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MY LAI VET SAYS: HERE IT
COMES AGAIN IN IRAQ
Tony Swindell
recalls "Butcher's Brigade" in '69; says "gooks"
have now become "ragheads", every adult male is an
"insurgent" ... atrocities against Iraqi civilians
are soon going to explode in America's face; US Government's courtroom jihads against terror
stumble. Alexander Cockburn on Lodi case where Feds paid $250,000
to man who "saw" world's three top terrorists at mosque.
As neocons
and Israel lobby howl for US to bomb Teheran, an Iranian outlines
simple path to peace. CounterPunch
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Now!
The United States of America recently
came to a fork in the road of history. One path led to the fulfillment
of the promise that America has made to the world: that it would
champion freedom, justice, and opportunity by its own example.
The other path led to slavery, violence, and futility. Did we,
exergasiastically speaking, choose to soar to the stars, or instead
embrace a plunge into the fetid depths of a swamp composed entirely
of decaying lamprey excrement? Let's just say this would be an
excellent time to possess an aqualung.
I am neither a pessimist nor
an optimist, weighing the evidence more or less as it comes.
Thus I do not see the glass as half full or half empty, but rather
twice the required size. The impending 40th anniversary of my
birth is not an occasion I anticipate with dread or delight;
40 is as old as a rhinoceros gets, but a Galapagos land tortoise
of the same age would still be a teenager, gerontologically speaking,
driving around bashing mailboxes with a baseball bat and huffing
glue out of paper bags. I admit that it might be better to be
two 20-year-olds than one 40-year-old, particularly if one of
them is a showgirl, but what I'm trying to say is you can't go
around being glum just because life is a mixed blessing. It sure
beats being some rocks. But the America I grew up believing in
has turned out to be a fairy story, like Santa Claus or the Easter
Hedgehog .
The pisser is, we had the chance
a few years ago. We could have turned this thing around. When
a fanatical group of architecture critics attacked the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon with passenger aircraft, the world
reached out to America, and America reached out to its president.
He took an immense, writhing dump on America and the world. But
it wasn't just this one man, this bumptious, ebriectious little
sociopath, that ruined everything; it was his entire bureaucracy
of fawning courtiers, the febrile, limp-wristed Democratic party,
the fascistic Republican stormtroopers, the patrician 18th Century
gents that opposed him in elections so obviously rigged one could
have mistaken the process for professional wrestling and
most of all, it was a luciferous amalgamation of fear-crazed,
gullible citizens and the corporate military/media complex filling
their heads with likely stories. So here we are, the fork in
the road now behind us, our feet treading the rocky path to perdition.
What next?
In such a situation, hemmed
in on all sides as one is by incompetence, greed, stupidity,
and a kind of quantum tackiness that borders on schlock, one
might well despair. After all, only ten percent of large ocean
fish remain, and five percent of coral reefs, and we reached
peak oil several years ago, and the only half-decent delicatessen
in all of Los Angeles is in Glendale. There's chaos in Afghanistan,
Iraq has spiraled into civil war, and everybody in Iran is going
around with one of those sniper rifle laser dots on the back
of their heads. Plus, I'm almost 40. Where's the good news that
allows me to remain calm? Because this all sounds pessimistic.
Hope is a matter of perspective.
The reason it's so disappointing
that America stalled out, at least for this disappointed American,
is that the American narrative was always about the next great
thing. We've gone down the wrong tine of the national roadfork
before. Sure, we wiped out an entire continent of indigenous
peoples, but those transcontinental railroads were a hell of
a thing. Maybe we clung to slavery longer than some folks, but
on the other hand, if we'd gone around emancipating everybody,
would we have jazz today? The Great Depression begat the Great
Society. I could go on, and if I was Ken Burns, I would. The
nut of the essence of the meat of the matter is that from our
most appalling failures as a nation, Americans have subsequently
wrested our greatest achievements. We rebound with style from
the most dreadful gaffes. So generally I'd be going around aggravating
people by claiming that great times were ahead, and America was
going to do something impressive and once again snatch up the
torch of liberty, instead of what Bush has done, which is torch
up the snatch of liberty. But we're out of resources. As Gramps
used to say, there's nothing in the kitty but catshit.
So I don't know what we do
next. The disaster is still unfolding. There is an election coming
up, the results of which will dictate whether America descends
into a new crisis or continues descending into the present crisis.
A new terrorist action has got to be well into the research and
development phase. Debt, Christofascism, global warming, the
privatization of fresh water, the ongoing rape of New Orleans,
you name it, the pooch is in mid-screw, and there remains a myriad
of days on George W. Bush's watch, unless somebody dethrones
him. It's too early to start looking around for a suitably American
rebound narrative. But it would be refreshing to come up with
something plausible. Maybe we could legalize pot and become a
vast, mellow land, like Amsterdam without the weird fruit beers.
Maybe we could welcome immigrants to our shores and become known
for that, or we could get national healthcare for all Americans,
or we could start a pet grooming business. Something needs to
be imagined, anyway, because it's a long, dark path ahead, and
for many of us, the next forks in this road will be a pitchfork,
applied devil-fashion to the posterior lobes. I'm not that worried,
though. Let the devils come! After five years of this administration,
I'm thoroughly accustomed to getting a prick in the ass.
Ben Tripp is an independent filmmaker and all-around
swine. His book, Square In The Nuts, may be purchased
here, with other outlets to follow: http://www.lulu.com/Squareinthenuts.
His favorite animal is the rhinoceros. Mr. Tripp may be reached
at credel@earthlink.net.
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