Just like
Red Warrior,
Idi Amin's life force is running out. No matter how much food he eats he will still die, having not seen any of the secret levels because he didn't save his super shots, he wasted them instead. Pol Pot and the Duvaliers are off the scene and the
hardcore 70s generation of literally insane murderous dictators have passed, to be replaced by a wave of slightly-more-sane dictators, and undirected
mass murder of the kind that came about in Kosovo and Rwanda and the like, either produced by collective madness or by a lot of little big men. Is this progress? The motion of power from individuals to the state to non-state groups has made evil less accountable, harder to target, easier to spread, albeit not so ferociously.
And Kurds, they come to mind, because I'm typing the appeal of a Kurdish man. I remember when 'Three Kings' came out, it was trendy to complain about the plight of the Kurds in Iraq, because Papa Bush had led them on and stood them up, but what did the complainers propose to be done, and where are they now that Baby Bush has let the Kurds have their revenge? Did the moaners want to help the Kurds at all, or were they just exploiting other people's genuine misery to bolster their own self-image, their credentials as dissident activists? Having said that, I'm no different from the people I criticise - I don't care at all about the Kurds, I'm just using them myself as a way to anger and frustrate the Left - and it's a shame that this kind of self-awareness isn't present in most political commentaries on the internet, the ability to recognise that one is not necessarily right all the time. A man's gotta know his limitations and I know mine.
Liberia. I type a lot of cases from Liberia. I have written about the place before in my daylogs, even before it was in the news due to the current phase of bloodletting. My conclusion was that the international community should try to make things worse there, so that eventually the few survivors would be sick of war - the 'Brewster's Millions' solution. It is as good a solution as any. As I have said, people want America to act, and they do not want America to act, in the same thought, and if America had any sense it would clap its hands over its ears and refuse to listen, lest we drive it mad, like the shapeshifter from Ray Bradbury's 'The Martian Chronicles' that was driven mad by too many people wanting it to look like their heart's desire.
I believe that America should require that each citizen of the nations they - and thus 'we', because we are all American - invade or plan to invade signs a contract stating either (a) "I am an implacable enemy of America and will not complain if I am shot" or (b) "I want the Americans to help me. I will not change my mind and attack the Americans once they are here. If they then leave, I will not ask nor expect for them to come back again". This would solve a lot of problems. It seems to me that once America sends lots of troops to Liberia people and the BBC will immediately want them to leave again. Perhaps America should station troops half-in, half-out of the country. They should do the hokey-cokey and then turn around (but not before giving the country a hug and saying something to fill the period between coitus and sleep, e.g. "Crow is the death of the fish" or "I thought 'Thunderball' was better than 'Goldfinger'") because that quite literally is what it is all about.
Also, America should send troops to Mary Archer, to protect her from Jeffrey Archer. They could strike up base camp in her fragrant cleavage and send patrols over her shoulders. If a man was miniaturised to the size of an Action Man figure he could be used as a dildo, although he'd have to wear an aqualung and a rubber suit so as not to be suffocated or absorbed. I think North America on the map looks like a ghost, a spirit raising up from South America like a big wisp. It would be the ultimate Freudian metaphor, the man-dildo, the mando, short of perhaps a woman managing to insert her own frickin' head up her fanny and suffocating at the point of orgasm, thus completing the lesbian/masturbation/birth/death/penetration continuum.
Whether or not the United States' State Department reads Everything2 or not - I surely hope so, because I know for a fact that I have to be stopped, and soon - it would appear that America's plan for invading Liberia is greatly inferior to my own. Instead of sending in a WW2-surplus aircraft carrier, a Sea Fury, and twenty or so programmers, they have instead send in 71 Marines, who I assume are under strict instructions not to leave their embassy, because no matter how well-trained and equipped they are, a random bullet or rocket grenade could make that 70 Marines or 65 Marines and eventually no Marines.
