Laughing myself sick

May 16, 2010 10:24

I have a messed up sense of humor. Its part of who I am, Like a foot or a brown hair color. While generally this runs the gamut of bizarre non sequitors (Fish Spectrum class wrestlers in corduroy face-masks ftw!) or the brutally sadistic (She fell funny) the subject of my story has to do with puppets.

Jeff Dunham is a funny man. He is talented with voices, singing, and displaying a sort of social irreverence that I find equally obnoxious as well as charming. The funny man makes me laugh. When a friend introduced me to his collection of DVDs of his performances I watched everything he had. It's rare that I can really get into comedy performances. Most of them revolve around things meant for a much wider audience and falls flat on my own aesthetic. As noted though,.. Jeff Dunham is a funny man.

In between the chuckles though,.. I noticed a couple of things that just got under my skin. It was not his reflexive closet racism that really bugged me so much. That's almost trendy on comedy central. What got me was a sort of underlying perspective that his conservative majority values were the same everyone in the audience had. This was displayed through his dead terrorist puppet, off handedly associating a lot of negativity with possibly being mistaken as a fag, and most importantly calling out special attention to serving armed forces past present and future with having the entire crowd cheer for them.

Now,.. I understand civic duty more than the next slob. What got me about the encounter was deep rooted and took me days to really grasp what upset me about it. I was raised in a military family in the regular presence of veterans. Vietnam Vets in particular with a circle of second world war legends filling out the peripheral grandparent's generation. These were my role models I had patterned myself after when making a conscious decision to be a willing sacrifice for the preservation of the country. That was the deciding factor of why I joined the army. Thinking in the terms of joining an organization staffed by volunteers with similar values and respect for national identity, it seemed like the right thing to do. Straight patriotism with no chaser.

I think the wave of applause that greeted the armed forces that stood up to get clapped at were applauding that same illusory view of what constitutes the military experience. A people see acts of altruism,.. and want to reward that. You can see the same concept at work in military ID discount if you live anywhere near a base (which is also a strategic move to increase sales and store traffic). It has been a long time since I was in the military though. So on the few occasions I see an opportunity to talk with military uniforms I take 'em. By displaying even a little knowledge and asking basic questions I overcome my social awkwardness and just tried get a feel in their own words about their feelings of military servitude.

Not a single time have I heard anything about a national identity, preservation of a way of life, or anything else altruistic. I never cease coming away from such encounters feeling profoundly,.. saddened,.. by unanticipated responses. Far and away the most frequent answer is for lack of other prospects, wages, and benefits. I don't think there is anything wrong with that. A professional soldier should be able to live comfortably within the arrangement of servitude. A little base by my own perspective,.. but an otherwise acceptable shade of moral gray. Some of the responses though,.. well,... Ill just paraphrase the more memorable ones.

I got my bitch pregnant.
It's the only place that will pay me to carry a machine gun.
It got me out of county lockup.
My dad made me.

(My absolute favorite response which left me stunned for a few seconds)
You know, because haji has to die.

Those reasons I don't think are particularly commendable. They are the ones that the current military people I have talked with have told me,.. being comfortable enough to say it to a stranger's face. The thing that I feel Jeff Dunham's crowd was applauding is better represented by those reasons than the incredibly naive and watered down concept of what I think most of society carries around in it's collective values.

Its not the image that they like to roll out in big swathes of red white and blue with gold trimming and shiny stars on the Murdoch prole feed. It's the bleeding meat of truth that lies beneath the more attractive lies of modern public relations campaigns.

In my own neck of the woods I was alarmed to discover that most weapons misconduct, including murder, is brought about by actively serving military personnel or their direct family living with them on base or in the subsidized cheap housing of Fairbanks. Two military goons killed Blondie (a famous hippie pawn store owner) for refusing to purchase their stolen body armor and threatening to turn them in. I found a business card of his in my home the other day,.. the last scarred bone from a long-since scattered pile. I watch Youtube videos of soldiers in places like Iraq and Afghanistan doing what it is heavily armed killers in lawless countries do.

I know they are not all like that. There are enough conscientious stories, suicides, and systemic drug use to tell me there is a very big problem with what our military service is doing to those that have volunteered for it. Those that excel in the environment are given a venue for their talent, those that do not find coping mechanisms, a certain portion of both come home missing parts of themselves and shunned by the broken VA system that has not functioned in years.

The support our troops need is to be brought back home,.. not fucking puppets applauding. I think the people that should be applauded are those which have enabled and continue to exacerbate the atrocity.

Yeah,.. I got me a sick sense of humor.
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