Coastal Empire

WW I: the good old days, when we could ship parcels containing
artillery shells, hand grenades and mortar rounds via the railways and Post Office

I was born a few years after America won the Last Great War. I saw the birth of a promising new post tyrant universe and then watched from my crib as time ran out, moment by moment, on that promise only four years later.

New laws of war were then devised by physicists and madmen. I watched minds close and accept mankind’s new fate to be incinerated in less than an hour from the start of hostilities.

No one in the history of the world had ever seen such a causal acceptance of mankind’s instant extinction at his own hands.

Nuclear bombs were man’s way of saying, “Let’s just totally fuck up the earth.” I wonder why we didn’t make a super weapon that made people feel real bad for a while. Oh yeah, we did try LSD back in the 50s and 60s.

Does our current infatuation with WW II prepare us, whether innocently or deliberately, for more war?

In every human endeavor save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war many of them die.

War endures.

My sixty plus years of life in America have seen the Korean, Vietnam, Cold, First Gulf Wars and the Global War on Terror. War was always here. War waited for me, my children, my grandchildren and awaits still my great grandchildren. It is the ultimate trade. At least it was mine. I was a practitioner of its arts for almost forty years.

Sun Tzu was right when he said there was no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare. The last hot war America won outright was World War II, called by most the last good, if not great, war. All other hot wars were ties, called on account of this or that, or undeclared cut-your-losses declared victories. America even lost its War on Drugs. Those taking the drugs won.

As its longest hot conflict, America’s Global War on Terror has grown worse and worse. I remember how the meaning of words began to change with unfamiliar words like collateral and rendition coming into the public lexicon. I remember when different became dangerous domestically and how we started to war with ourselves. It is easy to see how many came to hate us and how many of us came to hate each other so much.

There is no possibility of life without bloodshed. Those who are afflicted with the opposite notion that we can avoid the bitter harvest of this truism by living in harmony with other men are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom, and their lives when the jackbooted truth arrives at their doorstep. Their desire that life conform to their preferred dream way enslaves them and puts their lives in peril.

Is war work or play, a profession or a game, a trial of worth or a trial of chance? These are non-trivial distinctions.

Amazingly, men of war have similar, strange affinities that men of God do. Perhaps a kinship.

Let us consider the enduring box office popularity of Star Wars, its high tech, unending war with its underdog, numerically inferior, good guys getting the advantage through their reliance on the force. I believe that it is safe for me to say that America is a Star Wars adoring culture beset with Stone Age political emotions and medieval institutions – all of which are enabled by godlike technology. What possibly could go wrong?

Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of war. Even though I have not yet met him or read his writings, I have seen his work.

War is like the new boss who demands the impossible. In response, we work harder until we die or the job is done. The boss then asks for more without offering any thanks.

War is about killing and breaking stuff. The opposite of war is not peace but creation.

The old war of our fathers was total and external. It was industrial, force on force, attrition, annihilation or extirpation focused. It was now. The new war of our children is fought from within by surprise, terror, and slow mental sabotage. It is everafter. The internet of things contains the seeds of the future war of our grandchildren, where we humans may no longer remain in command. It is forever. I foresee a time of a conventional hot war of real and cyber robots. If I am right, I am concerned that my toaster oven will rise up and try to be the boss of me. Are we prepared to make war against those that make our morning Pop-Tarts or to cut alliances with our microwaves, garage door openers and garbage disposals?

A potential scene from Future War (l)
Let’s hope the fall of the robots from the internet of things
will be due to the bad habits they pick up from their creators (r)

A war on terror? It wasn’t so tough to know when you had won an old war. The losers surrendered. Should we win one of these new wars, who is going to surrender on behalf of terror? It’s like having a war on dandruff — endless and quite probably pointless.

Who said that the greatest danger of a terrorist’s bomb is in the explosion of stupidity that it provokes? He was very smart.

War on cancer has been going on over forty years now, no? How about that war on poverty?

Some of us die in our sleep. Others die nobly at the hands of a drunk driver or fighting cancer or in a world war. As a child I wanted to die fighting a monster or a dinosaur. Not a chance. So here I am. I’ll likely die ignobly while losing a war against some microbe whose last name rhymes with pus.

The darkness of death is generous and patient. It always wins.

Throughout my life’s intersection with war, I was at first sociopathic and, when required, psychopathic. There is darkness inside all of us. This void is more dangerous in those who toil at war. Still, we all have it due to the trials and tribulations of life. We are what we are because of it. Sometimes in spite of it. I think that was true in my case.

Some use this dank dreadfulness as a shield to hide behind, others use it as an excuse to do unconscionable things. This blackness is neither good nor evil unless we make it so. It took war to teach me this.

My journey back from these pathologies took more than a decade and much liquor.

Back during the summer of 1973 when the world almost blew itself up, there was a blood red storm that spread from the east to the west and then back to the east across the Mediterranean, until it sat just off the Armageddon Central coast. It was borne of several less than constant winds from Africa, Asia, the Levant, the New World and Europe.

This super-storm’s winds came from all points of the compass, were hotter and colder than hell, occupied all levels of altitudes, contained multiple colors of dust and dirt and were reported in their individual source countries as plucking the feathers of domestic and wild fowl, peeling paint, and traveling along the ground like a flood, and being foul, flowery, spicy and poisonous in fragrance.

A few western news organizations briefly broadcast foreign film clips that captured these winds downing telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads, entering and coagulating inside car ignition locks. Mediterranean mariners called these winds during filmed interviews a sea of darkness.

Some say that earth’s end time was avoided when the American and Soviet politicians talked to each other on their red phones. I still hold to the discredited and oft denied claim that the generals on both sides told their politicians that they would not lead their armies to an area thus beset by these weather furies only to be engulfed and then rapidly and completely interred by these rainbow colored death-storms

Yeah, I know, foolish me.

Sea of Darkness

Many phenomena – wars, plagues, surprise IRS audits – throughout the course of history have been advanced as evidence that the end of the world as we know it is nigh. Whenever end time aficionados now get together it is generally agreed that ill-fitting mass produced shoes, poor dentistry, and Twitter are among the top contenders for exhibit A. I can’t trump this.

Copyright © 2016 From My Isle Seat