Captain, United States Marine Corps
Killed, Iraq, March 20, 2003
On any single day of the week, you may verify that the pages of this daily are laden with dilettante speculations on which "trouble spot" the power of the United States needs to erase next. The young man shown above never drew one breath in a nation which was not constantly poised to yield to an utterly ungovernable addiction to war. Every American President in his lifetime pursued the destruction of other peoples in the tragically unexamined dynamic of this compulsion.
He never stood a chance.
And all they ask, is for nobody
to tell what they did to him.
Mask, Giacometti, You Have Been Here Sometime
Yes, it makes no sense, America seems to present such a "front" I can not know if the Haters are more obvious because a consensus of tolerance is threatening to become a majority. I hope that is my shred of optimism peering out rather than clinging to an unreality. pgt
ReplyDeleteThank you for your visit, LA.
ReplyDeleteThe reality (presented in part above) is that it does make sense; that the United States presents a “front” successfully only to itself; that the Haters are beside the point; that tolerance is not the issue, that public disfavor for discrimination already is a majority position (even in the US Senate); and that what we need optimism for, is the unfinished work of Reconstruction. I alluded to only part of this, although I’ve addressed some of these matters before.
The haters are the unwitting stalking horses, now and again the janissaries, and incurably the sharecroppers of a war this nation wages, quite singularly, against all of its youth, not merely its Others. This war was opened knowingly in 1948 (deeply exploiting my alma mater, Princeton, to staff it, teach it, dignify it, house it, and sustain it), gained its present lurid gusto and demographic contours in 1968, and flares recurringly as each generation threatens the revanchist financial structure which launched it.
In 1988 - please, do not hesitate to notice the generational renewal of this war - the sole residual menace in the catchphrase of 1948 and 1968 (“Commie pinko faggot”) was simply appropriated as the successor feast, to an international Stalinist menace whose crumbling literally terrified its American parasite. The United States, as we know it, destroys its boys to protect itself, uses their deaths to excuse new ones (re-read the Seal Creed, read the papers), all to sustain conditions of extreme emergency in which reform cannot mobilise and to inflict quiescence on the innocent.
That aside, the era of the supplicant homosexual is over. One couldn’t get a quorum today for a single staging of Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band" (1968). This posting explicitly defers to a later play, Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” (1985). You have grounds for your optimism. I appreciate your sharing it here.