Caltrops - Motherfucking News - On the first evening of war.

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by Zseni 03/19/2003, 10:54pm PST

Tonight Bahgdad will be thick with bombs, and I'm up to 41% of my download of Heroic Legend of Arislan 1. I bought DOA2 Hardcore this afternoon - last night contemplating my future purchase I wondered about buying a fighting game on the same day as actual live people will die across the sea.

Zsenijeim: I don't know if I can countenance buying, you know, a fighting game on National War Day.
PP: Technically it's only "deadline day". The war could be anytime.
PP: So, better buy two copies.
Zsenijeim: I'll buy one copy, then they can tell me to return it or else I'll be entered into an international DOA2 championship.
Zsenijeim: Them: not giving me a refund either way.

Like many of you I can't wait to see what Get Your War On is going to say about all this. I checked CNN a little while ago, the Pres is going to address us soon. Lots of things are happening, but not here, not behind thousands of thickly insulated miles. The great thing about this war is that it has no effect on me at all.

...What a horrible, miserable, decadent way to think about anything at all.

Actually I'm worried sick about what this war means. Much more so than I am worried about the war itself, because that part really is a dim blip on my radar, and I don't want to think about it anyway. The Dear Raed author - I hope s/he doesn't die. I hope no servicemen on either side are killed. That kind of thing worries me. I'm worried about my deep, deep distrust of The Government, which for so long I have been all over people's asses to think and research and learn and differentiate, and up until now all that has more or less strengthened my faith in the system - but all that faith got spilled some time ago, I don't know when exactly. I'm scared of the propaganda, because it makes me bite my nails to see people's thoughts getting dicked around (the irony) and I feel so powerless against that mighty engine of persuasion.

I went to Burger King today for the first time in maybe three years - it was profoundly confusing. Ducking down from the clouds for a moment I realized, with some shock, that I found kim chee infinitely more familiar than a Whopper. The gaggle of girls who were in line ahead of me, 15, 16 years old, each one wearing more make up than I have in the sum total of my life adorned myself with, and I gasped to think that after all I know very little about women. The make up isn't a bad thing, but they were so young, and I could not for the life of me imagined what they had under there that needed making up or anything else about their clothes or conversation or the way one sang sapid and soprano along with "What's Love Got To Do With It." But they were products of this nation, and like the older guy with his newspaper, or the landscaping crew of three beaners and a cracker to manage them, or the two best-friends women with their scrubbed toddlers and tight shirts and love handles - they were all people I should know better than I do. Not out of any desire to be best buddies with them, but because I feel certain they shouldn't be the lab specimens I made them out to be. I am unfamiliar with them. They're like bugs or dividing cells or other curiosities to me.

What did they think of the war?

Who the fuck am I to speak for America, anyway? When I descend from my ivory tower I'm awed and crushed by the world I find myself in. Here I want to save them all from the kinds of dangers readily apparent from the tops of towers, but when you get down on the ground your perspective changes; those dangers seem far off, intangible, and then of all the things around you which ones are dangerous and which aren't? Should I fear propaganda more than the potential backpack nuke?

Montesquieu's Persian Letters wrote:

In this letter I shall tell you of a certain tribe called the Quidnuncs, who assemble in a splendid garden1, where they are always indolently busy. They are utterly useless to the state, and half a century of their talk has no more effect than would be produced by a silence of the same length; yet they imagine themselves of consequence, because they converse about magnificent projects and discuss great interests.

The basis of their conversation is a frivolous and ridiculous curiosity: there is no cabinet, however mysterious, whose secrets they do not pretend to fathom; they will not admit that they are ignorant of anything; they know how many wives our august Sultan has, and how many children he begets every year; and, although they go to no expense for spies, they are informed of the measures he is taking to humble the Emperor of Turkey and the Great Mogul.

Hardly have they exhausted the present when they plunge into the future, and stealing a march on Providence, anticipate it in all its dealings with men. They take a general in hand, and after having praised him for a thousand follies which he has not committed, they prepare for him a thousand others which also will never come to pass.

They make armies fly like cranes, and overturn walls like a house of cards; they have bridges on all the rivers, secret paths in all the mountains, immense arsenals in burning deserts; they lack nothing but common sense.

It's hard to save the world from up in the tower, but it's only from the tower that such a thing seems possible at all. When you get down on the ground the world is vast, and you are a tiny thing swallowed up by it, incapable of understanding anything but the merest, tiniest portion of it. And this war is horsemen driven into the sea for all I know. I have no place to stand - in the end that's all I can say about it. I have no place to stand, and cannot take a position on the war, and cannot move the earth.

On the first evening of war, I find I am hoping something will happen that will make the answers clear for me even though the questions are inchoate. On the first evening of war, I am hoping, and otherwise dangerously unconcerned. On the first evening of war, the first war in which I am in full command of my own abilities, I have nothing at all to add.