Fuckin' obscenity and war
Sometimes people say I should use more gentile language than I do. I cuss a whole lot. It's natural language. It's how people in my class speak. We use a lot of salty language. I am not ashamed of the form of communication I learned growing up. Indeed, I prefer people saying simply and directly in great preference to this fuckin' jargon that exists to make murder respectable.
War is obscene. It's the ugliest thing there is because, as has been noted by wiser people than I am, it combines all other crimes. I would add that it not only combines them, it distills them. I think what's obscene when people don't use the most vulgar language appropriate to the situation to describe war. War is shitty. It's fucked up. It's evil. It's sick, depraved, and the sonofbitches who start them, continue them, profit from them are the worst goddamn criminals in the world.
I wish there were worse words, and, indeed, people often trip on the parts that I think are actually pretty tame. To me, pretty much the worst word there is is mercenary. These bastards profit on war. It's their business. So, each day and in every way, they encourage war for business reasons, so they can increase their profits. Unchecked, it leads to fucked up bullshit like the Hundred Years War and the horrors and depravities that convulsed France and England (and then Italy and Germany and beyond). People choke up on “fuck” but “mercenary” is, like, hell, it's downright sexy, nowadays, but I have trouble imagining anything worse. Mercenary should be as grotesque a term as “genocide”.
What brought this on? A US soldier in Afghanistan, Joshua Bernard, was filmed as he was dying and it got out to the Internet. The DOD is horrified. Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary, said, “I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Lance Corporal Bernard's death has caused his family. Why your organization would purposefully defy the family's wishes, knowing full well that it will lead to yet more anguish, is beyond me. Your lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple American newspapers is appalling."
Which is obscene. You know what really is fucking up the Bernard family, Gates? Him dying in a ditch in Afghanistan. That's the obscene thing.
We should be constantly bombarded - bombarded - with images of this war. We need to know what it looks like when a young person is shot dead, when the get their limbs blown off, what a person looks like when the house they're in has been hammered with Hellfire missiles (a name that is also obscene, if you ask me). Every time we talk about war, we should do it in the most emotionally charged way possible, I feel. Every day, in every way, we need to know that war is the worst thing that humans do. It combined and distills all the ills of humanity into a sick slurry of evil. So we should be forced to see the pictures. To know what war does to human bodies and souls. Because the only reason why Americans allow our government to continue the depraved, imperial wars we're in right now is because we have no sense of the horrors committed.
We must discuss war in the most obscene language we can imagine. We must see the most grotesque images. We must hear their dying screams. We must have the stink of shit and gunpowder and burning flesh in our nostrils.
War is obscene. It's the ugliest thing there is because, as has been noted by wiser people than I am, it combines all other crimes. I would add that it not only combines them, it distills them. I think what's obscene when people don't use the most vulgar language appropriate to the situation to describe war. War is shitty. It's fucked up. It's evil. It's sick, depraved, and the sonofbitches who start them, continue them, profit from them are the worst goddamn criminals in the world.
I wish there were worse words, and, indeed, people often trip on the parts that I think are actually pretty tame. To me, pretty much the worst word there is is mercenary. These bastards profit on war. It's their business. So, each day and in every way, they encourage war for business reasons, so they can increase their profits. Unchecked, it leads to fucked up bullshit like the Hundred Years War and the horrors and depravities that convulsed France and England (and then Italy and Germany and beyond). People choke up on “fuck” but “mercenary” is, like, hell, it's downright sexy, nowadays, but I have trouble imagining anything worse. Mercenary should be as grotesque a term as “genocide”.
What brought this on? A US soldier in Afghanistan, Joshua Bernard, was filmed as he was dying and it got out to the Internet. The DOD is horrified. Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary, said, “I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Lance Corporal Bernard's death has caused his family. Why your organization would purposefully defy the family's wishes, knowing full well that it will lead to yet more anguish, is beyond me. Your lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple American newspapers is appalling."
Which is obscene. You know what really is fucking up the Bernard family, Gates? Him dying in a ditch in Afghanistan. That's the obscene thing.
We should be constantly bombarded - bombarded - with images of this war. We need to know what it looks like when a young person is shot dead, when the get their limbs blown off, what a person looks like when the house they're in has been hammered with Hellfire missiles (a name that is also obscene, if you ask me). Every time we talk about war, we should do it in the most emotionally charged way possible, I feel. Every day, in every way, we need to know that war is the worst thing that humans do. It combined and distills all the ills of humanity into a sick slurry of evil. So we should be forced to see the pictures. To know what war does to human bodies and souls. Because the only reason why Americans allow our government to continue the depraved, imperial wars we're in right now is because we have no sense of the horrors committed.
We must discuss war in the most obscene language we can imagine. We must see the most grotesque images. We must hear their dying screams. We must have the stink of shit and gunpowder and burning flesh in our nostrils.