Appetite for destruction

"It's all fake news! More love for all lives!" screams a citizenry enslaved by media deception and the gruesome allure of eternal divisiveness, micro and macro

In the summer of 1987, when I was a high-school senior-to-be, a rock and roll band consisting of flagrantly unpresentable human beings from Los Angeles called Guns N’ Roses released its first studio album (I recall it as a compact disc). Dubbed Appetite for Destruction, its overdriven sounds—mostly the incessant wailing of a variously medicated W. Axl Rose, but also the rip-smashing guitar sounds of Saul (Slash) Hudson—rendered the CD’s tracks mostly unplayable on radio, then a critical music-distribution medium. Rap was on a marked, cross-cultural ascendancy; the antics of punk-rockers were practically blasé by then; Queen had been entrenched in the mainstream for many years. What risk was there of an especially boisterous bunch of Aerosmith-Led Zeppelin impersonators poisoning additional young American minds?

But also standing tall in the late Eighties, toward the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term as U.S. president, was Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, which was getting cancel-culture assists from a future (Democratic!) “Second Lady.” Remembering the flavor of the times makes it easier for me to appreciate why radio DJs were then reluctant to play songs like “Welcome to the Jungle” upon their release. But all of my shredded-jean-jacket-wearing, boom-box-toting classmates played that song constantly. And Guns N’ Roses was easily located on MTV, which, looking back, was almost like a one-way, pop-culture-only Internet. It was where everything new and hip was grown, groomed and seen, rather than merely heard as a final product.

Hard rock is not my favorite genre, but when I first heard “Paradise City,” I remember thinking, “Holy shit, this needs to be the number-one single all over the world. And I don’t even like the whole thing.” The following summer, around the time I was preparing to head off to the University of Vermont, it reached the number-two spot on the U.S. charts. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” achieved number-one-single status. The CD had broken through every one of its own ascribed taboos as well as its lukewarm initial reception. Appetite for Destruction went on to become the best-selling debut album/CD in history and, as of today, is the eleventh-best-selling album/CD, period. Guns N’ Roses was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.

Despite the commercial success of Appetite for Destruction, and the even more masterful 1991 compilations Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II—simultaneously released, ironically, at exactly the same time as Nirvana’s Nevermind, a CD that ushered in a new genre of awful music that helped kill off hard metal while boosting Prozac and flannel-shirt sales—it would be years before the Guns N’ Roses realized the critical success it deserved. Part of this delay can be attributed to the music itself carrying an unprecedented edge, but a lot of it was basic; it was often a miracle for all the musicians needed to produce music for a CD or a live audience to be gathered into in one place, sober or at least conscious. On their face, they were a million kinds of chaos and impending mortuary baggage, with news of their tantrums and blowouts rotating impressively among the band’s five original members.

But when did they show up, those guys could flat-out fucking play. Appetite for Destruction—which first struck most rock aficionados as a string of ugly, unnecessary explosions detonated by unreliable, crotch-grabbing cringe-artists—was later appreciated to be not just acceptable, or merely good, but brilliant musical art. And despite the mercurial personalities of the band members, they’re all still alive, and some of them have some thoughtful perspectives.

I was thinking yesterday how all of this plays out in reverse, with excoriating predictability, when it comes to something with far more damaging consequences than any rock music could ever impart: Armed conflict. American government officials and their hawkish media lackeys have been using the same playbook to whet America’s literal appetite for destruction, on demand and against its apparent will, for over twenty years. I watched this happen after 9/11, and I’m seeing it unfold with even more zany and surreal fervor now.

I shouldn’t be surprised that so many of the blue-check Twitter folk who spent the past several years calling incessantly for people to treat human lives with greater reverence by wearing masks and getting vaccinated are now treating the Russia-Ukraine conflict as something in which the United States would be criminally remiss to not militarily involve itself. Yet no one can sanely make the argument that the U.S. is under direct military threat, so Americans who are actively cheering on the hostilities in Europe, for whatever righteous reasons, are either not thinking clearly or have simply given up on feigning humanism and just want to see bodies pile up as long as those corpses and any associated chaos remain abstractable overseas elements.

