Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What If War Came to the USA?
We pompously forget that Europe has suffered WAR. We pompously forget that Asia has suffered war after war after war. The Middle East, again war after war after war.
Just think, Berlin was leveled to the ground in WWII. So was Hamburg. So was Dresden. Leveled to the ground, folks. That would be like New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., being leveled to the ground. How many times have European cities had to rebuild due to being leveled to the ground by WAR? Large areas of London were flattened by Hitler's bombs and V rockets in WWII. Look what Russian cities have suffered over the years, but especially during WWII. Small towns in France were blown totally away during WWII. Small towns in Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland were flattened by war. In Iraq, for centuries Babylon (Baghdad) suffered being flattened from innumerable wars--cities all over the Old World leveled down through the centuries by war. The Greeks worshipped WAR and brought destruction every where their armies under Philip of Macedonia and his son Alexander went. Then the Golden Horde hit that area led by Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Timur, ruthless armies that conquered towns and villages by going in and flattening them to the ground--then rebuilding them as Golden Horde cities--then the Islamic forces hit that part of the world using the same conquering tactics, leveling cities and towns and slaughtering human beings to annihilate them and other animals by the thousands--all in the name of WAR! all in the name of Conquering.
We are territorial animals. That should be all that needs to be said about human monkeys and their love of WAR, WAR, and more WAR.
The United States of America has certainly flattened many a city in its WARRING history. In WWII the American Air Force leveled cities around the world--the big ones of course: Berlin, Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne, Nagasaki, Hiroshima.
Then on that morning of September 11, 2001, the United States gets attacked not by bombers but by US-based airliners--no bombs, just planes--planes taken over by 21 hungover Saudi-Arabians and one Jordanian using only lowly boxcutters as threatening weapons of individual destruction--planes these 21 hungover Saudis and that one Jordanian didn't really know how to fly and yet they managed to fly these US airliners into the very exact places in the World Trade Center twin towers that would bring them crashing straight down--straight down into the ground as if they'd been imploded. An amazing military attack--a sort of an ancient Trojan Horse method of invading a country thereby making it a classic military attack.
This one attack on the US by US airliners flown by hungover Saudis and one Jordanian that leveled not only the twin towers but Building 5, too (and Building 7, too, right? I'm confused about what went on that day)--and several other buildings in the area--like I said, an amazing result for so crudely a pulled off military attack.
And look at how we reacted to this attack! We started two wars as revenge for that miraculous attack. We started two wars of devastation on nations whose people had nothing to do with 9-11. Absolutely nothing to do with it; yet, look how they've been made to suffer for it. (Of course, we know our forces are actually fighting for oil rights--for oil territories--the actual probable reason behind 9-11--the oil cartels needing a reason to use the US troops to take back control of all Middle Eastern oil, our buddies in Saudi Arabia not strong enough militarily to really defend all that oil--certainly not stronger than Saddam would have been after he beat Iran in their 10-year war of military sport; and today Saudi-Arabia is certainly not stronger than the Iranian army, especially if that army has nuclear weapons in its arsenal, though I'm sure the Good Ole USA (that's We the People) have secreted some nuclear weapons into Saudi-Arabia, don't you figure?
