March, 2003

We're in the melt here in the mountains of northern Bohemia, the roads running with small streams, the dog constantly muddy-pawed and it's a worthless exercise to wash the car. The upside is the smell of spring in the air, a different, more tactile sensation from the warmth of the sun and crocus beginning to show along south walls of buildings. The variety of birds at the feeder has changed as well and the woods sing different music.

Last night I went to the basement for my before-bed smoke. My smoking is a life long habit and one (among the many) things that keeps me in its arm-lock is the thinking I conspire to do while refreshing my dopamines. Conspire is the right word I think, because these thoughts are formed and worked out in a sort of debate with myself, a pro and con interchange much like planning a bank robbery.

And what thoughts these days can fail to be colored by the war?

It occurred to me in my basement retreat that this war is partially about credibility (a neatly exchanged metonym for saving face) and partly born of frustration. We are the world's greatest military power and need to periodically prove that. It's not enough to be acknowledged as having a big dick---every once in a while you have to go out and fuck somebody to keep the vision credible.

As to frustration, attacking Iraq is perhaps a bit like attacking Japan because we suffer 50,000 annual automobile deaths and some of those cars are Japanese. Frustration seldom leads to logic. More often it's the convenient and most defenseless face that gets slapped. We might next land troops in Italy, ‘cause everyone knows the American Mafia is ethnically Italian.

We do these things periodically and that's okay I guess, except for the two or three hundred thousand people, ours and theirs, for whom it is definitely not okay. Paraphrasing Joseph Stalin, a single death is a tragedy, but a hundred thousand deaths is a news event. What the hell, the Mayans sacrificed their virgins to the gods and we sacrifice a portion of our young as well. The Mayan culture is known as having been a great culture and maybe that's what it takes.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today