Journal-GISM

War Is Gory (Glory) (Gloriosky, Zero)
I'm sitting here, I just got in from taking my laundry around the corner, listening to a Brit journalist who though I admit to being an anglophobe and usually very cynical about Brits and their thinking is saying some ear-capturing things about a book on the Middle East he's just written, things (thoughts) I've been thinking since I studied world history in college--something I noted ravenously in the early posts of The Daily Growler and things I am still snarling about--things having to do with who is to blame for the mess in the Middle East--and I give you three guesses and, as usual, 2 of 'em don't count...er...ah, well? Do I have to do the old "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?" trick on you? It's a pity if you can't answer that question right off the bat. This Brit, Robert Fisk is his name, can answer that question, quick, precisely, with his long finger poking the blame right in the face of who is to blame.

Fisk's book is called The Great War for Civilisation --as a gung-ho Amurican, I should'a changed that sissy "s" to a manly "z," the Amurican way--but, nope, I allow the Brit his Anglo-Saxonized spelling. [Does a true Brit spell New Zealand with an "S"? New Sealand. Jesus, that makes much more Amurican sense to me than spelling it with a "Z"--but wait a bloody minute--the "Z" is Amurican isn't it. So confusing these languages we speak; these languages that are really saying the same petty things all languages say and are saying; the same cliches; the same tired old--"You better make hay while the God Ra is in the sky"--adages, aphorisms, grunts, groans, growls.]

Fisk is a knowledgeable and very experienced journalist; admitedly he's a war correspondent; and he's a war correspondent because of the Alfred Hitchcock film he saw when he was 12, Foreign Correspondent, a Hitchcock thriller about an American journalist who is made the first war correspondent of a New York daily newspaper and he's sent to Europe to cover the war.

Being a war correspondent is alluring work, especially to the highly romantic, and believe me, to be any kind of real correspondent, you've got to be highly romantic--think highly of yourself, of course, and be totally without obvious fear (the "never let 'em see ya sweat" of comedian law).

Fisk is a jolly looking guy; he looks like the kind'a Brit you'd love go to a pub with and sit for hours tossing back growlers of ales and tossing out growlings and dramatic growlings of experiential tale-telling and argument. Fisk is a real man--a true war correspondent, active in Middle East affairs for 30 years, going anywhere and everywhere there was war there, really making a name for himself in Bosnia (another war involving Muslims vs. Slavic Christians) and then going to Israel and getting Israel's side of their attacks on Gaza Strip cities or Palestinian refugee camps or lately their attacks on Southern Lebanon--and then going to the Gaza Strip and then into Southern Lebanon and eventually with the Hezbollah to have them tell their side of this story chapter-after-chapter-after-chapter long.

The important thing to a journalist, Fisk says loudly and rightly, is "THE STORY." And why the story? Because that's a journalist's way to fame and then more stories. That's why he eagerly risks his life for a certain story that he knows the world's eyes will be on when it's published, and if he's done his job well enough, it will be the first time anyone will have ever heard the story and the story has the potential of causing controversy, debate, and eventually maybe even a change in world affairs--whooooo-boy, Fisk knows how to powertrip, but he's right and it's the truth.

My brother was a newspaperman and that quest for "the story" was constantly nagging at him in his head--he was everyday aggressively looking for a new story, HIS story, and my brother got good enough at it he found enough good stories to eventually publish 29 books while he was still alive and two after he'd left the coil.

Journalism. A daily log. Like a daily web log. "Hey, folks, theoldgrowlingwolf is a journalist!"--and you damn right I am. I took a year of Journalism in college. The girl I dated in college was a newspaper editor--OK, her high school newspaper, but what the hell, it was a newspaper. Levity, folks; please, I'm a comedic journalist.

So this guy Fisk I highly recommend checking out. He traces his feelings about the Middle East back to before WWI--and he's right in that. He traces it back to Britain's attempt to overthrow the Ottoman Empire, which Fisk says--and again he's right because we shouldn't be fooled by assassinated dukes in Sarajevo (is there still a Sarajevo?)--that duke was a Hapsburg and the Ottoman Empire was partially carved out of the Hapsburg Empire--why Serbs still think they are Hapsburgs--and that was the true cause of WWI. The Turks. The vicious Turks. As the Ottomans, they were as ruthless as any imperially minded tribe of Yahoos with power enough to ride out and ravage and pillage and war and whore and enslave and conquer and spoil.

[And so does Neo-Conservatism go back to those same days--the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and the sudden need for ENERGY--POWER!!!

So who to blame for all the mess in the Middle East today? The answer is in the following copy-and-paste I excerpted from the BBC History of the Middle East Website--notice where this all took place:

As the Gallipoli campaign wound down, an Anglo-Indian force was cut off and surrounded at Kut-el-Amara, a town about 100 miles south of Baghdad. The limited, defensive stance at Basra had evolved into a distant and risky advance up the Tigris toward Baghdad, and this had been the result.


Who did the Turks defeat (the Muslim Turks don't forget) at Gallipoli--in what was then called Mesopotamia but is today called Iraq?

And this all started in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago--which you would know if you'd been an ardent student of The Daily Growler. I blame the Brits for all our problems--ever, in the history of this nation especially. We are still a nation led by either White Colonists or White Tories--as is the present government. We have never been led by a Native American; we have never been led by a black; we have never been led by a Jew; we have never been led by a Mexican-American; we've only once been led by an Irish-Catholic, and you see what happened to him.

The safest church to say you're a member of in this country--even if you're a Muslim--is the Episcopal Church--the Amurican Church of England, the Anglican Church. The Bush Family is Anglican; from the old pastures of the greener side of Connecticut. It was recently noted in the local Connecticut rags that the music director at the old Bush Family Church in Greenwich--Billionaire Heaven--and they always check every church music director out--come on, darling--but anyway, they just caught this dude with tons of child porno in his home and office. The Parishioners were shocked.

Our three instincts for surviving: 1) the quenching of thirst and the satisfying of hunger; 2) relaxation after work (toil/slavery)--entertainment; 3) and SEX. Sex before sleep, folks. Sleep ain't no instinct; it's a biological function. So's death. Instincts are urges to survive, to live. All men secretly crave a pornographic situation--it helps them get Viagra-bly able to have sex. It's frustrating, isn't it?

Remember, it's impolite to talk about IMPEACHING all of those creeps in Washington, District of Corruption. It's We the People's means of overthrowing any of OUR governments that try to take away our Bill of Rights--much more important than the Constitution, which is just a set of grounded rules on how to run this country as close to that idealized by John Locke...oh, hell, here I go, off on another starflight--except I dance among the moons--I'm howlin' for joy--"Hoy, hoy, I'm your boy/three hundred pounds of heavenly joy."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fisk