULUS AND REMUS, which he did with Steve Reeves.

It was every bad movie loving kid’s dream – Tarzan vs. Hercules!

Anyway, it’d be easy as cake to redub a Machiste movie so it’s called ATLAS IN THE LAND OF IRAQ. It’d be bigger than THE WIZARD OF MARS!

When Vietnam was new, they threw Support The Troops-style rallies and batted around slogans like that. Then that slimy asshole Nixon came in with his ‘Silent Majority’ bullshit and obstructed the fact that everyone wanted that goddamn war over except for patent idiot gook-hating assholes.

Then when the veterans came home, the people who ‘supported the troops’ blamed them for losing – instead of the insane leadership, which never saw a geopolitical quandary it couldn’t napalm to the ground. The right-wingers did the real spitting – and with their precious Reagan, they went ahead a few years later and actually elected someone who cut to the bone any mental health funding devoted to the problems facing Vietnam vets.

The right-wing bloggers are in their element when they’re screaming at soldiers who just want this horrible war to end. They’ll be the ones doing the spitting a few years from now, and when it comes time for their children to tell the story they’ll try and blame it on us. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Of course, you realize that to finish this script, you’ll have to write a scene where Michelle Malkin has sex with Hillary Clinton in order to try to get more funding for the troops in the field – at which point in time your audience will take the form of a pitchfork-wielding mob, hunt you down, and kill you. I adivse against it.

And you haven’t really seen 300 until you’ve seen it in IMAX. Holy God, that rocked. Probably it rocked moreso because I was seeing it with my best friend, who’s gay, and we spent the rest of the night after the movie dishing about which of the speedo-clad boytoys had real abs and which ones had computer-enhanced sixpacks (it’s much easier to see when you’re looking at twenty feet high torsos). That stuff really is softcore gay porn.

Clearly it is time to declare victory (for the billionth time). Can we go home yet?

Sorry, just one more corner to turn. And you need to sit through an informative presentation on Timeshares, the Vacation Opportunity of the Future!!

DA, I agree with your points on polls. It just stupefies me that the current great indicator of overwhelming victory in Iraq is a 42% minority. I mean at least with “major combat operations are over,” “we got Saddam in his hole” or “look the Iraqis voted. Freedom!!!111!” moments could be plausibly spun as signs of victory. Now the argument seems to be that “Bush isn’t hated quite so much” is a silver lining.

Also, am I the only one amazed that classic sword n’ sandal pictures like Doug Fairbanks’s THIEF OF BAGHDAD and the Harryhausen classic THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD portray Arabs and other minorities in a much more dignified light than recent Hollywood movies?

When you’ve got that bad dental hygene Scotsman from 300 bashing every darkskinned creature he sees, and TRANSFORMERS indulging in minstrel show absurdities. Seriously, there is not a single minority in that movie that isn’t a grotesque caricature whose personality is described by their ethnicity – my favorite was when they told the Puerto Rican (?) guy to shut up and speak English. Three. Times!

So don’t anybody tell me we’ve made racial progress. At least another big stupid action movie like INDEPENDENCE DAY had Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum as the Last Action Hebrew.

I can’t believe that after 4 years, the most powerful country in the world cannot even keep basic utilities online.

Somewhere on the Intertubes I came across a commenter who said the reason for the power shortages is that millions of happy Iraqi consumers, enriched by their booming economy, keep trying to run their newly purchased Maytags and DVD players and lava lamps at the same time, thereby putting a strain on the power grid.

I don’t think it was meant to be parody, but these days it’s hard to tell.

By the way, why is it wingnuts are taking to Sword n’ Sandal pictures now?

It’s the leather man-panties.

I must Defend Random capitalization. Without it I would have Died Years Ago. I try to avoid scare quotes & exclamation points, though.

The Surge? I read it as The Splurge. Makes a bit more sense that way.

Grarrr!!!!!!

I must Defend Random capitalization. Without it I would have Died Years Ago.

When used appropriately, random capitalization is a Good Thing. When used inappropriately, it is a Bad Thing.

