war these days

Commie that I am, I will have to disagree with Marx. If we all had equal amounts of wealth we would still be fighting. It’s just in our nature, some guy shoves us, and we shove back, and maybe if we are lucky we will give him a good old John Wayne fist in the mouth, and the blonde will gush and you just will not be able to pry her from your arm. If we are not as lucky we will crawling around the barroom floor looking for our teeth, but we will be a little proud that at least we stood up for ourselves and didn’t back down, and likely some brunette girl, whose father has a ranch almost as big as the blonde girl’s father, will be moved by our valor in a losing cause, and she will be helping us unto our feet and into her buckboard.

So you see, it’s a win win either way. Except for all those other guys in the saloon that didn’t pick a side in the fight and now are ordering double shots because all the hot babes are gone and they, unlike the winner or loser of the fight, will not be making any babies to night and there genes will stay in their pants.

That’s kind of what I meant by aggressive, not so much warlike. War is a big deal, war is a business, everybody gets into it whether they are aggressive or not, but there is something on top of all that, something besides the money or the glory and even beyond the altruistic good feeling of protecting the homeland. War is fun.

We are all doing something together, we have a purpose beyond filthy lucre, that barber is shoulder to shoulder with the brave boys at the front, instead of stuck in some crappy little shop and going home to a nagging wife.

The thing about war, unlike the barroom fight where both keys could be winners, is there is not much consolation to the losers. Losing is very bad, and you lose your taste for it for awhile. Like after Vietnam it took us about twenty years to get our war fever back up and break into Iraq and Afghanistan, and now we have lost the fever again. Even that odd McCain guy who travels the country rattling his saber has to add, lest he be pelted with rotten tomatoes, no boots on the ground. If Canada has a hankering for a bit of Idaho or Montana, but certainly not Michigan because there are some well-armed freeholds there, why now would be the time to march in and take it.

Here’s something, I got this friend to look over the blog, and it was while we were talking about race. He’s a freelance writer and he pointed to an article he had written from an interview with a guy who maintained that race didn’t exist, and this is what I replied to him.

Well it’s a whole thing, actually it’s such a loaded word. The scientists are looking at it one way, just the scientific genetic thing, but Black people are thinking what you are saying is that racism doesn’t exist. There is this whole thing like Obama’s beer with the prof and the cop, like we should all get together and have a talk on this, but I am not sure, I think to some extent we both really know what the other side is thinking, but if you have the discussion in public, both sides will be bland and nobody will say anything truthful, and still both sides will be mad at each other before the discussion is over.

There’s this guy who I run into at the Starbucks before watercolor class. Here’s his book: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/raceman-answers-lowell-d-thompson/1118473607?ean=9780964761636

It looks pretty good on the computer but when you offer to buy one it turns out is just like 3”x5” and more a pamphlet really, but by the time it is in your hands, your ten dollars in his pocket. He used to be in the advertising biz, and the book is about how advertising methods, propaganda against blacks, have poisoned race relations to the detriment of both races. It’s kind of scattershot and trite and not that interesting. But I do admire his enterprise. He was trying to get a critique from me yesterday and I was trying to thread the needle between being honest and not being discouraging. But you know when you are a white guy talking to a black guy and the subject is race, it is such a muddy minefield.