majenta is actually the right place for this but what are you gonna do?

When a suspected felon is surrounded by cops and they are sure he just had a gun a second ago but now can’t see it anymore, and said suspect refuses to show his hands or hold still… that dumb bastard is gonna get shot. He deserves it just like some poor sap stupid enough to stand in front of a bull-dozer in a country without an arm’s length of punitive litigious precedent.

As a condition for ending the affair begun 12 years hence, Iraq agreed to generally disarming. No more gassing of Kurds and so on. That hasn’t happened and Iraq was never in compliance. So, what’s gonna happen isn’t exactly unfair from a geo-political or legal standpoint, however…

We already have the oil and have long been able to control OPEC to an acceptable degree. France and Russia, oddly enough seem quite keen on preventing the war so they can get their grubby fingers in the cracks (their agreements with Iraq are with the current government, not future ones).

Iraq was not a major sponsor of the September 11 crew. Saudi Arabia was but their government likes us to an acceptable degree. Besides — I made the point before but it’s worth making again — 115,000 people have died from smoking in the US so far this year. Let it go.

Iraq bears no direct threat to the US at all. If you think they do compared to say, the rich disenfranchised, traditional Islamic families of Saudi and the UAE and Yemen and Syria and Egypt… you need to learn to read. The Philippines is a greater threat to the US than Iraq.

We already killed 100,000+ Iraqis 12 years ago. It didn’t do much of anything except kill a few real soldiers and a lot more innocent people, including the conscripted, who were stuck with no where to go but dead. Soldiers in Iraq are already trying to surrender to live-fire training exercises happening across the border in Kuwait. That’s how terrified and mistreated the Iraqi army is. It wasn’t a conflict either. It was a turkey shoot. The majority of US casualties in ’91 were from accidents. It was a stone cold slaughter whether or not the whole world was behind or it needed to happen to save Kuwait. It was what it was.

It’s too fucking expensive. If I have to pay 30% of my income in taxes, I’d like to have better roads, more teachers, more art and music and fewer dead foreigners. One Patriot missile in ’91 cost a couple million dollars and killed dozens of Americans shooting down a Scud on top of a base camp. I don’t want dead Americans even more than I don’t want dead Iraqis.

So — the only possible benefit is to the Iraqi people (and the related minority groups in and around Iraq that have long suffered). I don’t care about that. Neither do you. I mean even during WW II some of the French tried to defend themselves. If Iraqis are to have a free Iraq, there needs to be a Farouk Paine and a Thomas Jafisma. Any peace or freedom imposed on a nation always goes to shit. What you don’t pay for, you don’t respect.

It’s not our job. If it were our job we could damn well start in Africa where there are countries with real problems and mini-genocides springing up semi-annually.

We’re hypocrites. President Hussein is the problem and I agree he’s a monster who should be at a Nuremberg style trial before being riddled with thirty-aught-sevens. But we don’t want to kill him. We just wanna kill all those poor bastards he’d kill if they didn’t stand up to be killed by us. Nice.

Lastly, I’ve been to 15 countries in my life. I’ve never experienced any antipathy toward the US in person. The single bad thing I’ve ever heard about the US in another country was in Venice where a young Italian man said, “Fuck Reagan,” to which I replied, “Right on.” Otherwise it was 1,000 days worth of what amounts to “Hey, great to meet you, USA #1.” If that changes over this whole thing, someone is gonna answer to me for it.

And another thing, I don’t care if he’s fucking Adolf Hitler, you fuckwad newsies show some respect while he’s the leader of a country and stop calling him by his first name without a title. It’s disrespectful to everyone.

I want you to ask yourself something.

If all the people that know how to do things (like grow food, build houses, defend themselves, use basic math, make fire, and so on) disappeared tomorrow, do you think you could survive?

And if you have trouble answering for yourself, I can help a few of you. If you believe crop circles are made by aliens, you would not make it.

In 1968 many bad things were happening in the world. Many more than today, by volume and weight. In March of that year some frustrated, tired, bloodied US soldiers came across a town in Vietnam called My Lai.

