12/10/2003

America: Fuck With Us and We'll Kill Your Kids:
Oh, the suffering of children - so sweet, so innocent. Always the moral barometer of a nation's actions. We got the naked Vietnamese girl, screaming, having torn her napalm-burnt clothes off her because, well, shit, napalm fucking hurts. Three year-old John-John saluting his dad's coffin as it passed him by. Starving children in whatever country is starving this week. Children, man. Always bearing the burdens of the moral failings of we grown-ups. We beat 'em, starve 'em, burn 'em, put 'em in closets for months on end. How a badly person or a nation treats its own or other kids says a lot about how fucked up that person or nation is. And all indications right now are that America's pretty fucked up.

So what the hell is going on in Afganistan? It's not bad enough that the U.S. military, realizing that, holy shit, there really is still a war going on in Afghanistan, bombed some shithole village in a misguided effort to find a "terrorist" who had long left and in the effort, offed 9 playing kids. But then, just to show that if you fuck-up once, you may as well fuck-up twice, in a wonderful "oops, I did it again" moment, we just killed another six kids, sleeping ones this time, in another shithole village. Now, the Rude Pundit may be really, really off base here, but don't we, America, the Godzilla in the Tokyo of global realpolitick, brag about our military prowess? That we have satellite and laser guided missles that can pinpoint the stinking rectum of an enemy soldier and shove that warhead up that rectum with all the precision of an elephant fucking an ant? Isn't that our hype? And as Andrew Card declares that our intelligence failures leading up to the war are a "moot point," doesn't the wholesale murder of fifteen kids seem to also point to an intelligence breakdown of increasingly distressing proportions? There's fifteen kids that'll never go to school, never get to fall in love, never get to be cool.

Or, and here's the deal, maybe the military and the government don't fucking care. We're America, goddamnit. With us or against us, motherfuckers. You don't support our war? Fuck you, then; your country doesn't get to dine on the buffet of the corpse of Iraq. (More on this tomorrow.) Sure, we apologize for the deaths - sort of like a big "D'oh" in the face of grieving parents and others. But, really, and, c'mon, we don't care. On CNN this morning, the United States' killing of six kids was a story discussed after Michael Jackson, after the latest missing hot college girl.

Well, maybe there has been an improvement, though. Used to be the government just covered up this kind of devastation in hopes that no one would find out. Like My Lai in Vietnam. But, as the bare blip on the radar of the Toledo Blade's recent series on another massacre in that war, we've just stopped caring.
(Tip of the blog to Rude Two for help with today's entry.)