As it did with Iraq and Afghanistan, the public narrative regarding Ukraine is playing out like the tale of Guns N’ Roses, but in reverse. Instead of projecting initial resistance or revulsion at the certainty of hundreds or thousands of innocent lives being lost to purposeful violence, Americans have already been lured into not just acceptance but appreciation of a war Someplace Else. And instead of the awe ultimately afforded Guns N’ Roses, today’s rah-rah feelings will yield, years too late, to distaste and sullen regret.

As they did maybe ten years ago, at the height of a period when most Americans believed that the U.S. was no longer conducting lethal military operations, Americans will wind up wondering, as they stare with deflated dicks at images of flags drapes over caskets on television, “Why the fuck did anyone ever listen to cocksuckers like Bill Kristol and David Frum?” (Various journalists who were behind the whole “vanquish the Muslim world force, it’s brutish and backward” Bush and media message c. 2001-2003 have more recently leveled charges of “Islamophobia” against their colleagues and others as the geopolitical winds have shifted.)

But neocons never go away completely. They just go into remission like the beast in Stephen King’s It and patiently wait for the cycle of full-throated warmongering and cries of “You’re not a patriot if you oppose any of this” to begin anew on American television, enriching further both their bank accounts and their own psychotic pursuit of a doomsday triumph.

They’re doing it now. I don’t need to link to anything. Just do a Google news search and read the opinion pieces in the major mainstream pubs. They don’t even bother, for the most part, with pretending that actions by the U.S. and NATO haven’t created fertile preconditions for Vladimir Putin to roll his tanks into Donbas and beyond. And while it’s perfectly plausible to propose that someone can be a murderous psychopath, yet still act in accordance with internal if not external logic—sure, Jeffrey Dahmer was a cannibal and child sex rapist, but he still demonstrated patterns—this is exactly the kind of observation likely to earn a branding like “Putin puppet” from a major media figure or a furiously fist-fucking Twitter scold (often the same person).

Garry Kasparov is a brilliant man who hates Russia for some reason, and has laid out what looks to be a perfect strategy to cripple Vladimir Putin while essentially restructuring all of Europe. It would kill a lot of people even if it worked, and it’s not clear why Kasparov is certain his version of systematic destruction will proceed as predicted even while Putin is revealing the galactic frailty of his own c. February 2022 foresight.

But let’s say he’s right. Does that mean it’s desirable or necessary? I have never swallowed the idea that, sure, the U.S. is an ever-encroaching superpower, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t fight when its actions help generate deadly situations. This is like being a sober alcoholic who succumbs to the temptation to visit a liquor store. Once inside, the conflicted addict can still tell himself, “I haven’t taken a single sip yet.” But at that stage, it’s overwhelmingly more likely for that addict to hear his mind murmur, “You’re already here among the bottles, my friend. The game is on; pick your weapon and get going.”

It’s sad enough that Americans who themselves are facing massive inflation are in large numbers immune to the guaranteed suffering of Russian citizens that economic sanctions will inflict. One might propose that it is profoundly inconsistent to preach any message ending in “lives matter” for two straight years only to start pleasuring oneself with a President Zelensky vibrator at the first opportunity. It also seems rather compartmentalized for millions of Americans to accuse millions of unvaccinated Americans of being agents of murder and death—wrongly, as it happens—while not expressing fulminating horror or at least a tone of dismay at the fact that the U.S. is getting itself dug in for another extended campaign ensured of enriching defense contractors and their lobbyists, many of whom appear on CNN et al. to explain in somber yet upbeat tones why Uncle Sam the arsonist needs to send every available fire truck across the fucking Atlantic again.

For a country whose citizens routinely report having practically no trust at all in the corporate media or the federal government, the United States sure has a lot of smart people who internalize the messages from those ever-more-fused institutions anyway.

I hate this shit. I don’t think I’m the only person alive who has no longer use for any group of goal-oriented humans with more than three members (group runs are okay) and really hates it when people commit what appear to be purposeful and damaging mistakes, yet really doesn’t want people to die, especially those who have done nothing other than commit the crime of being born in a place that was or would become a locus of greed-driven calamities and death.

I can’t believe more people don’t feel this way. Maybe they do, and things have reached a point where “Hey, maybe we should dislike war?” is too risky for anyone with public standing to express. Perhaps if more of them understood that this will happen repeatedly until we’re all dead, and that the country will continue helplessly cheering it on until that moment arrives.