You see, folks, Sociological thinking is all about "figuring." To Sociologically think, and I doubt if many "sociologists," and there are millions of them around the world, understand what I'm saying, though maybe intrinsically they do. Serious Sociologists can be very clever observers, though how they "figure" what they observe is where I debate with them--"Problematics of Sociology," the constant drivers in Sociological thinking--have we eliminated all the biases?--is what we're doing "purely" scientific? I, going kinda arm-in-arm with Dr. Max Weber, say Sociological thinking is an art, a gift. It's inherent in the wide-eyed curious at birth. It's especially inherent in those wide-eyed curious who become nonconformists or at the farthest end of that continuum, anarchists. It's like reading the Yahoo News headlines and seeing something in them (like the phrase "Obama Says We Are Out of the Recession Earlier Than Predicted") that triggers an interest in your oval of vision's range of expertise in terms of your"training" (meaning, I was trained by PhD. Sociologists) to interpret Sociological Theories, to use them as principles and guides and to embed them within your intelligence so you know how to use those principles and sociometric guides to give measurement to the field in which you are noting your empirical observations and what you note when you note down in a notebook and from your notes you calculate the impressions of what you've noticed and you sketch dimensions and planes and tiers and parameters and embarkations--a sketch of the field of conclusions from which you'll eventually develop your percentage-based premises, which you then collect and arrange into rational points of view--all artists have notebooks, sketchbooks, preliminary drawings, jots and tittles--the art is in "figuring" (reckoning) out what is going on in what you're observing--what aspect of the SOCIAL Gestalt you are making predictions on--it could do with ethnicity, the tribal, a community, a neighborhood, the other side of the tracks; or to do with isolationists, aggressors, murderers, criminals in general (all criminals have a profound effect upon society just as do all richer-than-rich individuals), or maybe even the so-called "good" people, too (the Humanitarians, for instance. "Humanism" is a word out of the Christian Satan's Dictionary of the Satanic Language. To US Fundie Christian freaks "humanism" as a philosophy demands that even the Christian God adhere to the world principle of equality and respect and by doing that (it's like giving an order to the Christian Creator God) it actually denies that this Christian God is the One and Only Almighty God the Creator; therefore, all humanitarians are heretics, atheists, children of the Devil--therefore, the Crucified-with-Christ Christians are then naturally led to believe that so-called "pure" science ("unbiased science" in Sociological terms) is the science of the Devil--Christian Fundie backwards logic. Wow, Elijah Mohamed may have been right, we were all created by a Mad White Scientist!
Don't you see, I'm justifying all of my Soothsaying opinions, like the one I fixin' to lay on you all.
At the moment about 30 innocent Afghan men, women, and children have been accidentally killed (one can't say "murdered" in this case--"All's fair in love and war" don't forget--HEY, I'll bet you a hundred bucks that if you go into a social setting and say "All's fair in love and war" most people there will agree with you heartily--with an "Ain't it the truth!" tailing that off with a Lordy-Lord guffaw)--and just now on the radio news I hear one our "oops" off-course missile attacks just killed 9 Afghan policemen up in a Northern Afghanistan province--up where war has destroyed the ruins of a previously unknown large city from the times of the Kushan in Afghanistan. By the bye, I know two Afghanistan people here in New York City, one a young fiercely proud Afghani-American, the other an older native of Afghanistan who is now an American citizen, and these guys are wizards at "figuring" out what's going on in their country--I mean they know exactly what the US is up to there--and yet, Obama will listen to a fucking US Army general telling him what's going on over there before he'd even let my two friends in the back door of the White Man's House to maybe get to talk to the gardener or maybe if they're lucky, the President's personal chef.
Like the warlords of old did, why don't We the People make President Obama lead our troops in these two continuous wars?
[Mr. Ed: Old Soldier Robert Gates has just announced a name change for our "police action" in Iraq. It will from now on be called "Operation New Dawn"--the same name they gave the ruthless killing mission into Fallujah under this same General Bob Gates's command and his loose-wig buddy the author of "the Surge," General Petraus, who Obama said was one of his heroes--this on one of our president's quickie sneak-in-sneak-out visits to our troops in Iraq back when he was still popular--so it looks like several more years of US military occupation for the Iraqis. I mean, it's just now Dawn to the US Army--when's the sunset ever going to come, the Iraqis are now asking.]
Like that little prick G.W. Bush and his phony "Mission Accomplished" 15 minutes of fame--we should have suited that little asshole up and forced him into a jet fighter and told him to get the hell up into the wild blue yonder and leave us on terra firma the fuck alone--how many feet on that runway before that silly bastard would have crashed?-- or if he'd maybe miraculously, like those Saudi-Arabian and one Jordanian dudes, got the plane in the air, it might of been him crashing into the Austin, Texas, IRS office building--or that Houston building that kid pilot flew a plane into in an anarchic act in which he was trying to impress his filthy rich Texas parents--remember when the Texas kid flew the light plane into the office building?