Those soldiers were looking for VietCong soldiers. The ones who had been killing their friends and mining the roads and fields to maim those who didn’t die. There were no VC in the village. Those US soldiers killed everyone there anyway. Systematically, in some cases with rape, and in most cases without haste. They murdered 300-500 civilians. Old men, women, babies. Just like the SS or the MKVD.

Of course not all US soldiers were like this in Vietnam. My Lai was nearly successfully covered up, however, so it’s a certainty that at least a few more US soldiers were just like this but never caught.

When a bunch of Saudis and their Bible-group friends destroyed the World Trade Center towers and part of the Pentagon and a plane full of brave individuals in a Pennsylvania field there were TV cameras around the world. The cameras largely showed what amazing friends the US has in Canada, England, and many other nations. The cameras also captured Egyptian cabbies in Cairo applauding the act, waves of Palestinians partying in the streets, Pakistanis gloating while applying for student visas to study in the US. Muslim citizens of every predominantly Islamic country loudly crying out in joy.

Not all Muslims. It only looked that way b/c it was almost impossible to find an Egyptian who would say he found the act deplorable or a Saudi not in the royal family who didn’t heartily endorse the day.

When Americans found out our people had been raping and slaughtering Vietnamese civilians, we spit on them. We jeered them. We made them unwelcome, unemployable. We disowned them, even the honorable innocent who’d risked everything for the love of their home, merely by association with the isolated horrible acts that had come to light.

I’ve lived with lots of people. There’s only one I never got into a fight with. I’ve even avoided gun play with better than 93% of them. That’s an A-. Just like my blood type. Symmetry is a fantastic thing in life. Ties it all up. Who cares if it’s completely unrelated.

The one person I’ve lived with and never even got in an argument with was Shawn Kelly. I put his name b/c he welched on a deal so I’m a little steamed after all and I’d like him to look me up so I can complain.

Shawn and I lived together in I’Chon, ROK when we were both teaching at Kuk Je. I saved him from drowning in a rice field once, more or less. I full on saved him from sleeping in his sewage soaked clothes by making his drunk ass strip after I dragged him out of the stinking water and walked him home. Man we drank a lot of OB Lager together till he got thrown out of Korea.

He had a crush on a wonderful young lady who went by Sunny. Close enough to her real name to work well. Her brother had the best little dive in I’Chon but that’s another story.

Shawn wanted to give her some flowers. I supported the venture b/c she seemed so damn terrific. He was too timid though so wanted me to go with him. Ho! Sure, I said. But I put a condition on it. If they ever got married, he had to ask me to be his best man. I’m a child of vision you see. I’m also a child of Loki. When we got to her I pushed him and his roses at her and I ran.

He exchanged pleasantries and more or less asked her out. Then he ran after me intending to kick my ass or at least throw one shot. But God love him, he may be Canadian but he’s no Ben Johnson. He never even got close.

They got married but I never got an invite, let alone a best man request. Always a bride’s maid. I was in the states by then, though, so it saved me at least $1,000 US. All told, he was the best roommate I ever had. I’m not even really steamed about the wedding. I just wanted an excuse to have him find himself here via Google and write me one of these days.

But back to the Singaporean girl. After Shawn got kicked out of Korea he went to Singapore. I visited and we even went to Thailand together. Swanky old city-state the Lion City. Koh Samet ain’t half bad neither.

Shawn taught English in Singapore too. He had an 8 year old student curious about his occidentiality (to coin a term) ask him one day, “Are you a Christian or a free-thinker?”

Upon entering the world of corporate America there is only a single piece of advice I feel every initiate should be given and take as a grail.

Get yourself a micro-cassette recorder and tape record every conversation you have with your manager.

It is simply amazing how fast memories and communications improve when confronted with proof of the veiled threats, badgering sighs, insinuated chauvinism, and menacing tones that look so very innocuous on the written page of a legal document.

