I Was Going to Write About Civil War

Topsy Turvy
From terve "to turn upside down." I am upside down as I write this. My brain is mixed mash tonight, this morning, or whatever time it is. Time is relative and also was a weekly news magazine and I can honestly say I have not looked at a Time magazine since I lost contact with Time Inc. in 1993. I remember the last Time I looked at; it was the issue my best friend was listed on the mast head for the first time in his career; my best friend died of cancer that next month and after he died, I never wanted to see another Time magazine and I haven't seen one either. I don't think I've missed a damn thing, do you?

I was going to write about Civil War. We Amuricans love civil wars. We love getting involved in them: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and now the War in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan, both civil wars, Afghanistan already involved in a civil war when we interfered--why Osama was there, why the CIA was there already, how the Taliban got control of the country, etc. (same old stories told over and over in history) and now we have pushed Iraq in a civil war, the quest of our military desires. And now in Lebanon another civil war has started. Shi'ites versus Sunni. What? Yep, we're splitting apart the Middle-East. Dividing it into tribal (caliphate) factions. We are all acting like good animals, following our territorial instincts, our constant search for water, food, and sex--that's all it's all about, even these civil wars.

I couldn't write about civil war. The January death toll in Iraq again broke a record; over 100 Iraqis and Amurican troopers are dying in Iraq every day now--that comes to 3000 a month. Three thousand a month. Doesn't sound like much at all, does it? Average monthly salary of an advertising director in New York City--3,000 smackers a month compared to 3,000 dead bodies a month in Iraq. DEATH. God-damn how we worship DEATH.

I'm facing death. You're facing death. We are all living under a death sentence. Still we continue to act like animals even though our reasoning has decided we are not animals but special supercreatures made by the same Big Daddy who made all the other animals but "us" animals he decided were so special he made us nonanimals--human-animal hybrids. It's so weird it's difficult for me to write about it. Such bullshit. All to cover up the fact we are all going to eventually have to face DEATH, no matter what supernatural guru's path we are following. All paths and ways of life lead to DEATH. Sorry, folks. Jesus I wish I could god-damn tell you, I swear to God, I believed in eternal life. But, son of a bitch, I studied Sociology in the Devil's college, a state university, oh my God, a hotbed of unionism, communism, and anti-Capitalistism (anti-American) thought, and the great minds of the greatest of the great sociologists, Durkheim, C. Wright Mills, Talcott Parsons, Lester Frank Ward, Charles Horton Cooley, Pitrim Sorokin, Saul Weinberg, Thorsten Veblen, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Merton, et al., taught me to observe something, study it, you know, measure it, determine its every capacity, its every possibility, its every flaw, its every beneficiency, its every crack, its every brick wall, to take random samples of it and from those, deduce probabilities, like "If you build a six-lane highway through Greenwich Village in NYC, you are going to drastically change the whole Gestalt of Greenwich Village--first of all, you'll split it in half. Yo! The six-lane highway acts as a barrier, a zone, dividing what was once a whole, viable, actively progressing community/environment/culture. Evidence therefore shows a sociologist that the six-lane highways pros and cons show=it's better to keep the Village the Village than it is to hack a six-lane highway across it. Evidence empirically gathered and measured and analyzed and decided through deduction, like a good smart monkey, man!

DEATH is easily made evident through the study of Sociology. Evelyn Waugh's wonderful book The Loved Ones -- the movie is cute, but the book is vicious--same as all of Evelyn Waugh's strangely Brit-evil books--Scoop, for instance; what a book! "Eat me!" made defiantly visible.

DEATH in Iraq doesn't mean much. Overthere it's perhaps welcomed in certain circumstances, like when a US Marine is raping your daughter and wife and holding an AKA up against your head and you know these crazed US soldiers are going to maybe cut your balls off or your tongue out or cut your fingers off one by one as souvenirs or maybe ram a AKA barrel up your ass before pulling the trigger! Don't you pray for a supernatural death at a time like that, a time I can't imagine (people who live through what is insufferable pain to me amaze me--like John McCain--just think of the torture that poor bastard went through in 'Nam--I mean they pulled this dude's teeth one-by-one with pliers; they pulled all his fingernails and toenails out with pliers--surely he screamed with pain! and then they put him in one of their infamous tiger cages, a narrow pit dug into the open ground and then a steel cage put down in the hole and then John McCain stuffed down into the cage, locked in there, then buried where just the top of the cage sticks above the ground--the roof steel now, remember, and John's in this tiger cage out in open ground, in the heat, the rain, the wind, whatever--maybe a Cong soldier strolling over and taking a piss on John--who knows--perhaps at times like that, surely you might beg for quick DEATH, not slow DEATH. We are really afraid of SLOW DEATH. Yet, that's what we basically believe some evil people actually deserve. DEATH is the final solution. Keep that in mine as you stroll on down my wolf path.

