I really, REALLY, wacked my head hard last night. Like an idiot I stood up under an open kitchen cabinet door so hard that it took a ginder out of the top of my head. I was wearing a hat at the time and the point of the door still ripped the skin and dented my cranium enough that it was still bleeding 10 hours later. I have a sick kind of headache. I saw stars.
That was the icing on the cake. The last straw. It was only tuesday night and already my embarrassment at being an American was overwhelming. As the saying goes…. I needed this like a hole in the head.
The election was finally over and I expected some peace. No more phone calls, political commercials and election coverage. No more listening to rednecks tell me Obama was going to take “our” guns away and make us all Muslims. I even felt I, all of us really, deserved some peace. But it wasn’t to be.
Now I have to listen to how the “Best” and the “Brightest” America has to offer when it comes to military excellence turn out to be no better and certainly no brighter than the dumbest sons-of-bitches I have known all my adult life. I read this in The New York TIMES about the 37 year old floozie from Tampa who started it all.
…”Their parties, though, were the talk of the town. In February 2010, a gossip column in The Tampa Bay Times reported that Mr. Petraeus and his wife arrived escorted by 28 police officers on motorcycles to a pirate-themed party at the Kelleys’ home, to mark Tampa’s Gasparilla Pirate Fest, an annual event. Guests dined on lamb chops and crab cakes, beside hot dog and funnel cake carts, the paper said.”…
I go on to read….”MacDill Air Force Base is a driving force behind the Tampa economy. The local Chamber of Commerce estimates $6.7 billion a year flows into the Tampa Bay area from the base. Military contractors and other defense-related companies dot the city. Business deals are often made in the plentiful strip clubs and steakhouses.”
Is it any wonder America is in the crapper and sinking fast? Is it still a mystery as to how we ended up bankrupt? Can there be anybody still out there who can’t figure out how we can start wars, but, never fucking finish them without creating situations where a few hundred million MORE people don’t end up hating our guts?
So, let me lay it out. I DON’T SUPPORT OUR TROOPS! I would have to be fucking nuts to support people who blow up little children and torture people and who are lead by knuckleheads like …”Our best and our Brightest”. I would have to be crazy to support such abject failure and, while I’m on the subject…. Everybody who gets issued a uniform ain’t a fucking hero!
I closed the office monday night and headed home. I stopped on the way to pick up some milk for my morning coffee. The couple checking out in front of me were complaining to the check-out lady that their son, who is a senior in High School doesn’t know how to write his name in cursive. (He is going on 18 and he can’t write his fucking name!) It reminded me of an article I read over the weekend about a committee that has been formed to deal with the fact that so many school districts have stopped teaching cursive writing that banks are worried that, in the future, no one will know how to sign checks and the banks themselves won’t be able to tell a good check from a bad one.
My head is ringing like a bell.
How much more……………
Mrs. Neutron's Garage 
No need for cursive–no need to write checks–none of us will have any money!
You are probably right Anita. At least your state sent nothing but females to Washington and I, for one, see that as a step in the right direction.
So sorry for your head stars Mrs. N!!! You have my best nursing consideration. I often wonder as you have written, when this country will emerge from the outhouse! When is it that someone will get it that our president is no more than the figurehead ? When will we stop wiping shit on our flag, and finally when will we stop pretending that sending our young people to war is an act of patriotism? We as a nation are selling our young people on the stellar attributes of defending their country and refusing to support them when they come home with their limbs blown off. Makes me ill!
How people can see how miserably we treat our veterans and read how more Vietnam vets KILLED THEMSELVES than died in the war…. And STILL send their sons and daughters off to war thinking this is something to be proud of is so far beyond me that I don’t even feel like I belong to the same species as they do.
If one of my children, or, grandchildren were foolish enough to sign up to join this Band of Butchers & Bozos I would shoot them in the leg before they had a chance to get measured for a uniform. I’m 10th generation American and my father was career military. If I wasn’t too damn old I would be looking for a new home. Not that any other country wants us.
all in the name of patriotism. ! We tell our kids that they need to educate themselves, then we tell them we cannot afford it. Then we say ….hey go into the military…they will help pay for your future education……….however my child you may get your education with no arms or legs………not worth the paper the degree is written upon…..so sad for our youth
Can’t disagree with anything you say, but suggest you might consider this. I do Support our Troops, I was one during the VietNam era when I was spat upon in the LA Airport and called to my face, “Baby Killer.” I was one when I was threatened with bodily harm on a quiet street, minding my own business. Because in the days of long hair, us military types stood out like a sore thumb with our short haircuts and good posture.