One more astronaut in
Black skin of universe
One more traveling man with
Heavy tired eyes, feeling cold
Feeling cold

Thinking around the clock of
Drinking on the job
Of the powdered food and piss bags
Never having sex, growing old
Growing old

CHORUS:
Headspace, alive and painless
Weightless and almost sane, I
Close my eyes, I
Become the sky, yeah
Headspace, alone and shameless
Can’t wait to find the faces
Left behind
In a troubled time back home
Back home, back home, back home

It gets so lonely you know
Weeks and months alone
Chasing sleep and space junk
And the dying stars I’ve known and loved
Known and loved
Through true decline of the
5 billion minds or so
Through mud slides and earthquakes
Blue one hold and rolls along
Rolls along, rolls along

[CHORUS]

One more astronaut in endless old universe with
One more second chance and
Wondering why he’s here at all

[CHORUS]

Bold are the ones who
Come over the line to fall over
The horizon
Never ones to fade away

And then it hit me
This cosmic pull and energy
It kind of makes me wonder
If I’ll ever make it
Back home

—I Mother Earth, Scenery and Fish, “One More Astronaut”

If one thing is wrong, this does not make its apparent opposite right. There are no linear scales in the physical world past mean old Daddy Time. They are convenient for us to draw graphs but they don’t happen in nature. Circles do. When you apply a supposed linear scale to a circle the opposites are the same point. Now, strictly speaking this is not the logic I want to use but I think you get the picture.

If someone puts a cup of piss and a cup of vomit before you and says:

The vomit tastes awful but it’s fairly nutritious after all. The piss is easier to swallow, and it’s cleaner from the ammonia in it anyway. Which would you like to drink?

And you say:

“Yuck! no way.”

And the reply comes:

“You have to pick one, that’s all there is.”

Well, don’t miss the point this time. Just because one is wrong doesn’t make another right. Just because there’s no obvious alternative does not mean there are no alternatives.

I cannot possibly imagine a more uninteresting subject. I simply must stop letting the hired help put suggestions in the topic jar.

Cocksucker is an insult that was terribly popular when I was very young. I remember how much I hated to hear the kids in the older grades say it and words like it. It was years before I would willingly use expletives. I hated to hear them so much, I think, because they are potent and have the undeniable gutter poetry that makes them difficult to shake off. They have fallen out of favor in recent years. I would like to help one of them make a come back.

I am going to attempt this end with an open letter.

To every foreign national who is screaming “racism” b/c you are now required to be photographed and fingerprinted to stay in the US:

You have never heard me bitch once about getting photographed and fingerprinted in Seoul b/c I was a foreign national living in Korea. I watched them let all the Canadians go through without having the same treatment but fair is fair. I know that Americans are more likely to do something bad in Korea than a Canadian is, so I never will bitch about it even though I didn’t like it. It’s time for you cocksucker Pakistanis, Arabians, North Koreans, and Moroccans to quit acting like little girls and admit the same thing.

Someone in North Korea recently made a poster that wasn’t very nice. It showed missiles destroying the Capitol. We were talking about being nice the other day and how maybe it’s important after all. I think this could be another one of those cases.

Here’s another Korean lesson for you. PDRK stands for People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. ROK is for the plain old Republic of Korea. Americans just call them North and South because that is a pair of adjectives we have been obsessed with since the 1860s.

Something that I think many foreigners are surprised by is that the freedom in this country means Americans are free to be profane. Or perhaps that’s why “they” “hate” “us.” We don’t beat around the bush, so to speak. We go straight for the mother joke.

It’s a shame they are such psychopaths in the PDRK. They have one of the nicest flags in the world. It’s simple, clean, and sharp looking. They felt the need to copy the US in the color scheme but what the hey! I believe we stole that from France after all.

If you don’t believe me about North Korea being psychopathic, you’ll have to buy a history book. If you don’t believe me about their flag, well, take a look:

This is a flag that I am putting on display for them instead:

If you speak any Korean you might recognize this second flag is both subtle and profane. A combination the French invented but the Americans took away by force some years ago. Just like their flag colors… say, no wonder the French don’t like us. The Brits also had the talent at one time but they became so subtle that the profanity went inoffensive. It’s another sad thing. That there’s a point where subtlety snaps to insipidity.

If you do not want to go the clever route, here’s another flag. It’s the same joke but just plain profane.

Please do not show it to your friends in the ROK. While their northern kin are maniacal baby-eating fascists, South Koreans are really quite nice, if you’re not black or dating one of their daughters anyway.