the woman truck drivers love to hate
The only subject on the news this week is US Marines Urinate On Taliban Corpses. Of course, pretend horror is everywhere on tv and radio. I've not heard Limbaugh on the subject, though don't need to. Hilary Clinton did a good old-maid librarian job of putting those bad boys in their place. They embarrassed the Marine Corps. Crime number two. Crime number one was putting it on YouTube. They deserve the full sledgehammer of "military justice" for being stupid. Stupid is not illegal, but stupid action most often is. I hear the public pronouncements from on high in radio interviews and sound-bite declarations. This is not according to "American values." My thought when I hear that: What? Does that mean it's free, as in no price tag? Is there an item in America that missed having a price stuck on it? Like don't piss on dead people is an American value? It's a basic human value. We'll surely see very soon legislation rushed through the House and Senate to make it illegal to piss on the dead.
Visiting friends yesterday, I saw an "interview" (video-bite) from a guy evidently found in a biker breakfast restaurant, gray haired guys in disgruntled Vietnam vet regalia. Obviously staged. Obviously attention paid to the one guy in the place who gave the most outrageous opinion. The one they showed us said he didn't see any problem with soldiers pissing on people they killed. That's part of war. I don't doubt it's happened uncountable times down through all the millennia of human warfare. I imagine chimpanzees, when they gang up on one and kill him, gather round and piss on him when he's dead. I laughed listening to him speak so adamantly that he saw no problem. I was thinking his way was representative of a certain way of thinking, mostly male, mostly uneducated, people who wouldn't know a value if it bit them on the ass. The people at the front with guns shooting it out. The television people are pious with it in the same false tones as the politicians. I'm glad I heard the one man be honest. The people speaking on behalf of government were being honest, too. However, we associate their voices and faces with lies. The carefully composed statements tend to sound false in their legal cover-your-ass perfection.
That it happened is no surprise, even when I heard about it the first time. American boys not long out of high school armed with the most powerful weapons on earth, the boys remaining after the high suicide rate in the US military, kids raised by television. They don't know anything about something being wrong with pissing on the dead. So what? They're dead. The people talking on the tv are pretend appalled and the older ones remember a time when a value had meaning of something to do with morality, whatever the hell that means. People who were raised in the last 20 years of television have no exposure in their lives to anything to do with values other than how much things cost. Price is value, what a thing is worth. I wonder how many of the pissers could spell morality correctly. I'd guess three of them, and them by accident, going at it phonetically like counting fingers. Television raises kids to be Barbie and GI Joe. I've an idea that in the minds of these boys they were on tv. Pissing on corpses isn't half what you see on tv that is taken for ok. Like Arnold walks into a room with a machine gun only a weight lifter could handle and blows everybody away. We see blood squirt out of them falling into death, and feel like our man is good at what he does. Kill them "evil doers."
The act itself, I can't help but see as just another war atrocity. Doing it for the video camera and putting it on YouTube is the real issue. All the attention is going to the pissing part, which is what the legal case will be about. The act of desecration. It truly is. It was done by minds with absolutely no idea of what we once called their humanity. Humanity, like civilization, used to be words held up as high ideals. By now, after more than a century of scientific and historical research, and the examples of our "leaders" absence of interest in any kind of value but money, we have no worthwhile examples to go by in our political world, for sure, and none in our pop culture, either. Note: I include tv religion with pop culture as no more valid spiritually than Arnold Schwarzenegger. When mass killings are committed by the action stars, it's great; the bigger the body count, the better. Our man is bad. Then the continuous NYTimes best-sellers of deranged white male serial killers torturing teenage blonds that are made into big box office thriller movies.
My guess is the soldier boys felt no moral suggestion of guilt while committing their act for the entire, and I do mean the whole, world to see. If arrest and possibly a life sentence to the brig hadn't been the consequence, they'd be laughing and bragging how many million views they've had. I'd also guess that not one of them gets it that there is something to the charges on them, besides making the Marine Corps look bad. The one thing it says loudest is they know nothing about basic, the very most basic, human respect. And even nuttier is that it was more than likely meant as an affront to Islam like pissing on the Koran. Stupid behavior committed by stupid people the rest of the world will judge Americans by. Another American atrocity. On our side, we hear our atrocities explained away like they're nothing. Until something undeniable happens. Then it's not our fault, but an isolated incident (lone gunman). From outside the USA, it's just one more on an endless list of American acts of arrogance.
It's a measure of how low the dumbing down of America has taken us. For the prosecution, desecrating the dead in a way that embarrasses the entire country before the world (again), is the issue. I tend to see the issue is respect. Respect is a thing of the past in America. To make an issue of respect is to risk laughter for being naive. Where have you been? That went out with Buster Brown shoes. Desecrating the dead has been the practice all the way along in human history. I tried thinking of places and times when desecrating the dead in war was not the case. First thing, I remembered Mogadishu, American dead soldiers dragged through the streets and people spitting on them, kicking them, hitting them. It has happened in Iraq, American soldiers killed and corpses desecrated. It's what we humans do. Only the really stupid ones do it for video to put on YouTube. Putting it on YouTube is where the stupid came in. They deserve punishment just for being so incredibly stupid. They rate at least consideration for the Darwin Award. They survived, but will not be out of prison in time to reproduce. They snatched themselves right out of our gene pool---four really stupid people who will never sow their seed in fertile soil.
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