Somewhere on the Intertubes I came across a commenter who said the reason for the power shortages is that millions of happy Iraqi consumers, enriched by their booming economy, keep trying to run their newly purchased Maytags and DVD players and lava lamps at the same time, thereby putting a strain on the power grid.

When the Iraqis read The Stand, we will stand down!

M-O-O-N spells Legacy.

Alec: They’ll be the ones doing the spitting a few years from now, and when it comes time for their children to tell the story they’ll try and blame it on us. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Yep. To the Cheeto-stained wretches Teh Most Awesomest Troops Evar™ aren’t real men and women; they are desperate, idealized projections meant to compensate for the Wingnuts’ own sense of impotence and fear of weakness.

When the actual soldiers come home and the real human cost of war– the broken minds, the mangled bodies, the living ghosts who never adjust back to the insincere madness we call normal life– the Wingnuts’ little bubble will go pop and, just like the last time (and all the times before) they will be the first ones to call vets “losers”, “nutcases”, and “cripples”.

the broken minds, the mangled bodies, the living ghosts who never adjust back to the insincere madness we call normal life– the Wingnuts’ little bubble will go pop and, just like the last time (and all the times before) they will be the first ones to call vets “losers”, “nutcases”, and “cripples”.

Whell most soldiers who come home are adjusting just fine and are standup members of society, the hard cases are probably losers and in the mionority, probably Dems who can’t handle having to kill the enemy to win.

Slap.

Springer must be over, all the Trolls are coming out.

Damn! That didn’t take long.

Kingubu writes:
they [that is, conservatives] will be the first ones to call vets “losers”

And within minutes Gary proves him right by replying:
the hard cases [that is, vets suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder] are probably losers

you’ll have to write a scene where Michelle Malkin has sex with Hillary Clinton in order to try to get more funding for the troops in the field

Awesome, Jillian! Now I really do think we need to make the movie!

elected someone who cut to the bone any mental health funding devoted to the problems facing Vietnam vets.

The sentiment is right, and righteous, but I gotta quibble. Reagan was the eighties. When we got home from vietnam, we didn’t understand that we were fucked up. It didn’t make sense. Nobody had ever heard of PTSD. If you proposed it, we would have laughed at you. Come on. Our grandfathers fought in WW1 (mine in the german navy, but you know what I mean). Our fathers fought in world war 2 (mine in the first wave at Betio, Kwajelein and Saipan. Our uncles in Korea (mine on the pusan perimeter). Hell, men had been going off to war for millennia. War was tough, and ugly, and it made sense that there’d be nightmares. But we weren’t CRAZY, y’know? When we talked to each other, there was an odd sense that we were going through the same shit, but hell, that made sense, we were in the same war.

I guess the point is that if there was free, available mental health care in the seventies or the eighties, most of us would not have participated. What do you think, I’m some kind of fucking wimp? Can’t carry my own ruck? Fuck you.

So many of us spent lots of time locked up. We did things, we couldn’t tell you why we did it, but we got arrested for it. Which made sense, because usually there was some broken shit, some injured people and some drugs and guns.

I got lucky. I got married in ’89 and divorce a couple years later. I was making a pretty good living by then, so I went into private therapy. Funded it myself. I thought I was learning to deal with the crap that caused me to marry that woman in the first place, then the crap that showed up in the marriage. Nope. Turned out I was dealing with a bunch of other shit.

I’m still in therapy. In one sense, it’s going to be easier for the kids coming home from america’s wars today. Nobody (other than the drill sergeants and the gung-ho gunnies) think there’s any stigma associated with coming out of combat fucked up. And the worse you saw, the worse you did, the more fucked up you are liable to be. That’s understood.

The lives you take, and the friends you lose, hard and bloody in the noise and chaos, they stay with you forever. But you can learn to live in the world again. And today? Today they have a chance to get their lives back…

Wait, Ruppert has got to be some kind of parody, right?

GAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVER
GAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERBEAUCHAMPLIEDGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERLIBERALCHUMPSLOSEAGAIN
GAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERRETARDOGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERRETARDOGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERGAMEOVERLOLOLOLOLOLOL

So much stupid that it spilled over the margins.

