WHY "DYING IN VAIN" MIGHT BE A VERY GOOD THING - THOUGHTS ON MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND

First of all, let me make it clear -- I do NOT think that the deaths of any of our military people, our civilian people, of ANYONE is a good thing. Each death is a loss to the world of what might have been. What I despise is the way these deaths are papered over with cliches and bullshit. It is spinning a loss of life into politically favorable meaning that devalues the life itself, the courage, the fear, the pain, the hopes, the families, the friends -- it is the "Hooray-for-Us" bullshit that flashes a sad smile while it charges wounded vets for their hospital food that is an insult to everyone in uniform. It is flying to Baghdad under cover of night and having your photograph taken holding a cardboard turkey that devalues those lives. Let us at least reap some benefit in grief and understanding to accept the truth -- war always involves a lot of brave, caring, believing people dying in vain. Sometimes, those deaths are ALL in vain. Let us at least honor our dead with the Truth.

First of all, everyone dies in vain --– there is no glory, no meaning, none of that, regardless of what recruiters tell 17-years old kids to make their quotas. Certainly a person'’s last living act(s) may be admirable and heroic, and if so, that is worth honoring, raising a glass to, lowering a flag for, making a memorial about ... but, for all we'’ll hear that phrase “that they have not died in vain,” a lot this weekend, anyone who has actually seen/heard someone die screaming knows better. (I have, and I am fully aware that what I saw wasn'’t even within shouting distance of what soldiers mean when they say “It was bad.”) We may wish it weren'’t so, that it weren’'t just meaningless noise and pain – and wish it all the more when we know how meaningless it is, but there'’s a reason the great learning of the War in Vietnam was summed up in the phrase:

It don’t mean nothin’

Unfortunately, our country is currently in the hands of a bunch of sock puppets who have never seen the sort of reality show they have voted to create –-- a bunch of rec room patriots who spent the war of their generation watching it on TV with a beer in hand, jerking themselves off in obsolete equipment that they KNEW would not be used in Vietnam, or sneering at the “Dumb fucks who let themselves get drafted.” (Oh come on -- – surely, if you'’re old enough, you remember the attitude back then -- – until it got really covert because it was no longer acceptable, even in the hineymost depths of Texas, to say what everyone heard some nice white businessman say, sooner or later: "“Hey let ‘em draft the niggers. But white kids stay in school."

”

(Hello Bobby Seale, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton – you had your work cut out for you.)

Or haven'’t you noticed yet that the amount of sneering and tough-guy act put forth by various persons in this administration seems to be in direct proportion to the amount of time they spent avoiding having to be tested by giving some Little Green Man service to the country that helped them get rich?

Oh, they looove the heroes WHEN THEY”RE DEAD, because it gives them photo ops.

Like all that crap about the “HEROIC firemen of 9-11” – listen -- EVERY fireman ANYWHERE, ANYTIME that goes INTO a burning building is doing an heroic act EVERY FUCKING DAY, trying to save our homes and our stuff and our pets and our families. The NYFD 9-11 people are dead because their walkie-talkies were pieces of cheap crap that cut out inside the steel frame of the buildings, so they didn’t hear the heads up being given to them and the police. Well, hell --– good ones would have cost, – oh, nearly as much as Giuliani’'s limo.

But Monkey Boy got to stand by the hole in the ground and call them heroes (as if the rest weren’'t?) and dance on the bones of those who died as if they had died intentionally just to pull his political ratings out of the toilet ... but neither he, nor Bloomberg, nor Hilary Clinton nor anyone who shed such sincere-looking tears in New York has cut loose any funds to get these heroes better equipment to make them at least a little bit safer while they’re risking their lives for us.

And now we come around to the question of our military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan:– are they risking their lives FOR US? Or are they just being told this is a good thing that actually needs to be done? Because they'’ll do it, regardless -- whether because they believe it'’s needed and/or because class war in America has made it impossible for them to get a college education without joining up.

But what sort of a semi-conscious vicious pissant would send people into combat if it weren'’t necessary? Because win, lose, or draw --– come home in a body bag or maimed, or even with all parts intact -- – that person will never be the same. Never. It is not the education they thought they’'d be getting, but one that will shape their minds more than any philosophy course they'’ll ever sit through.

I will answer my own question and suggest what kind of people these are -- they are signifying, speculating, theorizing, megalomaniacal assholes who think they will pull it off -- get to decide how the people of the Tigris/Euphrates - Mid-Adriatic Rift will live and what they will think so they'’ll continue to play nice and let us plunder their resources while we let them rule with a whip in one hand and a proctoscope in the other.

They seem to be completely soulless (have you noticed that curiosity – that the less seeming spiritual awareness one of them has, the more he or she talks about religion) but that apparent soullessness could just be the result of knowing there’'s not a lot of profit to be had in being too sensitive, – no profit in objecting to sending a bunch of ... ahhh, poor kids --- White, African American, Hispanic – send them to their deaths dressed in desert camo.

So. That’s the context. Here'’s the point:

The greatest contribution these people --– the ones who have died -- could make to the soul and future of the United States is for their deaths to be acknowledged and understood as having been totally unnecessary and in vain. The wars to end wars didn'’t. But

The Memorial to the Brave Young Men and Women Who Died for Total Bullshit

THAT could really help us on the way to denying megalomaniacal assholes the right to wage war just because they WANT to, because they feel -- – not surprisingly--– like total losers, and they want to be -- need to be -- are desperate to think they might actually be REAL MEN and REAL WOMEN while they sit in their offices or smile for cameras and they don’t realize that creating this war just made them bigger LOSERS – historically monstrous fools that future generation will laugh at.

But if we understand that a public mourning for these people who have died and will continue to die, a public grieving at the fact that these were sincere, committed, brave people WHO DIED FOR TOTAL NOTHING BULLSHIT IN VAIN – then perhaps future generations will remember them and revere them as those who gave their lives for nothing so those future generations won’'t have to.

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