hello Mary Lou, good-bye heart

Of course Saddam was a very bad man, but at least he kept things tidy in that area. There were these countries in the mideast and they all hated each other and everybody in them hated everybody else inside them, but people kind of knew where they were at. If you kissed Saddam’s butt, he still might fuck with you, but probably not. Anymore nobody knows whose butt to kiss and everybody is fucking with everybody else.

I admit I am generally anti military, but I would never have sent our boys to Iraq. If they hadn’t gone they might have married Mary Lou and raised a passel of the cutest kids you ever saw west of the Pecos, or they might have knocked over the local 7-11 and gone on to a life of crime and now be doing fifty years in one of those scary prisons that they used to show on tv all the time, all full of tattooed thugs. But they would have been been better off than being dead, or walking dead like you see in those Wounded Warrior commercials. I think I would have been better for our boys then those guys waving the flags.

But what drives me nuts is then we bury them in these handsome caskets in these inspirational cemeteries, and dress up on Veteran’s and Memorial Days, and a Sunday every now and then, and we talk about the great sacrifice (for nothing) that they made and shoot the salutes and click our heels and play the bugle and think how noble of us for honoring these brave boys, when in fact we sent them there to get killed.

And then if anybody says anything like I just did, they are denounced as anti American, and as disrespecting our boys.

Drives me nuts.

But what to make of these brothers and that other guy? It does seem that one of the rules of taking on a faith is that people of other faiths will insult you. It’s not nice, but it’s what happens, I remember in the basement of Elsdon church making fun of those Catholics for engaging in the sinful act of playing Bingo . If these guys had written angry letters to the editor or gathered in front of the offices of that magazine and screamed their bloody heads off, fine, nobody has a problem with that.

And now for the last few days the news has been full of stirring words about freedom of expression and solidarity and condemnation of my man Obama for not marching arm and arm with all the world leaders, though I suspect if he had they would have been on him for grandstanding and associating with furriners and how about that tie he wore. Oh and inclusiveness, there was this African muslim guy among the arm and armers and the marchers have proclaimed that they don’t hold this against the muslims. And they are sure that the muslims of France agree with them in condemning this vile act. But not all of them do, there is a class of cultures, and I will get into that in the next post.

I seem to remember the yoyo guy coming around every spring, but maybe he only came once. I have written to a couple other people about this and haven’t heard back.

But see you have these kids doing their humdrum stuff, bent over playing marbles, a game I never really got the hang of, and here comes this guy out of nowhere and he’s got these amazing tricks, he’s dancing beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, and all the kids want to fade into his parade. Of course the song was widely interpreted at the time, as was everything at that time, as being about drugs, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. I see it more as wanting to escape the humdrum, but you can’t quite do it yourself and then along comes this guy who can help you do it.

I didn’t realize that war games had scripts. You know it’s always more fun to be the bad guy. Even after the good guy shoots the bad guy and rescues Mary Lou and is walking off with her into the sunshine, he knows that she is going to miss that bad guy.