Lethal combat with rules represents the inevitable nadir of the human mammal
Lethal combat with rules represents the inevitable nadir of the human mammal
Warfare is not a misanthrope's dream, but his most validating nightmare. And it's been successfully packaged in 2022 as a version of March Madness
At some point in your adult or nearly adult life, it’s likely that a fooling-around partner will slide a finger into your asshole without any warning. (If this hasn’t happened to you yet, your time has probably come and gone.) Part of your shock over having just surrendered at least some form of your anal virginity will stem from having not seen the move coming from this of all partners.
But the rest of your surprise, maybe too much for comfort, will be dedicated to an equally unbidden Hey, this ain’t so bad—a gleefully primordial shout-out from some backflips-turning, pom-pom-waving spot within your limbic system.
And to revisit part of a lengthier literary selection I leaned on recently:
A man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called ‘herd-poisoning.’ Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness.
Humans are mammals, specifically primates and even more specifically apes. We humans like to think that spoken language is among the many tools that separates Homo sapiens from every creature that has ever lived, providing as it does for much of our undeniable dominion over the planet. But to an intelligent external observer—say, Yoda, or God without the baggage and the long rap sheet—even the most elegant sentence or burst of song from a human-ape mouth would be no more striking a form of intraspecies communication than the pant-hoots of a horny chimpanzee or the trilling of an agitated songbird.
A hundred thousand years ago, give or take, it was necessary for our ancestors to organize themselves into distinct tribes—groups of extended families, probably—and physically battle each other, as well as myriad other threats, for access to the resources needed to survive. Also, at some stage, human brains became large enough to internalize the concept of the future and with it, the inevitability of death. Imagine it dawning upon someone, somewhere in Africa, for the first time in history that the permanently stilled mother or child lying beside him represented, in a general form, his own ultimate end.
Combined with the confusion that must have accompanied then-inexplicable natural phenomena such as thunder and lightning, the passage of the sun across the sky, and changing but predictable seasons, it seems virtually inevitable that humans would come to believe in gods and the afterlife whether they really existed or not (sorry, Voltaire).
I don’t think anyone requires any formal training in paleoanthropology to envision and connect these dots.
Yet here we are today as an 8-billion-strong species, full of scientific explanations—or at least useful theories—to explain almost everything of quotidian importance. And it is no longer widely necessary to hoard and protect material resources from one another for most humans to enjoy, or at least pursue, some measure of love and comfort. But our brains have evidently not evolved as far in the same direction as some of our ideas have. For all our words and self-important claims to whatever we want do dig up from deep in the ground or launch into outer space, we’re just asshole-probing, largely blinkered and insecure apes eager to latch on to whatever seems to offer validation in the moment.
We therefore not only live on a planet that hosts unending, almost entirely needless wars, we occupy one in which this reality is increasingly irrelevant, even humdrum. In the past, newly elected American presidents would at least offer lip service to the notion of “world peace.” Now, they don’t even bother. And why would they? The “wartime” expansion of the U.S. defense budget in the Bush-Cheney years is now just the annual Department of Defense allocation. Americans who dumbly believed the Patriot Act was no big deal to those who “weren’t doing anything wrong” can now be spied on with ease, and probably should have considered the eely definition of “wrong” from any government’s perspective.
Human beings, all attendees of a party they didn’t ask to come to, at a house where the light switches don’t work and the instruction manuals for all the appliances are fucked up, can be gross. We have a tendency to make serious mistakes in life, like sucking the wrong dicks or nuzzling the wrong twats and then lying about it to the faces of our loved ones, or perpetrating profoundly excessive or unjust verbal attacks on coworkers and family members and customer-service reps, or not being altogether forthcoming about incomes or job histories or running data or porn-site bookmarks, or having one too many screwdrivers and either getting a simple DUI or driving really fast into the side of a loaded school bus.
We can be beautiful, too. I probably just gave every single reader an unwanted trip down memory lane with the above list. But if you did one or more of those things, chances are you had some loving apes around to shepherd you through the worst of it.
People should be allowed to thrive in any way they like if they have the means and a fair shot. And we have a lot to offer each other our respective quests—almost always. I think, without knowing when we hold the real keys to unlocking happiness. But for whatever reason, when humans organize into formal groups, we tend to put the most overconfident morons and their cross-eyed family members and associated in charge of running things, and this is where most things usually get ruinous, hilarious or both.
Probe that asshole, yank that cock, wipe that booger on the car door. Grunt. Moments later, deliver a flawless and rousing speech in perfectly measured tones, or play Beethoven’s Ninth, or win a spelling bee, before a crowd of a thousand people, bringing some in the audience to tears.
