As the Election Heats Up, Some Wisdom-

"You want to know about voting. I'm here to tell you about voting. Imagine you're locked in a huge underground nightclub filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pit bulls for fun. And you ain't allowed out until you all vote on what you're going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch "Republican Party Reservation". They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns and brand-new sexual organs that you did not know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as the eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That's voting. You're welcome."
- Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan

You want a catchy summation of my view of the world situation? Fine.

Courtesy of The Rolling Stones:


"Yeah, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Lord, I'm gonna fade away

War, children, yeah, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children, yeah, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away, hey, yeah

Oh, see the fire is sweepin'
At our streets today
Burnin' like a red coal carpet
A mad bull lost its way

War, children, yeah, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children, yeah, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away, hey, yeah

Rape, murder, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Rape, murder, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Rape, murder, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away"

Happy now?

Riding the Endless Treadmill

So, as often happens, I got to looking about at my circumstances. And heaven help me, I haven't caught myself treading water like this in YEARS. I work a job that eats up enough time to sap my energy, and pays just enough to make me feel like it's worthwhile... while I live with my parents in a perpetual cycle of work (which pays plenty for a freeloader but would probably be difficult to live on) and slacking. If there's a light at the end of this particular tunnel, I fear it's simply a train called "Reality" coming the other way, and I'm certainly too damned blinkered to do anything as rational as getting out of its path. Not rightly sure what I propose to do about it, either- the last time I boldly and impetuously moved out and abroad, I did it without having a fucking clue what I was doing, and the ensuing debt rode me like a fucking spastic jockey for the better part of seven years. Now? Now I KNOW I haven't got a clue, and it's paralyzing. Once bitten, twice shy, and all of that. I'm petrified to make a move without having something stable to land on, and that won't happen as long as I'm slinging pizza 28 hours a week. I need to develop some ambition. Of course, at 30 years of age, it's a little late to start cultivating basic impulses...

Further Truth-Bombs of T.R. Fehrenbach

From the same book as the previous entry:

"Americans, who cannot understand or even communicate with peasantry, are growing lonelier in a world where the great majority of men are peasants."

"Americans, he found, tend to take pride in doing things in a big way. But they had no interest in fighting a half-ass war like this one."

"It is admittedly terrible to force men to suffer during training, or even sometimes, through accident, to kill them. But there is no other way to prepare them for the immensely greater horror of combat."

"As Americans discovered during 1861-1865, sustained land warfare is extremely costly in blood, and there has been a pronounced American distaste for such since."

"If war is to have any meaning at all, its purpose must be to establish control over peoples and territories, and ultimately, this can be done only as Alexander the Great did it, on the ground. But because after the Civil War America's Allies again and again took the terrible losses required to bleed the enemy, Americans gradually developed a belief in cheap victory."

"Thus, again, it cannot be considered accident that in 1950 the dominant power of the world was barely able to contain the ground attack of an almost illiterate nation of nine million- nor could it have done so without the enormous manpower sacrifices of its Korean ally."

"Under the Constitution of the United States, Congress holds the power of life and death over the military, and no one would have it otherwise. History has shown very clearly that for democracy to continue, the people and not the generals or even the executive authority, must have control over the military. The people must dictate its size, composition and its use- above all, its use."

(Commentary by Your Humble Blogger- Yeah, funny how that little proviso has pretty much evaporated, no?)

"And with victory, as it had always come to Americans after a war, came the determination to force their will on the enemy, to punish them for the crime of aggression, for starting the war. If the fighting, with its resultant death and destruction, its loss of American lives, resulted only in the return of the status quo, then almost all Americans would feel cheated."

"Americans have always accepted checks and balances within their own system of government, but never without, in the world. Because in the world such checks have never been achieved with votes or constitutions but with guns, and Americans have never admitted that guns may serve a moral purpose as well as votes. They have never failed to resort to guns, however, when other means fail."

"Actually, the Communist world had not broken the law, for one of the continuing tragedies of mankind is that there is no international law."

"Military intelligence, quite competently, can determine the number of divisions a nation has deployed. Military men can never wholly competently decide, from military evidence alone, whether such a nation will use them. Such a decision is not, and will never be, within the competence of military intelligence."

"It is obvious the MacArthur's reliance on air power was almost absolute. Whatever the weaknesses of his ground forces, whatever their difficult and exposed positions, U.N. mastery of the skies was complete, and air would be the decisive arm. It was a typically American viewpoint. MacArthur and the men around him had a great deal to learn about Chinese Communist armies."

Home Truths from 1963

T.R. Fehrenbach, writing a history of the Korean War in 1963, saw clearly some crap that we are a long, long way from grasping as a nation- mostly because the truth is unpleasant. Suck it up, people. The universe owes you nothing, least of all truths that are pleasant.

"The problem was that America had fought the war- as she had most of her wars- as a crusade, while Russia had fought first for survival, then for power. Crusades are usually inconclusive; it was no wonder Russia won the peace."

"It was hard for a nation and a people who had never accepted the idea of power, not as something immoral in itself, but as a tool to whatever ends they sought, to fight and die for limited goals. In short, it was hard to grow up."

"The United States could not be bought, or even intimidated, but it had a long history of looking the other way if not immediately threatened."

"Citizens fly to defend the homeland, or to crusade. But a frontier cannot be held by citizens, because citizens, in a republic, have better things to do."

"Korea was an infantry war, essentially no different from any infantry war of the twentieth century. This was one of the factors, along with the political, that made the fighting so distasteful to a people who had subconsciously come to regard infantry warfare as obsolete."

"Revolution and terror are synonymous; only with the passage of time does any revolution become respectable."

Fehrenbach wrote these words as Vietnam started to suck in more and more men. It is nearly half a century since he wrote them, and the lessons have not been internalized.

History. Read it and weep.

Musings on Renewed Poverty

So I, after attaining the lofty rank (and pay) of teacher last year, find myself living in my parents' house and slinging pizza this winter.

Worse things have happened. But it's funny- this shit seems to hit I and mine in waves. Not that everyone's rise and fall have been as radical, but still... this time last year I was pulling down bank, and my scuzzy cohorts down south were well on their way toward making an offer on buying some property.

Now? They are renting an apartment. Again. And getting reamed by their former landlords.

In point of fact, neither is terribly surprising- I'm a shiftless layabout whose only passions do not pay well, and my cohorts have a child to care for and, as basically broke-ass motherfuckers, an endless series of unexpected expenses that they cannot simply float.

It is frustrating, to say the least.

But on the other hand, we've always got each others' backs. When you have eaten sandwiches from the dumpster behind Arby's with a motherfucker (after standing lookout while those sandwiches were retrieved), when you have had the use of damn near anything a homie owns, not because he can afford to loan it, but because he knows you can't afford to buy it, when you have never wanted for a couch to crash on and a meal when you wake up... You may not be rich, but damned if you aren't lucky.

Of course, that doesn't mean I'd turn down a high-paying job... you know, if any of you bastards happen to have one you feel like giving me...

For London Youth, Down and Out is a Way of Life

It ain't just London, and it ain't just 18-24 year olds.
Indeed, the problem isn't even confined to people who haven't finished college- BAs are a dime a dozen these days.

Worst of all, a lot of people have no idea how many jobs actually exist out there- there are entire fields of work that go basically undetected.