Sigh, that’s what you get with the freedom of the Intertubes – every Interrube that can reach the keyboard with one hand can all-caps you (in the kneecap) and run away pissing his Big Kid Pampers

HURTSDON’TITHURTSDON’TITHURTSDON’TITHURTSDON’TITHURTS
DON’TITHURTSDON’TITCHUMPEROOSHURTSDON’TITHURTSDON’TIT
LOLOLOLOLHURTSDON’TITHURTSDON’TITMORONSHURTSDON’TIT

Tit Hurtsdon? Didn’t he play for the ’48 Phillies? Yeah, utility guy. Hit .220, but had a canon for an arm…

mikey

Mikey,

I like the idea of someone having a canon for an arm.

Especially if it’s, like, a rolled up illustrated vellum scroll, or something.

C’mon, I know you didn’t misspell it. You MEANT to do that.

Did Beauchamp lie? I mean, isn’t he a Heroic American Soldier? They never lie, right?

It’s like that Star Trek episode where Spock says Harry Mudd is incapable of speaking the truth, and then Harry Mudd says “I am lying”. Or something.

I think GAMEOVER and TRUTHHURTS have both short circuited.

Nobody (other than the drill sergeants and the gung-ho gunnies) think there’s any stigma associated with coming out of combat fucked up. And the worse you saw, the worse you did, the more fucked up you are liable to be. That’s understood.

Mikey:

I hope that you are right, that the current group of soldiers now in Iraq is more open to therapy.

I went to a meeting of “Millitary Families Speak Out”, and heard a former soldier talk about his long climb back to some kind of normal life, and feeling. The guy said that he started out very gung-ho, but changed as he experienced Iraq. He said that after he was discharged, he felt suicidal. He said the army gave him and his buddies questionaires, asking stuff like, “do you feel suicidal?”, and they would mark the question “Yes”, and send back the questionaire. But, the army never did anything, never told him to go to therapy, and never offered to pay for help pay for therapy. And so that was useless to them.

When I saw him talk, he was dressed in all camo, but he had a hippie-looking beard and hair. He asked, demanded actually, that we do somehting to help the Iraq veterans, because he felt not much was being done by the army, or anyone.

I wonder if there is somehting we could do to help this Beauchamp guy. That has got to be horrible, living in a war zone, and probably waiting to be attacked by his fellows.

Mikey, I think the English realised the horror of war, and what it did to soldiers, during the First World War. The absolute atrocity in the trenches, the mud that could drown the unwary, the risk of any hand or shovel put into the ground bringing up a body or part thereof, the endless shelling, the “over the top” attacks where men walked into machine guns, the filth, the lice, the water tasting of petrol (because they hadn’t invented water bottles, apparently), the listening to mates screaming in No Man’s Land for hours because the shelling was too great to go and get them, the primitive field medicine, the long tours of duty, and so on and so on.

All these factors combined to make a pretty high mental casualty rate (and an extremely high physical casualty rate). “Shell shock” entered the language, and I think it was generally accepted that (a) it was not their fault, and (b) they needed help (at least as much as they could get at the time).

And in the second world war, Britain itself came under attack, so civilians understood more of the horrors the soldiers face (if not all of them). So I think overall the Brits are more practical about war and its aftermath.

However, the US has generally fought overseas, probably because successive governments persist in pissing in other peoples’ countries. So the civilian population are blissfully unaware of what the soldiers are doing, and expect the troops to act like cartoon heroes at all times. Any soldier who doesn’t, comes in for quite a bit of flack: he’s letting the side down, dirtying their pristine picture of Teh Troops, and it makes them angry.

I’d really like to find a few of these jerks and give them a big slap in the face: there’s little that I consider more morally objectionable than sending boys and girls off to fight a war for no reason, demanding that they kill innocent civilians while under constant stress, then demanding that they act like manequins on their return. All while, I must add, refusing to make even the tiniest sacrifice themselves.

Pah. I’d spit them from my mouth.

