Toast Soldiers
Pride and joy and greed and sex That's what makes our town the best
--Shattered, The Rolling Stones
Once upon there was light in my life
But now there's only love in the dark
Nothing I can say
A total eclipse of the heart
--Total Eclipse of the Heart,
Bonnie Tyler
You know you've got a job and a little bitty chick
Six-pack of beer and a television set
Little bitty world goes around and around
Little bit of silence and little bit of sound
--Itty Bitty, Alan Jackson
_________________
Another metaphor for the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) and all it begets comes to mind: Behold -- the paper shredder.
We have fed the Constitution into the hopper and shredded the concepts intrinsic to our national beliefs.
We have fed soldiers into the military, and shredded its ability to address military threats to our nation by turning them into little strips called "warriors" that cannot be glued back together again.
We have fed our economy into this shredder, destroying hopes of a healthy, viable pre-2001 type of economy. We have also fed the U.S. legal code into the shredder, producing little strips called "military tribunals", which are a perversion of U.S. justice.
The shredder's job is one alone: to take the most damning, revealing or incidental materials and turn them into homogenous, inoffensive strips. We are taking the finest aspects of our union and converting them into common dross, content to lose those things that identify the best of us.
In exchange we get itty bitty pieces and parts, the simulacra of a once proud nation.
Labels: phony war on terror, PWOT, shredder
posted by rangeragainstwar at 8:05 AM
13 Comments:
Hi Lisa,
The first thing I do when I read a RAW post, besides giving your words serious consideration, is to guess whether it was written by you or Jim. This one was a no-brainer. Jim would never use the word "simulacra". Ha ha.
Great cartoon!
Dave
UC,
You've outed me :)
[I do edit most posts, and Ranger doesn't cotton to my twenty-five cent words :) Those posts that are solely me I i.d. with my name.]
Brilliant cartoon, eh?!
Brilliant cartoon to go with a brilliant metaphor!
BZ Lisa.
Retired (once-Serving)Patriot
i don't know what "dross" or "simulacra" means and i was too busy building this to look it up in the dictionary.
"I hate it when they say, 'He gave his life for his country.' Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don't die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them."
Gene La Rocque
SP: Thank you.
GD: That's o.k., my little pet.
(Are you affiliated with the Black Keys?)
SP,
Congrats on your life transition.
You'll get the hang of it soon.
I hope our paths cross some day.
You know where i stay at.
jim
Dave,
I ain't even able to pronounce these words.
I don't get it, i write a simple piece and it gets all gussied up.
Sorry you got confused.
BTW i use her computer, hence her pic on my reply.
jim
To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies — the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said — there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
H. L. Mencken
Hi Jim,
Even though I consider myself well-read, I have to admit that I had to look up "simulacra". Lisa's writing reminds me of Mencken, whom I had to read with a dictionary close by.
Dave
"But when everyday life gets detached from reality, metaphor is all you've got left. And in this ridiculous, sickening culture, with its toxic stream of electronic simulacrum politics sucking all the oxygen out of the collective brain-space..."
Watch out! It's catching! Jim Kunstler at Puke Time Clusterfuck Nation used it also unless Lisa ghost-writes that also.
POLT,
;)
Y'know, there's a whole lot o' simulacrum people out there. Faux folks striking poses and pursuing faux pursuits. Been this way for while, now.
<*sigh*>
p.s. --
FWIW, I did not read Jim Kunstler.
[I did read Baudrillard :) ]
UC,
Mencken is a joy. (You're too kind.)
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