Sunday, November 27, 2011

Boobie Counter Insurgency

(from Fernando Po, U.S.A., America's post-linguistic retreat to Plato's Cave)

If offered help you'd best refuse
For if you should relent
They'll draw an arbitrary line
Through problems transient
And complicate them all so as
To make them permanent

They’d like to spend a “night,” they say
To get inside the door
But after years you’ll find them fast
Asleep upon your floor
In no apparent haste to end
Their stay that you abhor

Like suitors of Penelope
They make themselves at home
In yours – till you will marry them
Or read to them a tome
That ends when brave Ulysses comes
From back across the foam

They start with talking of a “race”
But just as a pretense
Once underway, the “journey” talk
Begins to change the sense:
“Accomplished” missions leading to
No perfect in their tense

A hanging concentrates the mind;
No hangings, the reverse
When no one hangs for screwing up
Results become perverse
Rewards buy more incompetence
And gild the golden purse

Incompetents attract their ilk
They know no other kind
And so they concentrate like sludge
A residue refined
To gum up all the moving parts
And leave them in a bind

The Law of Parkinson explains
Bureaucracy’s demands
Just make more room to make more work
For still more willing hands
There’s room enough for everyone
When all the yeast expands

The Peter Principle sets in
And all float to the top
The good get out; the bad stay on:
Promotion will not stop
It doesn’t matter what they do,
Or how they fail and flop

“You fuck up then you move up” goes
The slogan of the day
Republican philosophy
For how to make some hay
Insurgencies have payrolls that
Would tempt a Kenneth Lay

To “counter” the insurgency
You first put on your crown
And then “elect” your puppets till
You start to spiral down
To end up with the worst of all:
George Bush and Michael Brown

Great nations, so the saying goes,
Cannot fight little wars
It just makes them look little
Like the whores that staff the bars:
Those widowed native women folk
Whose men died for our cars

We had to have the oil, it seems,
To make our gas and fuel
No matter that the price has soared
While Halliburton gruel
Fed to the troops to keep them fit
Has made them mean and cruel

But when a bloated, idle firm
Has little real to do
It either lays employees off
Or makes a pooch to screw
Then buys up some screwdriver stock
With options for a few

And then consultants come to call
To market mantras cool:
Some jaundiced, jaded, jargon jive
To mesmerize the fool
Which Dick and Don have taught to George
To make of him a tool

The trophy chief executive
Requires the use of sound
A propaganda catapult,
Some noise he needs to pound
He doesn’t have to know “above”
From “under” or “around”

Deciding to decide he picks
Decision as his guide
He chooses choices chosen for
The options that they hide
He puts them “on the table” then
Onto the floor they slide

He turns both tides and corners and
He chews gum as he walks
Then chokes and stumbles, yanked by strings,
As his bad puppet balks
Refusing to “eliminate”
The “enemy” he stalks

Technology will save the day
Or so we have been told
Our vastly overpriced machine
Will keep away the cold
Although “insurgents” wreck it with
“Improvisation” bold

The war to have more war again
Has made war without end:
Careers for all the supple ones
Whose rubber ethics bend
Until their “honor” turns to rust:
A blood-stain’s reddish blend

But why not send some campaign staff?
Those smarmy puerile jerks
Who masturbate to thoughts of “war”
With all its rank and perks
Who find “good bidness” where it “is”
And who cares if it works?

They’ll camp inside the castle walls
Some hamburgers to munch
And never go outside the wire
To brave the deadly crunch
While talking tough about Tehran
Where they’d be someone’s lunch

The days and weeks and months go by
With more excuses still
For why the costs keep rising while
The “enemy” we kill
But, What the hell? It’s free-lunch war!
The kids will pay the bill

Republicans can talk a fight
Until the buildings fall
They then attack the innocent
And squawk a shrieking squall
Producing only years of talk
To cover for it all

So “Hell is on the way,” alright,
Dick Cheney’s vow fulfilled
They fell asleep on watch and got
Three thousand of us killed
Then ran off half a world away
To have some oil wells drilled

In only six more months of this
The numbers will accrue
To show we’ve lost three thousand more
With no apparent clue
Explaining why we’ve spent more time
Than fighting World War Two

We used to have great enemies
But now we’ve only small
We shot a cannon at a wasp
Collapsing hive and hall
And now upon our bee-stung ass
The insects swarm and crawl

We’ve bought another cannon, though,
Because it makes more bang
And generates huge profits for
The ones who hire the gang
Who, when the sand gets in the gears,
Ignore the clunk and clang

The blowback, though, comes round in time;
No one has yet escaped.
Vietnamized; Iraqified;
Corrupted by the raped,
The “victors” thus are vanquished by
The monkeys that they aped.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

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George Armstrong Custer Bush

(First written on 7/2/2005 after reading that America's criminal invasion of Iraq had acquired a "new, improved" -- meaning, recycled from Vietnam -- military metaphor to explain it all: namely, "fly paper." See: the flypaper American GIs offer themselves to the "enemy" flies who then stick to the flypaper GIs until the whole sticky mess -- used up flypaper and dead flies -- gets thrown into the trashcan of history. See? No? OK, then, consider what still looks for all the world like the grim story of George Armstrong Custer revisited.)

Shades of Dien Bien Phu and the Little Big Horn!

Now I think I get it! President George "Deputy Dubya" Bush really did have a strategy when he invaded Iraq over two years ago. Yes, and you unbelievers thought he just blundered into a bloody quagmire with his empty head stuffed solidly up his butt. No way. The man had a plan!