Molly Ivins just succumbed to breast cancer. I lost my ex-wife a few years back to breast cancer. I lost my brother to brain cancer. I lost an uncle to lung cancer, laying on an army cot in a Vet hospital down in McKinney, Texas, screaming at the top of his half-lungs, begging to die, hollering to his mother, "You bitch, you damn bitch, you brought me into this world and now why the hell can't you get me out of it?--shoot me, mother! Shoot me, please!! " My best friend in NYC died of esophagus cancer while balled up in a hardened knot just like happens with any dying animal. You ball up in a knot when you are dying and feel you are dying and know you are dying and then you do die. Snakes curl up into tight knots, too, when they're dying. Elephants slowly creep to flatten themselves into the ground when they know they're dying, to blend back into the dust from which we all sprang.

Every day millions of people DIE. Philip Wylie said we gave up eternal life for sex. If we insist on continuing to have and enjoy and getting a thrill from sex and breeding more of ourselves, then we must all DIE or else the planet couldn't handle us all if we lived forever. That's why our only hope truly is in outer space. There may be a celestial heaven out there somewhere; who the F knows? You don't. I don't. I certainly as a sociologist can't believe in a celestial heaven or hell.

DEATH is everywhere. It's in the air as I type this; somewhere here in NYC someone is dying as I type this. And Ra only knows how horribly they may be dying. Perhaps they're being burned alive--last night a child burn to death in a fire up in the Bronx--or, you could have suffered a decapitation last night, like Jayne Mansfield was decapitated in a car wreck coming to New Orleans when I lived down there; Carol Lombard was also found decapitated in the plane crash that killed her.

There is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth all over the world as I type this, "Oh boohoo-hoo, poor ole so and so is dead...yep, dead. Dead as a doorknob. Terved. Turned upside down by the hand of DEATH." Why it's called a stroke, like the stroke of a sword.

Check It Out: Since the end of World War II, 16.5 million people have died in internal conflicts, compared with 3.3 million in interstate wars. About 122 civil wars have raged since 1945, compared with 25 conventional wars. Internal conflicts last six years on average and bring about widespread refugee dislocations and economic devastation -- as seen in Afghanistan, Somalia and Lebanon. Despite this heavy toll, the professors say, civil wars have been studied far less than conventional conflicts and are not properly understood.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/02/civilwar925.html

Interesting article, eh? From Condo-leasing Rice's alma mater. In the end, it was said, and they didn't have Colon's Pal counting the trooper bodies either, 700,000 people died in the US of A Civil War (there was nothing civil about it). Millions upon millions of people have to die over time in civil wars. Millions upon millions of people who we'll never know; young people mostly never given a chance to live life to its fullest extent. All dead because they didn't have enough money to buy their ways out of the various armies that need them to sacrifice with the gods of war.

We the People in the US of A are becoming colonizers, corporate colonizers, the forcing of our ways and means on the rest of the world, our banking system, our merchandising system, our manufacturing secrets and systems, our way of doing nuclear energy and making weapons of mass destruction--we are the leading producer of death weapons in the world; we have more nuclear weapons in stockpile that all the other nuclear powers combined; we have enough nuclear weapons in the ole storehouse to obliterate human beings from the face of the earth forever; nuclear weapons enough to totally deface the planet. So who are the real terrerists? Those who divide us. Those who separate us into tribes, tribes based on skin color, religious mumbo-jumbo, the visions of warped visionaries, all knowing that in order to keep power you have to keep your advisories divided, at each other's throats, and in the end, when these countries are all divided into north and south divisions, we'll be happy as possums eatin' shit--Iraq and Afghanistan divided in to North and South zones, the way we want all the civil wars we start to end up--like with North and South Korea. North and South Vietnam. North and South in the US of A. North sides of cities; South sides of cities.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler