Here in Parochial Paradise, reading books, at least worthwhile ones, is a dependable way to endanger your sanity. There you were, snoozing happily in your puddle of beer, and some loudmouth starts polluting the air with a verbofecal ventilation fiasco that just didn't quite seem...*well thought out*, at least in your humble opinion. Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that blissful ignorance is not, for you, a worthwhile attainment. So, willynilly, you've got some work ahead of you.
You wedge the silly twit's gibberish through a Google search box. After eliminating vitamin supplements, recipes, coupons, and porn, you appear to have a subject of study. You read the Wikipedia article (sideways). You read the bibliographies. You build a reading list. You fantasize about murdering your noisy neighbors and/or family in their sleep.
Finally you've rammed enough facts into your head. You may even delude yourself that, as a result of that effort, you might finally be able answer the question that started the whole goddam thing. Neurosis sets in as soon as you are dumb enough to open your mouth, when you discover that no one else even understands why your subject is (was? might be?) important, or even what it is. They certainly do NOT care what your opinion of it is, although they feel qualified to advance their own.
A surreal revulsion for critical thought sets in: you are vaguely aware that people shouldn't think those awful things, the country shouldn't run this way, the world doesn't WORK like that...and yet it everything bumbles along, day after day, assbackwards and oblivious. The very nature of chaos seems to ensure that history won't even repeat itself, since how do you know where you are in the cycle in the first place? A universal state of what George Carlin used to call 'vu ja de': the feeling that none of this has ever happened before.
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A few weeks ago, during one of my regular attempts to kill off a few more overuseful brain cells, all of this once again came home to me. We were talking about the War(s). You know the one(s).
"Cuz, afterall, yaknow dude, the President has messed the whole thing(s) up. We should been out long ago."
I sprayed a bit of my Hef on the bar, then dug in to refute, thus: “Huh?”
Not the best start. Maybe I should spit more of this stuff out, and drink less of it, right off the bat, aye? In any case....
“Um...yes, we probably should have been out of th..those places, long ago. Why is the President specifically to blame, here?”
“Well, he promised to...”
“Yeah, he probably promised to try, at least, I'll concede that, but he didn't start this mess, he was stuck cleaning it up. Let's put this in playground perspective...do you think it's easier to break something, or to fix it?”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Sigh.
"When a war is started, my friend, certain forces of human stupidity are deployed: there exist, in the real world, such things as: compulsive jingoism; compulsive apathy; the partisan echo chamber; political limitations; diplomatic inertia; commitments to allies; commitments to reparation (collateral damage); legal constraints; investment bias; bureaucratic inefficiency; conflicting mandates; emergent issues...blahdiblahdi....Winding down a war, particularly a [expletive deleted] like this one, is not as simple as starting it...”
“Well, it just shoulda ended when he said it would...”
“...and only naughty boys get mad and take their toys away before others have a chance to finish the game...I believe former President Gas Station Attendant wasn't exactly clairvoyant about that kinda thing hisself...”
“At least HE got Saddam, though!”
“And? So? Did we discover where he was hiding all those terrorist cells and WMD's while he was squatting in his cave? Did I get my cookie? Our current CIC 'got' Bin Laden, right? In schoolyard terms, I'd say we're even there, huh? Sure you want to stick with that answer?”
“Your cookie...?...bbut Saddam was a bad man....urrrr....”
“...that we put into power in the first place, along with the Saudis, and Diem, and Mobutu, and Guzman, and Somoza, and Pinochet, and Noriega...are you saying that, as a country, we have a special responsibility to depose, preferentially of course, the Bad Men we bankrolled originally?
Is it okay to ignore OTHER Bad Men, who we may or many not be responsible for? Are we a little teapot, perhaps, that has boiled dry on the campstove of....”
“Uhh, okay, okay...damn, we need another beer don't we...where is that book on the Battle of Leyte Gulf you were gonna loan me...”
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