Writers whose works I love: Neal Stephenson, Thomas Pynchon, Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Herman Melville, Ishmael Reed, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Feodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and James Joyce.
Email at PeterRobJon at gmail
Twitter: BrevetCaptain
In Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson offers a fantastic definition of America through the imagined voice of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, previous holder of the record for “Most Successful Attack on America.” I say this to glorify neither Yamamoto nor bin Laden, but to recognize that both the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center grossly underestimated the nature of America:
Isoroku Yamamoto has given up on trying to make them understand that the Americans are grudge-holders on a level that is inconceivable to the Nipponese, who learn to swallow their pride before they learn to swallow solid food. Even if he could get Tojo and his mob of shabby, ignorant thugs to comprehend how pissed off the Americans are, they’d laugh it off. What’re they going to do about it? Throw a pie in your face, like the Three Stooges? Ha, ha, ha! Pass the sake and bring me another comfort girl!
Isoroku Yamamoto spent a lot of time playing poker with Yanks during his years in the States, smoking like a chimney to deaden the scent of their appalling aftershave. The Yanks are laughably rude and uncultured, of course; this hardly constitutes a sharp observation. Yamamoto, by contrast, attained some genuine insight as a side-effect of being robbed blind by Yanks at the poker table, realizing that the big freckled louts could be dreadfully cunning. Crude and stupid would be okay—perfectly understandable, in fact.
But crude and clever is intolerable; this is what makes those redheaded ape-men extra double super loathsome. Yamamoto is still trying to drill the notion into the heads of his partners in the big Nipponese scheme to conquer everything between Karachi and Denver. He wishes that they would get the message. A lot of the Navy men have been around the world a few times and seen it for themselves, but those Army guys have spent their careers mowing down Chinamen and raping their women and they honestly believe that the Americans are just the same except taller and smellier. Come on guys, Yamamoto keeps telling them, the world is not just a big Nanjing. But they don’t get it. If Yamamoto were running things, he’d make a rule: each Army officer would have to take some time out from bayoneting Neolithic savages in the jungle, go out on the wide Pacific in a ship, and swap 16-inch shells with an American task force for a while. Then maybe, they’d understand they’re in a real scrap here.
Every American, from the descendants of the first Asians who crossed the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, to the descendants of Irish who escaped the Famine on the Death Ships, to the descendants of Africans who somehow escaped death during the Middle Passage only to defeat even greater odds by surviving slavery long enough to have children in the New World, is the result of colossal badasses mixing their genes together.
We are the sons and daughters of explorers, fighters, crazies, and supreme survivors. We are the ones who said, ‘Let’s try for something better’ despite the fact that ‘there be dragons,’ and the ones who, whenever possible, refused to lay down and die despite the lash and the rapists and the slave market.
And we don’t let insults go. As Yamamoto knew, and Tojo and Hirohito discovered, when the Sleeping Giant is awakened, it will move heaven and earth to gain revenge. Or, like Marcellus Wallace says, ‘if [he] goes to Indochina, I want a nigger waiting in a bowl of rice ready to pop a cap in his ass.’ Marcellus Wallace is a pure distillation of America. So is Barack Hussein Obama.
Sent via [redacted’s] email with the tag line:
NO MATTER IF YOU LIKE HIM OR NOT YOU HAVE TO LIKE THESE BUMPER STICKERS
If by loathe and find them racist, then, yes, I do have to like these.
/headdesk
I love this!!!
FOUR MORE YEARS!!
FOUR MORE YEARS!!
FOUR MORE YEARS!!
Let me tell you some things.
I used to investigate child abuse and neglect. I can tell you how to stop the vast majority of abortion in the world.
First, make knowledge and access to contraception widely available. Start teaching kids before they hit puberty. Teach them about domestic violence and coercion, and teach them not to coerce and rape. Create a strong, loving community where women and girls feel safe and supported in times of need. Because guess what? They aren’t. You know what happens to babies born under such circumstances? They get hurt, unnecessarily. They get sick, unnecessarily. They get removed from parents who love them but who are unprepared for the burden of a child. Resources? Honey, we try. There aren’t enough resources anywhere. There are waiting lists, and promises, and maybes. If the government itself can’t hook people up, what makes you think an impoverished single mom can handle it?