We move seamlessly between command and befuddlement, from certainty to chaos, hiding, to the extent we can, whatever scabs and scars we accumulate.
In early March, Rep. Adam Schiff—possibly the most covertly evil man in U.S. Congress—went on CBS’s Meet the Press and started talking (video here).
Schiff, a pop-eyed ghoul, talked about the U.S. imposing economic sanctions against Russia. Watch the way he kept his signature plastic grin as he spoke of crippling the lives pf ordinary Russian citizens by limiting their basic access to food, as if they asked for this shit, and (not that this matters) as if Russians haven’t protested—in their own country, at great cost and by the thousands—against Vladimir Putin’s actions.
Imagine the United States being a subservient power to Russia, and the reaction by the American to some official in Moscow laughing about starving all the fat fucks in U.S. flyover country. You probably can’t, because we’re all fat fucks, soft in the ways that matter.
Schiff also admitted that rising domestic gasoline and other prices might in part be a result of these sanctions, but hey, sacrifices for the greater good are a real thing! And most tellingly, he assured, faking deep regret, that the U.S. would likely be involved in Ukraine in some way or another for quite some time.
Schiff, of course, didn’t describe how American and NATO actions helped establish the preconditions for Putin’s actions, but that’s really a matter distinct from “war sucks, best to stay out of them,” and because most people have a hard time distinguishing that simple statement of fact from “Why do you side with Putin?” If someone produced a valid Putin beheading video, I would laugh my ass off. That’s how much I like him. But he is where he is largely because of U.S. actions thirty years ago.
No matter your feelings about that, Schiff might as well be Henry Kissinger. Or John Bolton. Schiff is a warmonger. As I watched the Meet the Press segment, I kept hoping someone would appear behind Schiff with an enormous battle-axe and split his skull so completely with one mighty, arching blow that it would fall apart like an apple and expose both sides of his lying throat. But that didn’t happen, so I hope instead that the man gets cancer, and that the only treatment he received is being strapped face-down to a cot and having strong acid injected up his ass at regular intervals, with the sound of his bitch-shrieks reaching not one fucking person who does anything but chuckle and shake his head at the disturbance. Schiff is a warmonger, and I hope he gets his but good.
Anyway, added together, Schiff’s deceits plus the continual Putin is Evil message pave the way for the cable-addicted American public to root for Ukraine, pull for the U.S. to militarily help Ukraine, and get used to another endless war to feed the war-profit machine.
When I say that the media do the bidding of high government officials, I wasn’t kidding about that, either. On March 29, the NYT ran these two headlines for the same story hours apart. Why? Because President Biden is too fucking gone to not say quiet parts out loud, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken evidently didn’t want the American public to think for one moment this was not going to be a protracted affair, and with the U.S. certainly pulling, or at least pulling at, the leading strings.
When the U.S. invaded Iraq on a sham pretext in 2003, the American media did a superb job on behalf of Uncle Sam of driving public opinion strongly in favor of war. Most readers of this site are probably old enough to remember the pattern, and to see it playing out now regarding Russia-Ukraine. And many of the same loathsome neocons—Republicans and Democrats both, like it makes any fucking difference—are around today, agitating with exactly the same bloodthirsty tones, and openly calling anyone not in full-throated favor of arming Ukraine to the max.
But there are a pair of massive new wrinkles this time: Social media, especially Twitter, and the complete conversion of the corporate media from a helpful tool of the government to a functioning arm of the government.
I realize that almost everyone still responds to such casual charges—“The media distributes state propaganda”—with eyerolls, and assumes that, like too many cranky and underutilized American males, I have slid further into the abyss of apocalyptic cynicism and general hatemongering. But liberals have been viewing Fox News as a propaganda outlet for around two decades, just as Fox News viewers properly see CNN and MSNBC in that light now, proving that Americans at least believes in the concept of corrupt U.S. media. Apparently, everyone believes they have magically managed to land on the side with most or all of the unfoolable news consumers.
Please watch this short video. It’s not directly about the invasion of Ukraine, but it’s extremely relevant.
If you can watch that, and come away believing that The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, or any of the entities most left-leaning people rely on are remotely truthful, ask yourself why. Ask yourself if you think they only lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop, or whether the fact that everyone around you has caught the coronavirus despite promises that the various vaccines rolled out would be effective suggests they just may have fucking lied about that, too. Consider now whether all the footage they rolled out in 2020 from places like Portland and Kenosha, Wisconsin represented faithful reporting about events on the ground. And are all those ex-CIA and FBI types on these shows because “they know the inner workings of the government” or because they still are, in effect, on the inside of that government?
None of it has been real.
Now, if you still believe these networks want you to think for yourself about Ukraine, fucking stop it. You’re embarrassing yourself.