It’s better. It’s not “good”….

mikey

mikey: I think perhaps we should be more worried when soldiers come home from war and are NOT suffering mentally and emotionally. I mean, THAT is fucked up.

Peace to you.

I’d really like to find a few of these jerks and give them a big slap in the face

Please do. These assholes are not going to stop. They’re not going to back down. And the congress isn’t going to stop them. The disgusting travesty is going to continue, and civil rights are going to evaporate, and the America we think we know is going down the tubes.

It’s time we faced it. The tipping point is here. We’re only playing their game. We’re going to lose, over and over, until there’s nothing left to lose, and everything we believed in and cared about is gone.

I’m pretty sure that if it’s going to get turned around, some of us are going to die, and lots of us are going to prison. Our option is to recognize that we have no remaining options, or to allow this madness to manifest itself completely. I promise you, there will come a time when the Assrockets and Reynolds, and even Ace will be howling in outrage, and wondering what happened to their beloved America. And that will be far too late.

It’s time to take to the streets. It’s time to turn up the volume. It’s time for general strikes, municipal shutdowns, civil disobedience, large scale protests. And if we won’t do even that to save the republic this time, if we don’t have the courage to challenge the authoritarians, we deserve to lose it all. And while I’d be a willing participant, I’m betting against us. The Spiderman and American Idol generation is going to wake up too late.

That makes me very sad. America’s end is in sight. And it’s not a bang, as the old saying goes, it’s a whimper…

mikey

I had to go over to my neighbor’s house to read the rest of GAMEOVER’s post.

I’m all for massive protests, etc. but I think change (or just a return to normalcy) can still come with votes and not violence. It would require a ferocious, gargantuan military and police effort to lock the US down into martial law and then dictatorship. I can’t see the majority of regular, middle-class cops and soldiers wrecking their own way of life for a couple of assholes like Bush and Cheney.

Illegal war? Sure. Totalitarianism in my back yard? Wait a second…

Call me an optimist.

I think GAMEOVER’s message is for HTML Mencken. His old screen name is buried in there.

And HURTSDON’TIT uses “chumperoos” as an insult. So stinging.

D–

I love it. Truly. I wouldn’t bullshit YOU. Look, I’m on YOUR side.
Two tweaks:

1. Does it have to be a “surge”? Can it be more like, I dunno, Will Ferrell and Owen Wilson have a “splurge” which someone pronounces “splooge,” and so forth?

2. Does it have to be about Islam-this and Islam-that? Why not The Cartel? Will and Owen go to–whatever…Iraq, say–to do X vis a vis The Cartel, and etcetera. Same thing only different, no?

[In the First World War] “Shell shock” entered the language, and I think it was generally accepted that (a) it was not their fault, and (b) they needed help (at least as much as they could get at the time).

Sad to say, that’s not really true. Modern war and its effects were something new in World War I, and when shell shock / PTSD cases began to appear the top brass didn’t understand what was happening. From John Ellis’ Eye-Deep In Hell:
For many generals, and even doctors, most victims of shell-shock were little more than cowards and malingerers who simply ought to ‘pull themselves together’ and ‘act like a man’.

If I remember correctly, some early British shell shock cases were court-martialed for cowardice and shot.

As the war went on, they finally began trying to treat officers who showed signs of strain, but enlisted men were generally ignored until they completely broke down and became useless as soldiers. Only then were they taken out of the lines.

Grim stuff.

As much as I dislike everything the United States military stands for, I’ve always had a soft spot for vets and what they have to go through. My old man was a Marine in Viet Nam for most of ’68 and part of ’69. He’s said a number of times had certain things not happen, he’d stayed in the Corps. He never talked too much about ‘Nam. Oh, he loved the Marines and would tell us horror stories about Paris Island and screaming drill sargeants, and he’d get drunk and tell my uncles about things he saw on leave when they all got together for a deer supper. I was supposed to be off playing with the other boys, but I always stuck around to listen, finding ways to hear even when I was sent out of the room.

