Big Mike: War Is Heaven

I’m glad it was Milo’s day to post on Monday.

Memorial Day.

I’m glad I didn’t have to post until today. Had I posted this Monday, I’d have been strung up.

I still may be.

We dig war.

Young Girl Signs Artillery Shell

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Want it. Enjoy it. Love it. It gets us off.

Let’s cut the bullshit about war being hell. Yeah, General Sherman said it and he’s right.

But he’s wrong, too.

The most horrible human undertaking in the history of our crazy, mixed-up species was World War II. Some 60 million people died in that little tete a tete. Let’s try that again: sixty ( as in six-oh) million (as in a thousand times a thousand) human beings — men, women, children, doctors, lawyers, nuns, kids, anarchists, sex workers, slaves, Jews, homosexuals, Communists, Democrats, Republicans, Fascists, cripples, physicists, stage actors, thieves, tyrants, wife-beaters, worshippers of god, lovers of satan, con artists, and every ilk and stripe of humanity.

When the Japanese captured Singapore, they took some 80,000 allied soldiers prisoner, forcing them into slave labor. Most of them died. When the Soviet army tore through Germany in the winter and spring of 1945, hardly a woman escaped the mass rapes those soldiers committed. In the winter of 1942-43, during the Battle of Stalingrad, up to 2 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives. A single bombing raid conducted by the US Army Air Forces on the night of March 9-10, 1945 resulted in the deaths of 100,000 civilians.

It was called The Good War by Studs Terkel. He was being ironic.

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The people that gave us this slaughter beyond all human imagination have been called The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw. He wasn’t being ironic.

And you know why he wasn’t being ironic? Yep. We dig war.

Monday the television channels were loaded with war movies and documentaries. Parades were held in cities across the nation. News broadcasts began with the anchors telling us how much we were celebrating our valiant soldiers.

War Makes Men Smile

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It always seemed to me that war is such a rotten, ugly business that we should be ashamed when talk about it. As in, “Yeah, the Japs attacked us at Pearl Harbor and so we had to go out and kick their asses but let’s forget about it, okay? We did what we had to do.”

Fat Man

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It’s said the primary responsibility of a national government is to maintain an army that occasionally has to go out and kill the other guys.

I don’t dispute that. I’ve lived through an attack myself, as have most of us. I nearly pooed in my pants when those airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center towers. Of course we had to go out and slice the Afghani Taliban into ribbons. I was all for it.

Our rage had to be expressed, our aggression vented. Had we not sent a hundred thirty thousand or so fully armed soldiers to that godforsaken shithole we surely would have begun turning our violence on ourselves.

When all is said and done, we’re nothing more than a sometimes sophisticated pack of fully clothed primates.

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We can cheer for Martin Luther King Jr. all we want. We can marvel at Marie Curie, swoon over George Gershwin, admire Bill Gates. But when the gang of apes from over the hill tries to harm us, we have little choice but to shriek and throw sticks at them. It’s in our genetic make-up.

And make no mistake, when we bombed the bejesus out of those crazy fundamentalist bastards, I cheered just as much as the biggest flag wavers around.

Only I wasn’t terribly proud of myself for it.

Still, we depend on armies.

It’s also said the most important thing a municipal government does is pick up garbage. Without the Department of Streets and Sanitation, Chicago would turn into a stinking, disease-ridden, rat-infested, giant petri dish. People would fall ill within a matter of weeks. Thousands would die before the end of the year.

Protecting Our Lives

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It can be argued that the garbageman is as important to our health and well-being as the soldier.

Yet we don’t make four-hour long movies celebrating the guys on the garbage truck.

We try not to even think about them.

If we think about them at all, we say, “Better them than me.”

This isn’t to insult garbagemen. But their professional lives are spent wading among our discarded chicken skins, baby crap-filled disposable diapers, vomit-laden rags, styrofoam pork chop trays, old pornography, apple cores, used tampons, and a host of other appetite-suppressing detritus. A sane person’s only rational comment has to be, “Better them than me.”

Whatever we pay garbagemen isn’t enough. The fact that the Kardashian sisters make any money at all while sanitation workers across the country must fight tooth and nail for every dime when their contracts come up for renewal is a disgrace.

You and I might be dead if it weren’t for the guys emptying our garbage cans.

You and I might be dead, too, if it weren’t for men and women willing to fight tooth and nail — and not in the metaphorical sense either! — against the gangs of men who want to harm us.

America hasn’t used it’s armies very wisely through the past few decades. When we’re throwing our parades and patting ourselves on the back for killing the enemy better than the enemy killed us in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq again, we tell ourselves the fiction that we did it to remain free.

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By my read of history, the last time the United States armed services really fought for any Americans’ freedom was in the Civil War.

Yeah, the Japanese and the Germans and al Qaeda all looked askance at the general citizenry blissfully doing their thing. But none of them had a reasonable chance of upending these Great United States, Inc. Our wars since the Union defeated the Confederacy largely have been expeditions of empire. We’re the biggest guy on the block so whenever there’s a fight, we’re pretty much duty-bound to wade in.

The problem is, we’ve also waded into the Phillipines and Cuba, Nicaragua and Guatemala, Iraq and bunch of other places where our interest was big business or dick-waving rather than survival.

It’s as if our garbagemen spent too many of their days washing rich guys’ cars.

Funny thing is, the nanosecond we learn that a garbageman has been washing a rich guy’s car, we howl to high heaven and demand he be fired, all his bosses be fired, and the mayor be indicted.

But when the Marines march into Nicaragua, we throw them a parade.

The only explanation I can think of is we love war.

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