And now we get to the crux of my sermon today: Here goes a passage from my Sociological Notebook on Afghanistan: We the People of the USA are not there fighting to save the people of Afghanistan from the Taliban and al-Queda. In fact, al-Queda are almost totally out of the big Afghan picture now--it seems we've shifted all the al-Queda forces out to kill Americans from Afghanistan and Pakistan over to the Arab Peninsula now (Yemen especially)--WHY that's right across the way from Iran! How 'bout that?
Nope, it looks to me like, and here goes the Sociological soothsaying: first, I am looking at a map of southern Afghanistan focused on where the latest intense NATO (read "US") fighting is taking place: the city of Marjeh. Why, lookie there, it's in Helmand Province. You remember what the major crop production is in Helmand Province? The juice of the poppy, folks, Afghanistan's oil--though also, don't forget Afghanistan is the site of the almost-built-all-along-proposed oil pipeline that will run down from our Oil Barons's oil leases and wheeler-dealer deals in Kazakhstan (a ruthless dictatorship--but that doesn't bother us in the least bit) down through Afghanistan and into European ports--oil for Europe. Europe has no oil, folks--they've just about squeezed every drop out of the North Sea. Though we now see why the Brits reacted militarily to the Argentinians trying to invade and occupy the Falkland Islands way back there when they had their little WAR, which has now started back up. Why? you ask: BECAUSE THE BRITS JUST DISCOVERED OFFSHORE OIL THERE!!! So now here comes Argentina claiming it's theirs again. I assume President Obama will come to the defense of the Brits and we'll send a couple of destroyers against Argentina in defense of our White Motherland England's Imperial right to the wealth of their colonies--remember, the Monroe Doctrine covers that part of the World, too. This is all hearsay, but a Sociologist has a good notating ear as well as a good notating eye.
What if there really had been an Al-Queda drone air force carrying Weapons of Mass Destruction from Saddam Hussein's huge nuclear weapons cache buried in the desert sand somewhere?--and what if this air force of supersonic drones (ask yourself here what air force is actually using drones carrying weapons of mass destruction in this world today?)(how hypocritical are We the People?) had leveled New York City?--left it in bombed-out ruin?
The American air force pilots and crews who flew those missions over Hamburg and Dresden and Cologne are either gone already or there are only a handful of them left, especially the bombardiers and tailgunners and fuselage gunners who looked down and saw face-to-face, the bombardiers watching out the open bomb doors through binocular devices, as the showers of bombs landed in spectacular glory in a spewing of destruction across the width of those several large German cities. Imagine enduring what the people in those cities suffered during those fire bombings--incendiary bombs. Imagine something like that happening to New York City.
Our Ivy League-trained corporate lawyer President is trying to bring his corporate-backed (the source of his Chicago community service efforts) brand of community organizing to the whole world now that he's the world's most powerful leader, which US legend tells him he is whether he is or not. Dr. Jack Van Impe, my man in the world of Christian Fundie prophecy, says that President Obama is the antiChrist! I'm thinkin', wow, Brother Jack, like Elijah Mohamed was right in his way of sociological figuring about a Mad White Scientist creating Mankind, maybe you're right about President Obama being the anti-Christ. Brother Jack sees society totally different than I do; yet we can almost meet (through our parallel lines) in terms of prophesying that WAR seems to be the one instinct we can't control--we totally believe our legends of war and warriors--that they are HEROES and that it's an HONOR for our WARRIOR HEROES TO DIE for their country--and that it is BETTER TO DIE IN WAR than to come home crippled and damaged--the sign of a loser. The true WARRIOR HERO if he survives comes back a a decorated HERO, a TRUE CHAMPION--the one who did not surrender--the one who kept fighting even though maybe he lost a limb--BETTER MILITARY HONOR than saving a silly limb. Going one up on Brother Jack the Accordion-playing prophet, I'll predict, as long as We the People continue to follow our animal instincts and keep on choosing males to be our LEADERS we will have WAR upon WAR upon WAR until our technology becomes so nanofied it leads to our destruction. As soon as human monkeys annihilate themselves through their imagined righteousness and mirrored divinities, then the old Earth can relax and let whatever seed slime is left beneath what's left of its polar ice caps crawl once again out of the slime and onto land and the evolution of the super monkey will begin once again.
