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Thursday, April 08, 2010

Re: Wikileaks horror and my freaking out on Twitter right after viewing it

[140 character chunks preserved w/ no editing even though I really want to]
http://www.collateralmurder.com/
http://www.wikileaks.org/

I've never seen a video that made me weep and scream at the same time. I could imagine war. It was not the footage of the killing that...
dumped adrenalin into my system (at 1am), but rather the video-game bloodlust, which I know all too well, by the soldiers. Don't you
EVER let some patriotic soldier-fuckface tell you s/he's just doing his/her duty. This is MADNESS!
This war will never end until we're all dead. I didn't fully accept it before, but now I understand that the fighting will never end.
People can understand greed and revenge. But the hypocrisy of 'heroic troops?' Madness. THIS is fire control? Badgering control until...
they've been given permission to fire? Talking over/ignoring the guy whose observations might have had them hold their fire? This is the
shit soldiers in Iraq expect us to suck their cocks for? Fuck them. A family member brought pictures of charred bodies to a Christmas.
event right after the war started and he was chuckling and showing the little kids who he killed. I thought that was fucked up, but
thought he was caught in a machine. No. This is war democracy in action. The telos is combined to kill _someone_. To see foes everywhere
We are all so dead. This madness has just escalated from Vietnam. I used to see 'nam as a separate issue. "The Vietnamese forgave us.
so will the Iraqis." There is no forgiveness here. This is unforgivable. _I_ am unforgivable. I knew it was bad, but I chose to believe
that our thugs had controls. There is no system that can survive willful attempts to game it. Whether it's the jury system or fire control.
I am too cowardly to sacrifice my life to fight this insanity. So when someone kills me later, I'll understand why. I deserve it. So do you.
I don't want to fight this shit. I just want to be left alone. But so do most people. And when we hide, evil grows. SHIT! And all I have are
my fucking poems? Poem vs Apache: "April is the cruelest month..." "Ratatatatatat"
And what the fuck are you people doing here, talking about long cat and spamming the shit out twitter? Goddamn!
Imagine if all that effort on meme generation/proliferation was spent on debunking the war. FUCK! We're so dead. There is no point doing
whatever it is that you're doing, because this shit will BOOMERANG on us and kill us. America has become too sick. No amount of poetry, no
amount of your fake-ass 'pity-me' sensitivity is going to save anything. Poets aren't the only ones to blame, really all artists who just
go along for the ride, trying to climb the social ladder--you know what to call it when Romans do it: Degenerate. When you do it though...
you're what? Fucking creative? NO! What the fuck have I been thinking? This MADNESS is the ONLY thing worth writing about.
Everything else just enables the madness. Ignoring madness makes it normative. OMG! And you fucking ninnies get mad at me when I'm being...
harsh? Look to the machine gun if you want harsh. Look to young maniacs who played wargames all their lives. Look to Twitter as you're shot
in the back by a chopper in the distance. There is no future for those who enable this horror. There is nothing for those who stay silent
and let hostile memes make people CRAZIER! WE are harsh with our narcissism. When this madness continues and people scream 'mememememe'
well, I can't help but look at it all and think we're all fucked. Every single last one of us. American and otherwise. Because you
non-Americans are too much like us. You live like us (if you're on twitter, yes, you live like us) with the same ergonomic environment.
You played wargames if you're male and you dismissed the boys' wargames as harmless if you're female. And with the computer and its fake
mediation of really everything, it takes the audio clip of mass murder to make me sick. I was not sickened by the shooting, though I should
have been, I was sickened by the way the decision to shoot was brought about and the PATHETIC justifications that I hope give those fucks
PTSD. I hope they don't kill themselves, if only to serve as zombies. Reminders of how horrible war is. I didn't believe the hippies
when I was growing up, because they were such hypocrites. So I thought war was like peace--just another natural human activity.
Now I understand that the war veteran is a signpost. A warning. Only now, one can see the war, not just its used-up ex-men/women.
I will fight against this, but I think it's too late. i thought my relative was an outlier. I didn't want to believe this was the norm.
And now that I know it's the norm, all my horrible suspicions about the world are confirmed. If anything, I was too soft. If there is a God
It's Manicheistic because the worst impulses in humanity have become the norm. Goodness is just an impulse. Evil is a propensity.

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3 comments:

Khakjaan Wessington said...

2 things: 1) the clip recontextualized everything I ever knew about the current wars. 2) Vietnam through now is one continuous bit of American insanity. The crazy vets (I'll tell you about the time a drunk war vet pointed a .45 at me when I was a teenager some other time), the military-industrial complex...they're all connected. Why did I see that video just before bedtime? I have an iron stomach. I usually can fall asleep after reading/seeing disturbing things. This was too much though.

And it's not that I think war is always bad either. But I've been in denial as to how sick America has become. I thought it could be redeemed. While those with consciences were busy teaching the children of people with consciences how to be artists or high-paid morons, the insanity grew and metastasized.

Space is the only hope now for species survival. Oh God! How can one live in peace while harboring fantasies about war? How can one live in such an insane machine and still expect a sane outcome? Nobody tells the truth about war. They either say it's always bad, which is obviously wrong; else they say it's right for the circumstance--also obviously wrong (almost all of the time). And I, who fancy myself a connoisseur of war and history and other crazy byproducts of civilization--I with my skeptical instincts--still fell for the lies. I didn't want to believe the world is as depraved as it is, even though I've encountered all sorts of depravity in my life.

Get me and my loved ones off this planet!

The Humanist said...

This too shall pass, and the apathy will once again creep up your spine and lodge comfortably in your head. There it will whisper to you that you were right to be outraged, you were right to be sickened, you were right, you were right. It will coo you to sleep, and into complacency. So that its master, the one who wishes to rape and murder in plain sight does just that.

Men better than us have come before us and changed the world. I feel a rage that is only stoked by my own perceived powerlessness, and those that self immolate seem less crazy and more familiar.

For some it is better to not think of such things. For others it is all they can think of, and for those it might be best to simply throw themselves on the sharp rocks of it instead of living on the cliff. I don't mean suicide. I mean going against the immovable wall with such force that you either break through, show other people that they are not alone in their outrage, or in the very least: stain the structure when you break upon it.

So hopefully one day someone will see the faint spatter on the wall and wonder if a better man came before them and tried to change the world.

Khakjaan Wessington said...

Yeah, you're probably right. A buddy of mine coined a phrase that couples well w/ your point: gory glory. It's easier to just go out getting stabbed while saving a little kid; than it is to identify the enemy, formulate a strategy, formulate a tactic and then execute it. I wouldn't say the binary is bounded w/ apathy--instead, it's probably proactive/reactive. It's easy to be reactive--we're fuxing meat-reflex machines (more or less). Proactive though, involves having a special set of traits--and intelligence isn't necessary. I think 9 out of 10 people would choose to be more cunning, rather than more intelligent.