Abolish poverty. Do you have any idea how much childcare costs? Daycare can cost as much or more than monthly rent. They may be inadequately staffed. Getting a private nanny is a nice idea, but they don’t come cheap either. Relatives? Do they own a car? Does the bus run at the right times? Do they have jobs of their own they need to work just to keep the lights on? Are they going to stick around until you get off you convenience store shift at 4 AM? Do they have criminal histories that will make them unsuitable as caregivers when CPS pokes around? You gonna pay for that? Who’s going to pay for that?
End rape. I know your type errs on the side of blaming the woman, but I’ve seen little girls who’ve barely gotten their periods pregnant because somebody thought raping preteens was an awesome idea. You want to put a child through that? Or someone with a mental or physical inability for whom pregnancy would be frightening, painful or even life-threatening? I’ve seen nonverbal kids who had their feet sliced up by caregivers for no fucking reason at all, you think sexual abuse doesn’t happen either?
You say there’s lots of couples who want to adopt. Kiddo, what they want to adopt are healthy white babies, preferably untainted by the wombs and genetics of women with alcohol or drug dependencies. I’ve seen the kids they don’t want, who almost no one wants. You people focus only on the happy pink babies, the gigglers, the ones who grow and grow with no trouble. Those are not the kids who linger in foster care. Those are certainly not the older kids and teenagers who age out of foster care and then are thrown out in the streets, usually with an array of medical and mental health issues. Are they too old to count?
And yeah, I’ve seen the babies, little hand-sized things barely clinging to life. There’s no glory, no wonder there. There is no wonder in a pregnant woman with five dollars to her name, so deep in depression you wonder if she’ll be alive in a week. Therapy costs money. Medicine costs money. Food, clothes, electricity cost money. Government assistance is a pittance; poverty drives women and girls into situations where they are forced to rely on people who abuse them to survive. (I’ve been up in more hospitals than I can count.)
In each and every dark pit of desperation, I have never seen a pro-lifer. I ain’t never seen them babysitting, scrubbing floors, bringing over goods, handing mom $50 bucks a month or driving her to the pediatrician. I ain’t never seen them sitting up for hours with an autistic child who screams and rages so his mother can get some sleep while she rests up from working 14-hour days. I don’t see them fixing leaks in rundown houses or playing with a kid while the police prepare to interview her about her sexual abuse. They’re not paying for the funerals of babies and children who died after birth, when they truly do become independent organisms. And the crazy thing is they think they’ve already done their job, because the child was born!
Aphids give birth, girl. It’s no miracle. You want to speak for the weak? Get off your high horse and get your hands dirty helping the poor, the isolated, the ill and mentally ill women and mothers and their children who already breathe the dirty air. You are doing nothing, absolutely nothing, for children. You don’t have a flea’s comprehension of injustice. You are not doing shit for life until you get in there and fight that darkness. Until you understand that abortion is salvation in a world like ours. Does that sound too hard? Do you really think suffering post-birth is more permissible, less worthy of outrage?
“Pro-life” is simply a philosophy in which the only life worth saving is the one that can be saved by punishing a woman.
Dun voted.
And tore my sticker :(
Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. — Stephen King, “Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption”
I’m grading and tumbling and blackboarding, as per usual on Tuesdays, but this day, Election Day, is moving me close to tears. I am full of hope.
I find the notion that a people as weird, diverse, angry, resilient, smart, stupid, tuned in, tuned out, and all the rest can decide for ourselves who will represent us for the next four, or two, or six or whatever the years might be for county coroner (we vote for that here in Jawja), extremely moving. It’s such a new idea in human history. And one full of hope.
My brevet captain came to America in 1860, and here I am, 152 years later, waiting for the California polls to close tonight so that the networks can (hopefully) call this election for our President, and he will get another four years to do great things in our names. Hope and Change y’all, are real.
I truly believe that he can become one of the greatest Presidents in our history. Our FDR. Our Eisenhower. Our Lincoln.
I’m pretty close to tears, y’all. But the champagne is on ice.
I hope.