As an aside, let me tell you what We the People of New York City are having to put up with from our little-guy, billionaire, lover boy, billionaire mayor within this past week or so. Let me emphasize again that this Mayor is now serving an illegal third term he spent 100 million dollars to get himself finally elected to at the last minute by the narrow margin of 50,000 lousy votes over a Black man whose name (Bill Thompson) nobody today even remembers--I exaggerate, of course). Back in power, Billionaire Mike ain't wasting time getting that 100 million back in political rakeoffs. Lately his PR people have been promoting the little prick around town through photo ops and press releases as the most charitable man in the USA--trumpeting like little asskissing swans how much of his riches the Good Mall-Mad Mike contributes to...well, here they suddenly aren't too specific. My question is how do you praise him as a charitable rich man when at the same time he's allowing his real estate developer buddies (and, yes, folks, Bloomberg has investments in real estate--all Power Elitists buy all the real estate they can get their hands on, i.e., Ted Turner owning 1/4 of Montana ranch lands) to tear down blocks of affordable housing, throwing the tenants, some of whom have lived their whole lives in these apartments, out into the streets with a "Fuck You" eviction notice from a developer with a note that Michael Mall-Mad Bloomberg approves of your eviction. You get rid of poor people and you increase your tax base--which, of course, is a big fat Leisure Class (Power Elite) LIE. Nobody pays more out-of-proportional taxes than your Middle Class down to your workingclass down to even your poorest of poor.
So here lately, this little prick has just pulled another Plutocratic move on us dumbass New York City taxpayers. Last week he closed 19 New York City public schools because they weren't performing like our brilliant not-native-New-York-City-born mayor had ordered them to perform--in terms of promotions based on test scores that have no measurements for a student's learning abilities only what he has supposedly learned--and of course most of these closed schools are in poor and mainly Black neighborhoods.
This week this lousy little egoistic pecker of a mayor announced he was giving 75 million dollars to help build three new privatized charter schools: one in Brooklyn where the principal makes, listen to this, $700,000 a year; one in Harlem that is the project of Malcolm Smith, an old-school Albany state politician; and the Peninsula School in Queens whose founder and owner is, by golly, one of Mayor Bloomberg's old asshole buddies from a long time back. Yep, this sorry son of a bitch mayor, Mr. Charity, closes 19 schools--and instead of keeping them open, upgrading them in terms of repairs, equipment, new teachers (new jobs), etc., he gives taxpayer money (property taxes) to three private charter schools to which only ORDAINED students can attend.
Mayor Bloomberg being a Capitalist pig is attempting to privatize the New York City school system. He has been given power over the school system by New York State. The reason: New York State is broke--so they don't want the responsibility of the New York City school system on their hands.
The fucking rich are taking over New York City, folks. They are protected by the NYPD. They are given huge tax breaks by the City Council and the Mayor. Foreigners (Foreign hedge funds and private equity groups) that include Middle-Eastern potentates and royalty, Chinese commie real estate buyers, Brits, Israelis, Indian private equity gangs are being encouraged by Mall-Mad Mike to come into the city and buy our buildings and buy our affordable housing and upgrade it into unaffordable housing, to buy up our foreclosed-on businesses and condos and houses, and to buy up our land, and our factories (what factories? you ask)--AND NOW TO BUY UP OUR SCHOOLS--and they're already buying up our hospitals. [St Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village (where Dylan Thomas died) announced last week it was bankrupt and unless it was privatized it would have to close. Imagine that; with health insurance companies making billions in new profits and HMOs raking in the cash by the barrelsful; yet a hospital that is so viable to that neighborhood--I myself have been to St. Vincent's on a couple of occasions--the best emergency room in NYC--I can't imagine letting that hospital close or go private. Instead of spending 100 million dollars to win an illegal third term our billionaire mayor could have spent that money since he's Mr. Charity, don't forget, to save hospitals--that would have gotten him votes--more votes than his 100 million bucks spent on bullshit ads got him] And none of these silent-terrorist-invasive bums are paying their fair share of taxes, the burden of taxation falling on the backs of the already broke poor--higher property taxes, higher small business property taxes, higher taxes on the ungodly products like beer and cigarettes, higher tolls on bridges and thruways, higher fares on public transportation, allowing slot-machine gambling at the city racetracks, which are losing money out the ass because the gambling poor don't have bucks enough to gamble on the ponies so the pony boys are installing slot machines by the thousands in their race tracks. Yonkers Raceway in Westchester has slot machines already. Aquaduct Raceway out in Queens has just gotten state permission to install them. In this case, it's interesting that the company that got the contract to install the machines and run the casino at Aquaduct is headed by the Reverend Floyd Flake, a Black preacher on the order of the self-ordained Al Sharpton (and I like old Al's wit), who is always in trouble in terms of being in the LIGHT while he's in the pulpit but being in the SHADOWS when he's dealing with the Devil in a secular way, Praise the Hypocritical Lawdy Lawd!!