He had two buddies in his platoon, a pair of wildboys named D.W. and Charlie. My old man’s from south Mississippi and has always had a soft spot for Cajuns, and Charlie was the meanest coon-ass in Monroe Parish, Daddy said. D.W. was from California, smoked pot and was heavy into martial arts. Y’all ever see on “Kung Fu” where Grasshopper has to shove his fingers into sand and rock to make ’em tough? D.W. did that. Once in Greece, Daddy and D.W. whipped a baker’s dozen squiddies for some reason that probably made sense at the time. Later that same leave, my old man rented a bicycle and bought a bladder of wine, and took in the sights. Eventually, he got so drunk he drove the bicycle slap off the mountain. Luckily, he was drunk enough that he didn’t get too badly hurt. This would be the start of a pattern for my father’s life.

Back in the shit, the platoon was out doing their thing for Freedom And Democracy. Daddy was on point on one end with D.W. and Charlie was on the far end. Somebody on the far end stepped on a bouncing betty, and that was all she wrote. D.W. got some shrapnel. Daddy lost part of his left leg. Charlie probably never felt a thing. That’s what Daddy hoped, anyway.

So the old man never talked much about Viet Nam. He drank a lot about it, though, spending his nights in shit-hole beer joints on the county line. The only time he’d talk about ‘Nam was when he was three sheets in the wind. The drunker he got, the less fun his stories got. The less fun he got, too, and shit got real scary more often than not. You can’t make me go into detail and I can’t explain the exact whys, but it’s probably why I will never, ever get married or have kids. No one understands but my brother, and he was just young enough for it all to be mainly a bad dream. Just 23 months seperates us, too, ain’t that funny.

Eventually, for reasons I won’t explain, he had to quit drinking. And no more was said about a place called Vietnam. He’d watch movies like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, and all he would say is, “They don’t get it.” He never kept up with the Corps after he left. His service medals and Purple Heart was put into a box and stashed away. D.W. died of lung cancer in the mid ’80s, two months after he and the old man talked for the first time in almost 20 years. He was saying goodbye to the last man standing.

For reasons I’ve never quite groked, a few years ago, my old man reconnected with the Corps. The medals came out and were mounted in a nice display. Him and Momma started going to Corps reunions, Momma seeing San Diego and the Grand Canyon for the first time. He worked with the Moving Wall and gave talks to the schools where Momma and her older sister worked. I never got to see one, as I was off in Florida getting educated, stoned and, occasionally, laid. My old man’s a real Gary Cooper type and says maybe a half-dozen words a month (mainly because Momma can’t stand silence and thus sees it continually filled), so it must’ve been something to see.

Just before the Iraq thing started, Daddy told me he wanted to get something like memoirs in some sort of order, maybe something like a book. He wanted me to help him, because I was making my living as a professional journalist and he said he knew I’d do it right. That’s one of the few compliments my old man ever gave me, and it was a “good soldier” compliment. Just his way.

One thing he did was talk to young Marines coming out of Paris Island and Camp Lejune. Regular grunts and young officers would email Daddy and ask him about seeing the elephant. When Iraq started, they told him about what they saw. After a year, my father asked the few Marines who were still able to communicate with him to please stop. There weren’t many left, anyway, and most of them, well…they weren’t insulted and thanked my old man for his time.

My folks didn’t go to the reunion this year and probably won’t go to another. My father’s involvement with the different Vet groups dwindled, and though he still goes to meetings, he’s not taking an active part anymore. In fact, he’s actively refusing to when someone asks him, which is something my father simply never did. That was one of his cardinal rules, you never refused help you could give if someone had enough respect of you to ask.

The old man’s been very lucky in his dealings with the V.A., and they’ve done nothing but right by him. It took him 20 years and the onset of diabetes to make it happen, but damn if they didn’t fall right in line. ‘Course, it helped when they found out the old man’s resperatory problems came mostly likely came from Agent Orange. He’s never done therapy, though. He doesn’t do anything now, just sits and stares at the television. My momma’s at her wit’s end, my brother feels helpless and confused, and me…well, I try to understand and forgive. I encourage therapy or at least talking with someone who might understand, but I can’t make him do anything.

