Twa Corbies

The War Fetish and the Weapons Industry

Memorial Day, 2010

"Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane,

And I'll pike oot his bonny blue een;

Wi ae lock o his gowden hair

We'll theek oor nest whan it grows bare."

--1611



If humanity survives, although strange at this writing, the image of a young living woman prone on the grave of a dead young man will be with us for centuries.



Make of it what you will. Wiser eyes will see carrion-eaters; invisible, all too real and engorging themselves on the dead.  They see the living only as moving feasts.  There is horror in something so living pressed so closely to something so dead.  Between them the arrogant worms writhe in corruption and await the time when the sweet flesh will finally be still and feed them in the darkness.  The maggots muck and wiggle in the profits of war.  At their command, the tombstones raise graven with lies.

“Operation Iraqi Freedom” or “Operation Enduring Freedom:” what could be more cynical, viler and more evil than the black suits and high hats of the Ghouls?  The undertakers who lugubriously pout and preen to bring comfort to the bereaved are all the while preparing their midnight banquet. Call it the high-kitsch “Memorial Day Concert,” the grave-robbers fawn and mince, “…a time to remember, to heal, to bring our nation together…” they say, and what “nation” would that be?

Is it the “nation” of Boeing, or the Land of Lockheed-Martin?  Is it the Kingdom of Xe or the Republic of Religious Roobs?  This is not to gainsay the folk or families who had the idealism to try and believe in something bigger than themselves, nor is this to “politicize” their stories, so go on and look at them if you have the heart or stomach.  Go on.  Look at them.  Look at Katherine Cathey reaching into an open coffin. Read about Tyler and Renee… their wedding was a state holiday.  And don’t miss the show afterwords!

It’s a show full of actors and acrobats and old soldiers… all full of that Yankee Doodley Dum.  Go on ahead and make Kitsch of the dead.  They were the kids with the drum.  And the photographer said, “I felt I owed the Arlington National Cemetery a little time -- and I think I still do. Maybe we all do."  Goddam right we do.  If we spent more cognitive time and a lot less show-time, we would stop filling it up with victims.  Had we not been such smarmy Kitchifying cake-heads about WWI, WWII never would have happened.

But when the yellow-ribbon drum-and-trumpet showboat serve-the-cause Corbie comes home to roost on the cradle, when we have to face the boxed-up meat that used to be someone we loved so very much in real life… well THEN we have to make some kind of sense of it all.  We parrot the dogma of “duty” and “honor” and “sacrifice.”  Even worse, we say it was all for “freedom.”  The Germans had their “Fatherland,”  the Japanese their “Emperor,” and we have our damnable fuss-and-feathers “freedom.”

All of these seedy simulacra serve quite nicely for swelling the bellies of the Ghouls.  They see the swollen stomach of pregnant mothers pressed against the casket as well as the starving children’s bloated bellies in the “developing world.”  It enhances our zeal.  To them, it is veal.  “They are neither man nor woman… they are neither brute nor human… they are ghouls.”

We could not admit to ourselves that the “first world war” was a pointless fuckup generated by ghouls.  It really was not the “first” in any case, but one thing the ghouls do not want us to understand is History.  They do not know it either, it is second-nature to them.  They have been eating the fresh-dead of war fetishism for at least ten thousand years.  The horrific hubris they use to lure us into gathering them grub should make us hurl bile and hairs instead of “offering tears and prayers.”

Look at “Operation Just Cause.” Right.  “Just ‘cause” we felt like it.”  Not so funny to thousands of dead Panamanians who live in a “country” we stole from somebody else “just ‘cause” we needed the space for the merchants, who wait cooling-tables for the ghouls.  The merchants are impatient for their profit-tip, the ghouls may be the only ones who understand the value of “renewable resources,” and what could be more renewable than carrion?  Death occurs naturally, and if not, give it a boost with bullshit.

So even today, Memorial Day, 2010, the slobbering classes feed their dead children, wives and husbands into Mammon’s gaping maw.  Long after everyone with the brain of a moth knows that the “war on terror” is stinking bullshit, we smile (tearfully and respectfully), put on a show, and dance on their graves.  We watch T&A TV to help us hump and squirt and produce more veal for the villains.  Meanwhile, we vilify our ancestors who had all this shit figured out almost a century ago.

The half-billion goal of the neo-feudalists will be no problem.