I am mindful of 'Aliens', which also had US Marines, although fewer in number, and they all came to sticky ends (Hicks and Bishop, of course, were killed in 'Alien3', the one with superscript in the title). Although, having said that, Vasquez and Gorman did not meet 'sticky ends', they had heroic, self-sacrificing ends - in Gorman's case, a redemptive end - and we never really saw what happened to Hudson, he was just dragged away. It must be tempting for comics writers to create a sequel based on the possibility that Hudson managed to survive the alien assault and also the blast, because he was a memorable character. Indeed, most of the marines were memorable characters, even the boring ones, the Wierzbowskis, the lady pilot, Ferro? Dietrich? Frost? Poole? Kaminsky? Hunter? There used to be a website called 'The Wierzbowski Hunters' which compiled sightings of this most mundane of Marines - he was blown up in an ammunition explosion - but it is long gone now, shame.
If I was going to war I'd want to watch 'Aliens', even though the Marines get killed. I'd want to live in a world where there is an enemy that can't be negotiated with and can be killed without a second thought. Why can't we live in that world? All it would require is willpower, the will to believe that our enemies are subhuman, but not subhuman in the same way as dolphins or meerkats, but submammal, even worse than insects, or lizards, or snakes, like viruses, irredeemable. This must be the wet dream of governments, to virus-ise the forces acting against them.
Also, if Devil Child Bush could persuade North Korea to declare war on Liberia and Iran, that would kill threes birds with one stone and would be fucktastic. He could phone up Kim Jong Il and tell him that Charles Taylor has been saying bad things about him to whoever is in charge of Iran. They could nuke the site from orbit.
~
I found a copy of 'The Sun' on the train into work (it was lying there, on the Metropolitan Line, northbound out of Wembley Park, heading for Watford although I changed at Harrow on the Hill for Uxbridge, by which time I had finished the paper, although I was actually going to Raynor's Lane, and not Uxbridge, although Uxbridge is very nice and posh and I would like to go there, but no matter how long I spend in that town I will never own it, which is why I never go on holiday). The Sun was the defining British tabloid newspaper of the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps the finest example of its ilk, and was a work of evil genius, hated by many but nonetheless more popular than its competitors, a position it retains to this day although the Daily Mail is increasingly seen as the modern tabloid successor to the Sun because it has a slightly smaller print size than the Sun and is thus aimed at a more middle-class audience.
Yeah, I read (i.e. past tense) the Sun (just this once). Big deal. I knocked them dead because I'm the king and my imbalance was minimised. Everybody's thought about reading the Sun. It seems that society is hipper to it now, but that might be because I'm older, and I've seen more things, scary things, things that would make a white man transparent. The substance of the newspaper - zany stories about taxi drivers having dolphins fall out of the sky into their taxis - have been greatly surpassed by the Onion, the Weekly World News and the like, whilst the news reporting has self-consciously adopted a much more liberal, tolerant tone than before, which is probably why the Daily Mail is so popular. Liberia, for example, had a little block on page 2, whereas in 1984 the troubles in Beirut or Angola, for example, would have not even been in the paper.
My thoughts on the newspaper are that Page 3 has improved immeasurably. It used to be bleak as hell, absolutely drained of everything human - no offence to the models involved, but the glaring photography and blank smiles just seemed off-putting and robotic, I assume it was deliberate - but now it is at the level of, say, Maxim or FHM or the like. Staring for five or six minutes at the semi-naked lady whilst on the train has no effect on my cock whatsoever but it brings me peace. I find that looking at pictures of attractive women has a tranquilising effect. Presumably if I actually was a woman I'd be in a coma all the time, like the captain in 'Dark Star'. Flo-til-la, light of my life, fire of my loins.
The newspaper itself thrashes the Daily Mirror, and also the drums, and I saw a couple of other people on the tube also reading the Sun, and I am mindful of all those people who said that e-Books were going to hit big in 1999, because if they had, people would not read newspapers, and all those people were wrong, those big clever people in their suits and ties, they were wrong, and they are wrong now, and they will be wrong, because they want to believe and make us believe that what they are doing is and will be right even if they and we know that it is not.
All there is are sandwiches and apple juice. The rest is speculation and hearsay.