Momma doesn’t know what happened. She thinks it’s her fault. Sometimes, when she’s really hurting, it becomes my fault for a multitude of reasons. Even at the best of times, my father’s waiting around to die and my mother’s heart is shattered and there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it. I don’t know why they just won’t listen to me, dammit, they said I was the smart one. Why won’t he just talk to someone? There’s nothing I can do.

I think, though, I know what caused it. The timing’s just too coincidental. My old man isn’t ashamed of ‘Nam. He’s proud of his service. He’s a Marine and Marines do their job, even if it’s an ugly one. Especially if it’s an ugly one, because that’s why you have Marines in the first place. He’s still pro-military and still thinks the best defense is a good offense. He don’t think much of them that play soldier or want to invade anyone who looks at us cross-eyed, but he thinks American military prescence in foreign locals is a positive thing.

He wasn’t angry with Kerry’s Winter Soldier testimony, though Momma was, and he never forgave Reagan for cutting loose so many screwed-up and lost veterans. The thing is, he didn’t blame anyone who managed to get out of serving. He don’t think much of them, but he doesn’t blame them. Soldiers don’t start wars or even win them, really. They just fight them. And then they’re…not needed anymore. My old man was just lucky enough to run into something tougher than Life After ‘Nam: my mother. Steel magnolia, indeed.

But I think I know the why, even if I can’t do anything about it, even if he disagreed with me vehemently when it all started. History does repeat itself, or rather, certain people seem intent on making it repeat itself. Once was bad enough, living it was bad enough. But to see it happen all over again for even worse reasons by even worse people? God damm it. You’d think we’d learn. You’d fuckin’ think we’d learn eventually.

Shit, didn’t realize how long that was. Sorry. Shorter me: up yours, Gary, you pathetic excuse for a human being, and whoever thinks like you. There are no words foul enough to describe you.

Matt. Thanks, man.

Tell the fucking jarhead I said Charlie Mike.

See, just because we lost doesn’t mean we didn’t win.

(That’s gonna PISS him off!)

mikey

mikey,
De nada.

And you don’t even want to know what the old man used to say about…well, just about any other branch of the service. Marines are funny that way. The only squid he ever had anything nice to say was my pappaw, and he never gave my mother’s sister’s husband too much hell for having been in the Army, though.

Snorghagen: yes. I didn’t mean to imply that they were speedy at recognising and dealing with it, just that, after a couple of years of the same shit in the same shithole, they realised that most guys either died or went barking mad, regardless of their prior conduct. From there it was a fairly short step to general acceptance on the home front that shell shock was a reaction to horror. It probably gained credence at least partly because so few of the boys made it home, and of those who did, so many left behind bits of themselves.

Given that their mental health facilities at the time were fairly primitive, they couldn’t do much to help, but they did at least realise by the end of the war that it existed and it was serious. And the civilian population at the time weren’t being subjected to a constant stream of TV propaganda, so they didn’t believe, as some people do now, that they knew everything there was to know about the war. Whereas now, the dickheads watch carefully edited press releases from the armed forces and government media offices, and think that war is a sanitised, heroic, enterprise.

Mikey, I’d love to take to the streets, except my streets are about 6,000 miles away from your streets. Bummer, that.

I’m not sure that the American public would go for that (nor the Australians, lest anyone think I’m pretending to be superior). I think both our countries have had it far too easy for far too long, and have become accustomed to congratulating ourselves on how much better we are for having democracy. Except that it’s a very pallid, thin, empty form of democracy, although most people don’t notice.

It’s ironic that our pampered western countries, which pride themselves on democracy and ponies, really have little idea of what it means and what it entails. Bolivian peasants know far better than we do. Korean students and labour groups know better. I suppose that being deprived of clean water, or being massacred in the streets, can concentrate the mind marvellously. Hell, Iranians know better.

But we, who’ve been given the whole lot on a plate, are passive and self-congratulatory. It makes me both sad and angry, and unfortunately when I’m angry I tend to be inarticulate. Perhaps I need training from someone like this. (Bit of preening here: the guy in the movie, Stephen Chow, is the most popular comedian in Hong Kong, and has been for years, and I’ve interviewed him. And couldn’t stop talking about it for months.)