Just like the French at Dien Bien Phu or George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn, or Ronald Reagan's Marines at the Beirut Airport, Deputy Dubya decided to send his troops down into an indefensible hole in the ground and "bait" the enemy into coming after them. Then, when the American forces found themselves surrounded, they would just wipe out the enemy all around them. What a genius plan!

In a repetitive and totally inane speech the other day, Deputy Dubya reminded us of why foreigners consider Americans among the dumbest people ever to walk the earth. Even aside from trying to pull that discredited "9/11 = Saddam Hussein" canard for the umpteenth time, the really stupid bit came when Dubya the Dullard let us in on his clever scheme to invade a country that didn't have terrorists just so he could create a country that did. Now that the "terrorists" who didn't exist in Iraq under Saddam Hussein now do exist in that country (with Saddam Hussein in jail for the past year), the killing of Americans and Iraqis can just go on and on and on because .... well ... because ... well ... BECAUSE IT HAS ALREADY STARTED! You see, in American logic, starting something justifies doing what you've started doing once you've started doing it. See? Hmmmmmmm? How can anyone expect Americans to stop doing anything stupidly suicidal once they begin doing it? Hmmm? Doesn't that make perfect American sense? Hmmmm?

Canon-fodder British soldiers in World War I and American GIs in Vietnam had a slogan for this kind of self-referential, tautological strategic tail-chasing: "We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here."

See: as "big-thinking" American domino theorists like Henry Kissinger keep telling us decade after decade, our friends won't respect us and our enemies won't fear us if we stop acting stupidly! Don't you see the logic of it? See: "big thinking" American domino theorists simply assume that our friends respect stupidity and our enemies fear it. Why do you find this so hard to understand? And stop laughing!

Early in the Vietnam War, genius American generals used to laugh at the French generals for putting their troops into that hopeless trap at Dien Bien Phu where the Vietnamese wiped them with artillery firing down from the surrounding hillsides. Then the genius American General William Westmoreland put his troops into a trap at Khe Sanh where a whole bunch of his troops got royally hammered by the surrounding North Vietnamese -- while other Vietnamese guerrillas simply walked around the pinned-down Americans and blew up most of the major cities to the South. Actually, this "use ourselves as bait" strategy has an even earlier history among genius American generals: like when General George Armstrong Custer cleverly "baited" thousands of Sioux Indians to come wipe him out at the Little Big Horn River. What, one must ask, induces genius Generals to do such monumentally stupid things? Does it come with the rank?

George W. Bush cleverly avoided service in the Vietnam War where he might have learned from all the stupid things our former Presidents and generals did there. But noooooooooooooo. He had to hide out (at least part of the time) in a champagne National Guard unit that never engaged a single enemy airplane in mortal combat anywhere in the skies over Texas. Now, when he finally gets to live out his wildest fantasies as Commander-In-Briefs, he figures he'll just send the American military into Iraq where they can create "terrorists" and then "bait" them into killing Americans day after day after day. He calls this "strategy" the "war on terror." See: first you create terrorists and then you dare them to kill you. See? Republicans understand this "reasoning" intuitively, even if they wouldn't think of risking their own children's lives putting it into practice.

Anyway, you unbelievers out there had better learn a whole new level of respect for George Armstrong Custer Bush. You may think he lacks intelligence and experience, but that only goes to show how little you understand the power of Republican faith in fantasy! Just keep dreaming along with Deputy Dubya Bush and a miracle will happen any day now. If it doesn't, who cares? Dead flypaper GIs tell no tales.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2005-2011

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Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Congenital Stockholm Syndrome

He started by giving up quickly,
Surrendering early his case.
He offered to kiss their asses.
Replying, they pissed in his face.

Their urine, he thought, tasted strangely;
Yet not at all bad to his taste.
He'd gotten so used to it, plainly.
Why let such a drink go to waste?

The people who voted in favor
Of him and his promise of “change”
Now see in his many betrayals
A poodle afflicted with mange.

Each time that the surly and crazy
Republicans out for his skin
Condemn him for living and breathing,
He graciously helps them to win.

He’ll turn on his base in an instant
With threats and disdain and neglect
While bombing some Muslims so Cheney
Might thrill to the lives that he’s wrecked.

A black man in love with apartheid
He offers his stalwart support
To zionists and their extortion
With “More, please!” his only retort.

A masochist begging for beatings
Obama takes joy in abuse
Receiving just what he has asked for
Which makes him of no earthly use

The little brown men that he’s murdered
In homes far away from our land
Bring profits obscene to his backers
Who give him the back of their hand.
 
Obama seeks praise from the vicious
Republicans, no matter what.
He suffers, apparently, nothing
So much as his need to kiss butt.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2011

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Friday, November 11, 2011

Peacock Pugilism

A terza rima sonnet in dishonor of America's most recent President to win the Nobel Prize for Peace:


The precious peacock poised upon his perch
Perspires profusely, pondering his plan.
In short: he must decide which way to lurch.

Not if, but when should he attack Iran?
How best prepare the public for this strike?
Which lies to tell, the flames of war to fan?

From where the ruler sits, what’s not to like
About the usefulness of nameless fear
And heads of Muslim preachers on a pike?

Self-satisfied, he grins from ear to ear
Reporting proudly of his latest kill.
No charge, indictment, trial, or verdict clear,

Just fiat disappearance, Newspeak swill:
Iraq and Vietnam -- again and still.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2011

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