Plus, I just noticed, the state has put a deposit charge on plastic bottles--especially bottled water bottles, 5 cents on my bottle of Poland Springs--plus we are dealing with higher food prices, added taxes on our utility bills and phone bills, added taxes all over the place, plus our health insurance premiums are going up, 39% in some cases--plus supplemental Medicare healthcare insurance premiums are going up---GLORY, GLORY, GLORY the Power Elite pirates are dancing on the grave of Lady Liberty.
Think of this: because of our broke governments and bankrupt governmental agencies we are all surviving on BORROWED MONEY! Our dollars are now imaginary dollars. Every individual in the USA according to the national debt clock is in the hole thousands upon thousands of dollars, an amount increasing every day at such a rate we'll never ever again have our heads above water in our lifetimes--that is what's left of the lives of those of us over the age of 40. With dollars actually worthless, that means people who are working today are actually not making any real money, only imaginary money. Like if they went down to the bank and wanted to withdraw everything from their checking and savings accounts and IRAs and such, the banks would be boarding up faster than you could drive through the front doors--even if like Actor Rip Torn, one of my favorite actors by the way, and I hate most actors, you drive your god-damn pick up right straight through the god-damn bank's front door.
You see that's what caused the Great Depression--that's why Obama and his Clintonista and Bush Baby advisers are bailing out the crooks who took advantage of deregulations that Clinton and his gang foisted on us to go hog wild in deriviative speculation with OUR money--WHERE DO BANKS GET THERE BASE MONIES? If everybody made a run on the banks today, we'd end up like Argentina was not that many years ago, where you had to go to the bank every fucking fifteen minutes and check to see if you could get any money out--the value of the Argentine dollar falling faster than the people could keep up with it. A wheelbarrow full of money one day made you rich and the next day the wheelbarrow was worth more than the money it was holding. So that's why G.W. and Obama had to bailout the banks.
Oh how weary politics makes me. It drains me--though I do manage to work late at night on a couple of novels and some essays and dammit if I haven't been mentally charmed into trying my hand at a detective novel. I've invented a character: Dick Stump. Catch on yet? Yet, I can't take my Sociological eyes and ears off of the political scene--it's too crucial for me to know what these cheesy bastards are up to.... I mean one unexpected debt forced on my ass right this minute would send me out to buy a pistol and like Dr. Hunter S. Thompson blow my fucking brains out leaving behind a short note saying the world was going to hell in a handbasket and I was too tired and worn out physically and mentally to even consider continuing on the ride.
We (speaking the King's English) got a compliment from L Hat (proprietor of www.languagehat.com) t'other day saying my posts reminded him of Maxim Gorky, whose life and writings, L said, we're on parallel lines with OURS (speaking the Queen's English this time)--he'd just been reading a book on Maxim (in Russian, of course). I (speaking American English) did take it as a compliment as I have read in my youth one of Gorky's novels and liked it very much--when I was in my Rooshun-reading period brought on by my reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast in which Ezra Pound tells Hemingway he should "read the Rooshuns" if he wanted to learn how to write the best.
I'll leave you with a Maxim Gorky quote, which at one time I surely would have agreed with--myself included:
Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.
I gotta have a drink,
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
1 comment:
Ah, yes. Drinking more than writing. Brendan Beehan famously described himself as a drinker with a writing problem.
Post a Comment