I’ve often wondered if part of the reason Americans don’t take to the streets more often is because our country is so damn big. If I got pissed off at the President and wanted to go stand out in front of his house and scream at him, it would take me a two days’ drive to get there. That’s a bit of a haul, even with the good adult diapers. And I’d have to take time off from work – it’s not a weekend affair. If I were French and wanted to go scream at Sarkozy for a while, what’s the longest it would take me to drive there? Eight hours? And I could always take mass transit instead.

Jillian:

Could be. Maybe Russia has that problem too? Though I think us Americans being very unused to public protest, and being just kinda soft and self-involved, and the harder police response especially since 9/11, and us being more afraid of losing our jobs than ever, and the whole attitude of “nothing matters” that our media promulgates, and finally, the general taboo against speaking of anything political or controversial, explains the problem much more.

I think it’s a combination of atheist’s and Jillian’s reasons, and that it feeds itself. First, it takes a lot to get Americans past the complacency & denial and out onto the streets — but once it happens, you have these pockets of people out protesting. Maybe a dozen in a small town, a few hundred in a small city, up to many thousands in the major cities. All in all, it’s rather impressive but it’s never presented that way. The media spends more time arguing about how many people actually attended which rally in which city than reporting on the grievances that prompted the protest in the first place. All of which just drives people back into the why-bother mode . . .

It’s analagous (maybe) to the impeachment drumbeat. How many cities have passed impeachment resolutions? More than 80, last time I checked, but each city’s action is treated as some sort of isolated incident. And there’s Conyers saying, “Oh, just three more congresscritters and we’ll start,” immediately followed by “Did I say three? Oh, but them’s fightin’ words.” And everybody who got fired up by the resolutions and the promise of congressional action sighs and sets the alarm in order to head back to the cubicle.

I think the English realised the horror of war, and what it did to soldiers, during the First World War. The absolute atrocity in the trenches, the mud that could drown the unwary…

I don’t know whether conditions in WW1 were so much uglier than (say) the Crimean war… it’s more that in previous wars, the Brits didn’t care whether the troops came home permanently fucked up, because after all, the troops were only lower-class riffraff… little better than animals. OK, the officer corps were gentlemen, but they were already so fucked up by boarding schools that no-one noticed the difference.

Then WW1 came along, and the citizen army was invented; once it was decent members of the middle class who were waking up screaming or simply not sleeping at all, people started talking about ‘combat neurosis’ or hysteria or shell-shock. Rivers wrote his paper on “The Repression of War Experience” in 1918.

For many generals, and even doctors, most victims of shell-shock were little more than cowards and malingerers who simply ought to ‘pull themselves together’ and ‘act like a man’.
I recall from somewhere that the Austrian army organised a commission of inquiry into this combat-hysteria business. They consulted Freud, who reassured them that it was simply a form of malingering.

And see, that actually IS a piece of it, but not after you get back home. One of the ways combat infantrymen disassociate is they begin to see themselves as the ones who control their near-term fate. Oh sure, you can send me to a combat zone, and put me in contact with the enemy, but I get to decide how I’m going to deal. I might not fight. I might tell you to fuck off. I might kill you.

Malingering, to the 11 Bravo grunt, is the most honorable, most rational thing you can do. If you can spend three days in the aid station for a fake illness, those are three days you will likely not die. If you can avoid an op, well hell, that’s an op you won’t get killed on. See? Malingering is the province of the combat veteran. You have to survive a certain amount of horror before you can make it work. I guess your thousand yard stare has to be convincing. FNGs cannot even try it. They’d get hammered. But after a while, when you shave less and cut your hair less and care more about your weapons than your uniform, in short, you are everything they want you to be in combat, that’s when you start trying to game the game. And there is nothing wrong with that. It’s the most reasonable human reaction…

mikey

mikey: Thanks for setting me straight on that one. I’m not related to anyone who’s served (my grandpa was a combat instructor of some kind during Korea and the ‘advisors’ part of Vietnam, but that was as close as it got – my other grandpa was a professor with kids and my parents were born in ’62 and ’63), so the visceral experience of that is far from my mind – I’m seeing all this as an outsider. A lot of the stuff you have exact words to describe I don’t, and they aren’t the first things I think of talking about. I’m a sociology/politics wonk from a coupla generations younger than you; we have different priorities when talking about the same thing. But:

