And no end in sight.
I asked for an imperial
song and dance
and in run a bunch of
zombie cloggers and singing zits!
Admen said it was a mystery
but we already understand
that all of us are
naked
under our underpants.
They call it missing in action, but those soldiers are missing at home, too, at every wedding and every graduation and every holiday.
Sometimes you meet an old man who has children and grandchildren now, and he never had a father. You meet amputees who had twenty good years ahead of them, playing softball or throwing a football around on Thanksgiving or pushing a stroller and lifting a baby ever so carefully out of it…
No war ever ends.
I remember Mr. Bush in the Press Club video, looking under a table for WMDs and all the elite reporters laughing, Karl Rove and Rumsfeld laughing and all the elite reporters laughing with them. Remember them!
There’s always broken souls and crazy men raging in bare rooms, and women who wake up screaming, and children alone in the dark, listening.
Names and dates of birth on tombstones and monuments, and a mother who remembers every birthday, soldiers buried in consecrated ground and others unburied in jungles and wastelands. This was the father who would have given the bride away. This was the brother who would have been the best man.
No war ever ends.
For anyone who believes in omens, America’s supreme civic festival is an obvious place to look for them, and what did we see at Super Bowl XLVI?
We saw a fat and clumsy former super-star fall on her ass in the middle of halftime festivities, and then…
The most grotesque winning touchdown in the history of football!
Squat on the goal-line, Ahmad! Then fall slowly backward on your ass!
Hurrah!
Super Bowl XLVI is over, and it’s maybe a minute to midnight in our dying Republic!
What’s your excuse for
so much ridiculous
screaming and thrashing?
I fell off a boat in 1987
and for the first
ten years
I thought I was drowning.
This is exactly why Barack Obama will be re-elected. He’s an incredibly charming con-man, and Romney doesn’t have a chance against him.
After various delays and multiple cost over-runs, the Pentagon has finally unveiled its whiz-bang multi-billion-dollar Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), which will supposedly vaporize hardened underground targets like the invisible nuclear weapons labs in Iran. Bunker-busting bombs to make the world safe for Israel! But…
These things aren’t much like what most people would call a “bomb,” meaning something you drop more or less directly above a target. A more accurate description would be “slow and heavy air-to-surface missile,” with maybe a nickname like “The Flying Slob,” and a range of about 40 miles. Are they vulnerable to radar-guided surface-to-air missiles, interception by conventional aircraft, and GPS interference? Yes indeed!
And there’s actually a fairly significant conclusion to be drawn about these massive low-velocity flying targets: You could shoot them down with a 20mm cannon mounted on (for example) a P51 Mustang or just about anything else that can fly, and so…
Before you deploy these slow fat bombs, you have to destroy every airport and runway in Iran, because if the Iranians get anything off the ground, and I mean anything, they can shoot down all your “Flying Slobs!”
But nobody in the Pentagon or White House wants to sell the war-weary American public a very ugly package like massive, massive bombing all over Iran and total war with a very unpredictable array of allies on the other side, like Russia.
So…
What’s discussed via leaks from “anonymous high-level sources” is something more like “surgical” strikes against hardened nuclear targets… as if a few strikes would be all there was to it!
I meet my
therapist (Baudelaire)
in an intimate
café on Boul’ Mich and while I
blather about my silly problems
he stares moodily at the passers-by
or writes pitiful letters to his mother…
sometimes six in one day!
Now he’s threatening to beat up some geezer…
his best friend!… and the geezer’s
wife and children and burn down his house!
At four o’clock exactly!
I look at my watch and explain
that he’s booked for another session
and another and another and another
all afternoon and yet another
busload of
British psycho-
tourists is already en route!
Baudelaire is infused with relief and self-abnegation.
Would I beat an old man?
He’s my only friend!
I’m in love with his wife!
His brats call me Uncle Charlie!
My mother made me do it!
So he writes her a pitiful letter while I
blather about my silly problems and the
golden
evening
decends along the Boulevard St. Michel
from Notre Dame to the Luxembourg Gardens.