war pigs

ever wonder what cable outlets like the discovery channel fill up their days and nights and days with? me, neither, but yesterday afternoon i got a lesson anyway.

on the traditional day of family get-togethers, 00soul and i got together with his family, for the traditional sibling joint birthday celebration. a ton of takeout chinese food and some delicious homemade dessert. but also, for much of the time, the discovery channel spewed a steady diet of war propaganda disguised as a show called futureweapons. in fact there was apparently a futureweapons marathon. this program, hosted by a former navy SEAL named, i swear to god, "mack," is all about superior firepower and intimidating your enemies into submission and just totally fucking jacking off in boy world. there was so much surrogate wanking going on, what with the missiles sliiiiiiding out of their tubes and bursting from their airborne shells and penetrating their targets with loving accuracy. lots of blowing stuff up real good and crowing about how this weapon or that weapon made the enemy give up before even engaging us. (which is of course why no more of our troops are dying in iraq ... .) the MOAB and the clusterfuck smart bombs that spin out of one missile, whose cute acronym for "kill as many motherfuckers as you can detect" escapes me right now, and erupt in black cloud columns worthy of saruman himself. and of course the very portable javelin shoulder missile, ooo-rah, and the bitchen high-tech tank, and the gun that sees around corners, and the gun that's "even better than an m-16" (now you know that's u.s. propaganda ... the m-16 is hardly the best fucking rifle in the world to begin with...).

it was nonstop sterile death-and-destruction. endless footage of the same field-test explosions, nice and neat, interspersed with grinning bespectacled white men talking about how "impressive" these weapons are. i mean, they just could not get enough of that lovin' stuff! but with all the euphemistic, sanitary ways of talking about the results of their little technological circle jerks, it was as though no actual killing is required. empty tanks, empty buildings, empty fields -- impotent targets taking the brunt of their brute force. oh, yeah, baby, right there. uh-huh-uh.