Where does it all come from? Where does it all go?

Friday, April 4, 2003. Minneapolis. The surreal channel surfing of Notable Times, I boggle at Dennis Miller, seemingly transformed overnight into a mean-spirited, prematurely graying loudmouth grampa taking cheap shots at war protesters, journalists’ hairstyles, Michael Moore. Meanwhile, on Charlie Rose, a noted author on Iraq with a scary list of credentials discusses the fact that in 1991 plans were discovered suggesting that Sadaam Hussein had a final strike bunker full of scuds loaded with bio and chem and that his innermost ring of officers had orders to, in the event of the ultimate capture of Baghdad by the USA military, fire all of them at Israel.

Who knows, anymore, what’s true and what’s not? Most of these people are, as far as I can tell, sane. I do know that some people think they know. Some people think because they don’t know that there is nothing true. Everybody shut up, somebody says. To be able to say that without irony seems to define for me precisely the tone to the response I am seeing around me. I don’t know but I still believe that a true answer exists. And it sure as hell isn’t THAT so spare me, buddy.

There’s no not reacting. I read today somewhere someone claiming it was the start of World War Four (he wrote as the clock struck midnight) and how are you supposed to not react to that? I mean, you have to ask. What are they saying was World War Three? And what am I to say? I’d rather be bombarded with industrial propaganda, agitprop, civil disobedience, and a galaxy of distinctly uncivil but perniciously legal human behavior than be bombarded with, well, bombs. Or airplanes. How can I complain?

I get mixed up trying to think about it, I know that x pounds of hi-tek explosive in a big steel egg is going to, on detonation, turn into a mother huge sphere of you’re fucked in an astonishingly brief period of time. And I think a person, if they want to dare to have any opinion on the ultimate morality of this forces of nature level of shit, has to look directly at what this does to a human body. We’re talking pieces splashed against a wall, any piece of durable garbage becoming a projectile that can shatter a skull. We’re talking burnt to a crisp, decapitated, pierced through all over with window glass. On the other hand there is nothing there that can’t happen to you in an SUV, rolling end over top-heavy end, a hapless sacrifice to image marketing, physics, and Firestone tires. I keep waiting for one of them women on one or the other current manifestation of that “Hey, Marry This Jackass on Teevee” show to ask Mr. Richey Firestone how it feels to be heir to a fortune that is substantially smaller due to your namesake company killing the bejeezus out of a slew of sporting-utility drivers. Planet Television dissapoints me as usual. But you know what I mean, right?

Everybody has an answer but me.

this is what is up with this.