But as long as there has been a written history, it has been the Leaders who’ve gotten us into such terrible predicaments, not the troops making the sacrifices. We are in Iraq and Afghanistan because of numbskull president who believed the only exceptions presidents were war-time presidents, and by gosh, he was gonna’ be one! We had a dept of defense leader who never outfitted the troops with the equipment and training they needed, but felt no problem with extending tours from 12 to 18 months, and rotating the troops through the zone multiple-times, often 5, 6 even 7 tours on the front. We had a bully VP who gladly traded lives for oil, and changed intelligence reports to claim there were WMD, when the guys on the ground found none. And then these three fools went around cutting funding to the VA hospital systems, claiming these guys didn’t have brain damage, they were just slackers. (see the current Ft. Lewis case)
And this current fool in the spotlight? He suffered from believing his own PR, that he was somehow the supreme being in the military. Obama’s plan was to get us out of Afghanistan in 2009. (this was all reported today). Petraeus lobbied him, then, behind Obama’s back, the far-rght hacks in congress, to suport the surge, putting an additional tens of thousands of troops at risk, just so his ego could be stroked as being a “brilliant” commander.
So I would beseech you to reconsider where the problem lies. It Vietnam, it was Kennedy, Johnson and McNamara, with a little Westmoreland thrown in for good measure. In Korea, it was McArthur. In Grenada, it was Reagan.
Our troops, are having to play with a stacked deck and a poor hand. The boviating leaders have nothing at risk, have never personally placed themselves or their family at risk, and are armchair warriors. The worst ever classification of cowards.
I read your comment twice Barney, to make sure I didn’t misunderstand your position. You and I are of the same vintage. I did not/would not serve in VietNam. You and I not only came to different conclusions at that time, but, to this day, seem to maintain them.
You think you were right to go and should be respected for it. I think I was right to reject the militaries call and should be respected for that.
I was one of the “longhairs” Barney. All the lying, sociopathic assholes you listed as being responsible for all the butchery of our generation had nothing going for them at all until they had you to do their bidding. They didn’t get me. I have spent my life encouraging others never to willingly take part in the foolishness of surrendering your autonomy.
You write; …”So I would beseech you to reconsider where the problem lies.”..
Like I haven’t? Like I didn’t agonize over it at the time? Like I can forget the faces and the voices of dead childhood friends and the funerals of suicides, alcoholics and agent orange induced “cancer of the everything” victims, who fell apart in what should have been their prime?
I see where the problem lies Barney.
You write: …”Our troops, are having to play with a stacked deck and a poor hand. The boviating leaders have nothing at risk, have never personally placed themselves or their family at risk, and are armchair warriors. The worst ever classification of cowards.”…
Barney… Why the fuck would I ever encourage ANYONE to get involved with people like that? Why would I direct children toward them and suggest that they become their willing toys?
You can choose it. I can’t stop you, but, I would be not telling the truth if I said I didn’t want to. I DO NOT support “the troops”. As far as I’m concerned, the moment you decide to become another mans “thing” is the moment you choose to give up the only worthwhile reason for being alive.
We could probably go at this for days Barney. We took different paths. I have never worked for anyone but myself and I’m betting you were a corporate type. There is lots we will never see eye to eye on, I’m sure. But, at our age, who gives a shit. I’m thrilled to wake up in the morning.
You know Barney… You can forget everything I wrote above. Replace it with this, and picture me asking you with a real “wise-ass” look on my face….
Barney…..?
Why the fuck would you listen to Nixon when you could have been listening to John Lennon?
I actually was listening to Lennon, like tens of thousands of my compatriots. Many of us did not come from rich families who bought their precious Johnny a deferment, or were Mormons with rich daddies who bought us trips to France instead of the front lines. Your position is overly simplistic, your assumptions sadly misplaced, no better than typical Fox News prejidicual attacks, something I abhor.
I did what I did with regrets and many second thoughts, like most of us face every day of our lives, but never, ever lost my honor or integrity.
Thanks for the kind words & compliments Barney. You know what I abhor? People who think there is honor in following orders… People who think there is integrity in killing other people because somebody told them to… People who remain so deeply in the dark, after all these years, as to STILL pretend to themselves that there is anybody left with a functioning brain that thinks the Vietnam war as anything but a titanic mistake.
Here is where I’m at Barney. I’m sick of pretending that Vietnam vets are innocent victims that “I” owe some kind of respect to because they couldn’t see what was really going on. I saw the war was a money making scam, sorry you didn’t. Three million Vietnamese are dead and countless more are born profoundly neurologically damaged and misshapen in body to this very day. Since then, in other ridiculous wars for profit, thousands more American boys have been persuaded to go get ground up and spit out because they were told tall tales of how “honorable” it is to go to war and follow orders. People like you tell those tales Barney. People like you who talk of going to church, but, never once admit to yourself the profound hypocrisy of considering yourself a moral Christian while killing people because somebody told you to.
You write that you… “never, ever lost my honor or integrity”
How the fuck can you loose something you so obviously never had?
I’m too damn old to pretend anymore Barney. So are you.