The Sad Truth Is: We're Just Unfortunate Enough To Survive

When will it happen again? When will I wake to the rigid screams of gunfire, at five thirty in the morning, and look out my bedroom window upon a sea of soldiers and blood raging through the streets of Columbus so fast the sewers gurgle? When will they kick in my door and demand I drop the gun though I haven’t even got it loaded yet? When will hot lead whomp the air from my chest, like the broad side of a mountain smacks the shit out of a party balloon caught in the jet stream? When, oh Lord, when will sweet, sweet War come to America again?

We have not heard a peep from our Poets since The Sixties died with Ginsberg. Our songs are made for television, and our novels are written to be made into movies. Our newspapers are dying. Even our magazines are withering away to their stapled and pasted bindings. The printed word has evaporated, and we’re left the damp remnants of its unconvincing Soul barely clinging to the stale, modernized air of a central heating system. Woe is the state of American culture.


There are two types of people in this world: those who fight and those who don’t. You’ve got to shoot to kill a motherfucker, otherwise he’s going to rape and murder your wife in front of you, then rob you blind and slit your throat. Too few Americans are forced to make these decisions on a day to day basis. We have lost our animal instinct. Only when our most primal of urges are met can we begin to explore the true depths of our creativity. We thrive on The Fear. Complacency breeds lack of emotion. We need to kill and almost be killed to rediscover what we’re made of.

Iraq and Afghanistan will not suffice. Even a Vietnam wouldn’t do it for folks these days. It’s going to have to be something we can taste; some tangible terrible atrocity that openly confronts us every time we hear a knock at our front door: All Out War in the Homeland. Not just CNN’s interpretation of some controversy in the Middle East, or a single act of terrorism on American Soil, or a sneak attack on our sleeping Navy in some erstwhile Pacific island harbor, but a Full Scale Invasion consisting of missile strikes and massive civilian casualties, complete with sodomy, pillaging, and napalm—basically the worst of the worst.

But who’s got the balls to do it?

Somebody has to have the means. At the very least, some coalition of Anti-American forces has got to be able to mount some kind of meaningful offensive. For Christ’s sake, we’re the most hated Nation on Earth, and Lord knows with our economy there’s no way we’re still winning the Arms Race. If we are still winning the Arms Race, then it won’t be for long. Asia has always been the quickest to develop and implement new technology. Their Armies seem limitless, and the Pacific Ocean no longer seems quite as wide as it used to. Is it really so far out to think that we’re actually vulnerable to this sort of thing? Most of the Rest of the World wants to see D.C. burn to the ground, but they would probably settle for Hollywood.

That’s not to say that the East Coast, the South, or even the Midwest is invincible. Al Qaeda has already proven how easy it is to infiltrate America’s vital social, economic, and political organs. Imagine the damage that well-organized Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorist Groups could inflict with full Chinese monetary backing. Instead of reading a story in The New York Times about a suicide bomber killing twenty five people in a Gaza Strip shopping mall, you could feel the warmth of the detonation as you pull your Mercedes Benz into the Macy’s parking lot just down the road from your daughter’s middle school, in Mentor, Ohio. Instead of seeing the leftovers of a man’s torso in an AP wire photo, you watch his innards ooze down your windshield and sizzle on the hood after his torso lands on top of your car before the engine has time to cool down.


There will be no sleep when All Out War hits the Homeland. Children will be snatched from schools at random gunpoint. The elderly will die of starvation. Husbands and wives will turn cannibal at the first sign of madness. Whole cities of people will be displaced into the countryside. Utter chaos will break loose on the interstates, and people who were once neighbors will blast holes into one another’s skulls with sawed off shotguns after traffic screeches to a halt and they crash trying to drive in the shoulder. The shit’s going to hit the fan, and all the TP in the world won’t be able to clean the tight, hairy asshole that is the United States of America.

And it’s exactly what we need. A swift kick in the junk. Total Degradation. Pissing and shitting ourselves on televisions across the globe. Al Jazeera making a spectacle of American Soldiers dying in combat but keeping relatively quiet about any civilian loss. Broken like starving dogs. The literal and figurative equivalent of all the refugees created by the many Wars we have previously brought down upon others. Rendered to the Hell we have created. Then, perhaps, we’ll see The Light, and The Free Flow of Good Ideas will again renew in Harmony.