(None of this, by the way, is a suggestion to develop a warm viewing relationship with the piss-rags at Fox News.)
The thing is, even though Americans claim to be deeply skeptical of news media across the political spectrum, most of us pick a side, knowing it’s a shitty one if we stop and think for one minute. Maybe because facing the fact that real information about the government’s intentions is inaccessible and that the people tasked with delivering it are the most flagrant misinformation-merchants of all is so frustrating and frightening and strange (and it is) that it is preferable in a difficult and conflicted world to have people to shout wrongheaded things with than to have no voice at all.
Our limbic system seizes on tribal identification, on the sense of protection and commonality and vigor. Even when the power afforded by this mindset and associated flailing is all an illusion, like the importance of a blue checkmark for a Twitter account.
It's sad how easily we as complacent people who fight about trivial things, myself included, can be misled into believing bad conclusions simply by operating televisions or surfing “trusted” news organizations. I want to hate people for this, but I can’t, so I avoid them instead. I do hate the motherfuckers orchestrating the fusillade of bullshit, though.
That includes Arthur G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times. The names of the previous three publishers, in reverse chronological order, are Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Sr., and Arthur Hays Sulzberger. If you’re reminded of Arrested Development, you’re not alone, and if you’re thinking the Bluths—any of them—could run a newspaper better then young A.G. Sulzberger, you’re right. This asshole, who has employed Taylor Lorenz and various other hound-faced, ethics-free shitlords at his “news outlet,” actually had the temerity to claim he doesn’t like bullying.
Sulzberger, who resembles a shiny, human-sized dildo whose ears ate there not to hear anything but for extra-tickly cunt-slamming fun, is a warmonger, directly or by proxy, and as such I’d enjoy seeing him chained naked to a missile that would then be fired into any floor of The New York Times building in Manhattan with every member of the managerial and editorial staff somewhere inside. These are disposable humans. Sulzberger is a liar of such magnificent scale that he actually deserves worse than anything I can write about him here.
(I said I hated war. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t approve of a properly scaled clean-up.)
As of a few days ago, Safeway and other national chains with presences in Boulder were offering an option at checkout to donate to “the Ukrainian relief effort,” or whatever. Given the fact that the cost of food is rising so rapidly that grocery clerks are getting carpal-tunnel syndrome from overusing their price-sticker guns, this almost seems like a macabre joke. This is not our fucking war. And as terrible as it is for those on the ground, why are we more worried about Ukraine instead of poor people in Arkansas, opioid addiction, Native American poverty, and all the rusting bridges that Biden was going to replace?
But it’s worse than that. Ukraine’s government is in debt to the tune of $57 billion, and its creditors, including World Bank and the International Money Fund, expect the country to keep making its payments—totaling over $7 billion in 2022 alone—while it is under attack by Russian forces.
So if you add a dollar to your supermarket order to "help Ukraine," there's a good chance that money will, in effect, flow right back out of the country and into the hands of rich people. Funding “the relief effort” in Ukraine may instead be viewed funding international banks and monetary funds.
#BLM!
That the collective blue-check consciousness can go from “BEING UNVACCINATED IS LITERALLY KILLING PEOPLE” to “WOW A WAR WHERE’S MY BLUE AND YELLOW FLAG?” without even blinking reveals the surreal yet well-established pliability of Americans’ collective attitude. That’s especially grim at a time when the media has never lied more forcefully than it’s doing now and when citizens battered into disillusionment by pandemic-related disruptions and the nonstop fomenting of what amounts to a not-so-cold race war. Need “liberals” to be war hawks now? Done!
NOT BREAKING: There’s nothing wrong with wanting to fuck the guy. A substantial number of women are jizz-encrusted, brain-damaged whores whose only purpose and conscious thought involves sucking and riding cock. They dream of nothing but bucking their hips in response to being jousted by the most enormous, vascularized dicks they can find, imagine, or purchase in rubber, mechanized or motorized form. They inexplicably love getting nailed in the ass until they bleed, often with an audience present and forever unaware of how strange and lovely an experience it actually is to fuck someone who is on her hands and knees. Not many, but enough to keep the asshole-probing circus especially lively and compelling.
They can give away that Twitter and Wokesters impose double standards about violence and death and body appearance and that they, they idiots who keep in going, are too enchanted by the latest thing to “support” to care.
But do they have to think of war in such cavalier terms?
I have more to add to this topic, mostly about how I came to see war in the terms I now do and how it’s affected some of my decisions over the years. I may not wind up writing it, because it will be at least as long as this post is and thrice as bleak.
(Photo: Bombs explode in Tripoli, Libya during a June 2011 U.S.-led NATO airstrike. The “War on Terror” has killed an estimated 360,000+ civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.)