I'd gotten off to a late start last Thursday, and was leaving my apartment around 8:20am when I heard some strange voices coming from the direction of J.Y. Joyner Elementary. I took a half-step off my porch and verified that it was my hippy-chick neighbor boozing it up with two other females. I've never tried to grapple with her, so although she's a total Jesus-Krispy we've managed to become pretty good friends over the last year.
I'd been having a couple of bad days at work, half-step ahead/two steps back kind of shit, and so went back inside and grabbed what was left of the case of beer I'd bought the night before.
As I walked up I identified the blonde in the group as an old high school pal of my neighbor's, and brightened-up immensely as she is as good-looking a woman as you're likely to see, six feet tall and stacked, with an intelligent face and a husky voice that'd make even Truman Capote's dead crotch twitch. I greeted her first. Then I took a good look at the gal to her right (her sister, as it turned out). Here's a word I've never used before in this context: She was completely incandescent. Jaw-dropping. Stunning.
If I hadn't been running on autopilot due to a massive hangover, I might have plowed into a tree.
The Sister was a brunette. Seen alongside her sibling, I was perfectly willing at that moment to start circulating a petition requesting that their parents begin copulating twenty-four hours a day on the off-chance that they'd eventually produce a redhead to complete the set.
The ladies all had on short skirts. And they were sitting on the grass. So every time I pulled my face down to my bottle I got a great peek without being too grotesquely obvious. And it was a beautiful goddamn day, as nice as it ever gets here this time of year, with a pleasant breeze gently swaying the trees. I went out to buy more beer later, and we spent all day drinking and yacking about nothing in particular. I was really, utterly in a fantastic mood when we finally parted.
Then I went home and found out that Bent-Dick Bill had cruise-missiled the holy shit out of two Third World pestholes. So now we have a new concept to play with, the anti-terrorist terrorist bombing. Neat.
I don't really know fuckall about Sudan, but remember reading that "Chinese" Gordon -- about as big a hero as Victorian England thought that it had produced at the time -- and his entire command caught the High Hot Hard One in Khartoum back in 1885 due to the loving attention lavished on them by this Muslim true believer called the Mahdi.
I've managed to learn a bit more about Afghanistanis. They are the hard-bitten badasses who whacked the crap out of the Soviet Red Army not so many years ago while armed with little more than goofy-looking beards and pointy sticks. Rudyard Kipling's assessment of them (and please don't bust on me for the quote, 'cos I'm doing it off the top of my head) was that:
Now, do these sound like the kind of people we want pissed off at us because our Boner-in-Chief felt the need to grab some positive face time after his approval numbers took a bit of a slide? I'd much rather hear about him nailing Tony Blair's wife, or vomiting on some Japanese official who hasn't resigned in disgrace yet, or complaining about the smeary signatures on the last couple of checks from his budskis in Beijing.
Expectedly disappointing was the response from Clinton's soiled opposition, the Republicans with the Amazing Prehensile Spines. Almost every one of these lameballs trotted out the crusty old gag about the value of unanimity during a "crisis," thereby ceding the point that something just had to be done RIGHT NOW, followed of course by the knee-jerk pledge to support our troops in the field. That last bit works great when our fighting men are actually in the thick of things, but this time out the only threat our boys faced were chipped fingernails from inserting the keys, turning the keys, and pushing the big lit buttons. I've only heard of two Congressmen so far who've had the balls to go against the "Amen" tide and condemn the Head Horndog for pulling off such an incredibly dangerous stunt for momentary political advantage. I have to hope that more will join them when average Americans start getting dropped in retaliation by looney-eyed dudes with incomprehensible accents. And you know that's gonna happen.
I'm not completely cynical, so I'm willing to believe that there might be even a .2% chance that our cloak & dagger crew coincidentally stumbled across the location of the "terrorist bases" and that "precursor to chemical weapons" factory (it purportedly housed potentially-dangerous compounds . . . well heck, so does the Mallinckrodt plant on U.S. 1 up near Wake Forest) just hours before their boss needed to divert the media from the spectacle of his personal Mini-Vac spilling the seed, uh, beans to a grand jury. But I would be much less surprised to learn that U.S. taxpayer revenues were used to finance the damned things in the first place. That's the way our "Intelligence" services generally go about their business. Remember how the World Trade Center bombing went down? Of course you don't. Some Tony Danza sitcom was probably on at the time. So here's a real shocker: Guess who provided the know-how behind the destructive device the wascally wagheads used? You should know. After all, you were paying his salary.
Maybe now one of those Stinger man-portable anti-aircraft missiles we sent to the mujahadeen in the '80s will be paying some unfortunate batch of us a visit real soon. Then the folks in Washington who care about us so very much can gleefully hop on the heart-tugging TV images and twist 'em into an excuse to finally implement the dead-serious slate of "security" programs and regulations they've been planning for decades ("Your papers, citizen?"). A War on Terrorism will make the heinous War on Drugs seem downright rinky-dink as far as them pesky civil liberties go. And go they will.
Fascism abhors a vacuum. If we don't have enough natural enemies, then enemies must be painstakingly cultivated.
Emmanuel Goldstein, meet Osama bin Laden. Ozzy, Manny.