The lives you take, and the friends you lose, hard and bloody in the noise and chaos, they stay with you forever. But you can learn to live in the world again. And today? Today they have a chance to get their lives back…

This is the thing I’ve heard most when I’ve heard veterans or veterans’ groups talking about Iraq. The hope is good – it’s the best thing there is about Vietnam, from what I’ve seen, the hope that that nadir of humanity could have at least produced some good, solid knowledge of the shit ‘civilization’ can put human beings through and how to deal with it. But I don’t know.

You hadn’t heard of PTSD, and neither had most of the guys there. And people have now – and it wasn’t an issue of it being shameful to get fucked up by war. But every big modern war has a name for PTSD and it’s common knowledge afterwards – it’s just that military culture, the kind that produces a SUUUUUURRRRRRGE mentality, the kind that is exhibited in the most awful twisted parody imaginable in shit like college football and 300, that insists that if something’s wrong, that’s your problem – you just gotta work at it harder.

You hadn’t heard of PTSD, but you had probably at least heard of the thousand-yard stare – your fathers had stared that stare, and their fathers known of or felt shell-shock in the trenches, and those shell-shock-facing doughboys had been raised around hard, ancient old men who knew they were at risk for something the medical eggheads called ‘nostalgia’ in the Civil War.

The establishment knew about PTSD, and besides the fuckoff Reaganoids, nobody would actually want a good fraction of a generation to go through it untreated. But as much as I dislike the word ‘culture’ in all its forms, it’s just the easiest and best way of explaining the pervasive attitude in the military, especially in the mid-level brass but percolating down to the common soldier and up to officers and public officials, where there’s no problem a little more elbow grease can’t fix. It’s probably even worse when it’s on a sane level, more like America or Britain than Stalinist Russia or the Japanese Empire – where nobody’s going to ask you to charge a big tank with a pike and don’t even think of retreating a damn step – because reality never interceded there. You never had the chance to step back and say ‘Jesus, what the hell am I doing? This isn’t going to work.’

The more “pro-military” we get, the more society adopts that attitude, which is what strangles militaries from the inside out, turns them into overglorified, lethal sports teams without regard for their own safety, the confines of humanity, or ultimately common sense.

I don’t like undermining hope, but I’ve heard so often that the Iraq veterans’ll have it a lot better – they know there’s PTSD and they can get help for it – but I don’t believe it, not all the way, because what makes military PTSD so bad is, if anything, worse now than in the 60s/70s. Stuff like the Surge just goes to show that the brass still believes we’d fix all our problems with a little bit more hustle, and with that attitude flying around, it’s going to take a lot to admit to yourself no amount of hooah is gonna fix post-traumatic stress without outside help.

Hell, stuff like The Secret is a perfect example of American society getting more elbow-grease-fixated. Your life isn’t going right? You just need more hard work and positive thinking – psychology and counseling are for losers.

The suits running the military now have nothing to lose by adopting that damn hoo-ah attitude; the more the military fucks up the more the Pentagon has to spend. Not a bad deal, if you’re rich and don’t care much about human misery.

On an entirely unrelated note, if I had a time machine I’d go back in time and kill Leni Riefenstahl. She didn’t kill anyone per se, but it’s thanks to her every idiot right-winger with a grudge against society takes fascism seriously as an alternative instead of seeing it as what it was: all the negatives of a bloated, domineering state bureaucracy without the positive, humanizing effects of one.

If it weren’t for that bitch and her Triumph of the Will bullshit, people like CY wouldn’t be lining up to slobber on Mussolini’s rotten dick whenever tax season came around.

On an entirely unrelated note, if I had a time machine I’d go back in time and kill Leni Riefenstahl.

I’d patent the blowjob.

I’d patent the blowjob.
Clearly I am gunning for the wrong Nazi. D: