I just heard that Vern and Sherry's kid, Glen, got killed in Iraq. Vern and Sherry lived in a log cabin near me on the Coeur de Alene Reservation in Idaho a couple decades ago, back when many white people lived on little plots inside the res. Vern had emphysema, Sherry weighed over 300 pounds, and they had a white malamute dog named Ike. The isolation bothered us older people sometimes, and Vern and I drank a lit of whiskey during the six winters I lived there. Hell it was two miles to the mailbox and seven miles to the main road, there was no electricity, and about the only fun available in winter was drinking, guitar picking and horse logging when the ground froze solid enough. But Glen was a little loner and never seemed to mind.
Anyway, Glen, that skinny kid in the fatigues who loved to fish and hunt and damned near set my cabin on fire once while playing with matches, is dead. Killed by a roadside IED. And I cannot help but think about the road that led him to Baghdad. The one that started with the deepest love of his crippled up ole daddy and ended, right along with his chances in life, right after high school when there was no possibility of college and no work within a hundred miles of the reservation. The kid was quick as a whip, just like his daddy who could draw, do calc in his head and break horses on those days he had enough wind to tackle the job. And like his daddy, Glen was born into one of those corners of America where people are rooted in the earth they were born upon and grow up grounded enough not to care about making it in the big city or imitating what they see on television. They also grow up proud of their country, untroubled by the bitter truths borne by more educated people. Their notion of patriotism has to do with a sense of place and people, blood, kin and whatever higher power rustles the branches great red fir trees, animates both the chipmunk and the mountain lion, and stirs fish to leap in the rivers. Hard as it will be for urban readers to understand, Glen was a stone cold country boy of a kind mostly vanished from America. The real thing. Now he is dead and now the Iraq War has plucked the most sacred thing from the lives of a poor crippled up old man and his huge sad wife crying in their shabby little cabin on the range above the Minneloosa Valley in Idaho. People like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld could give a goddamned what I think. In fact, millions of fellow Americans who support the war could care less what banged up old writer down in Virginia thinks. So I know I am yelling into the wind. But I think there is not one goddamned thing in the entire nation of Iraq worth the life of that boy.
One wonders just how long the slaughter can be sanitized by the state. A quarter million young men and women will eventually return. At least a few of them will speak the truth, though our supine media will not hear them unless it is sweeps week and they need the ratings.
But overall, we can expect more of the same. Thousands more dead, blood and treasure hemorrhaged on desert sand for the satisfaction of an elite cult of aging rich men obsessed with power. Americans seem not too worried. They knowingly reelected the men who orchestrated perhaps the bloodiest public hoodwinking in American history, one spawned in secrecy, hatched behind closed doors and launched upon the world amid a flurry of the most vulgar sort of lies. Lies so huge, so brazen that even now most Americans simply do not believe anyone would have that kind of balls. Dick Cheney has said that: "The American people will continue to support this ongoing effort to establish freedom and democracy in the world."
Or to put it in the parlance of the dwarves of darkness behind the thick oval room curtain: "The dumb fucks will never see through it."
geheim
playing the banjo for glenn now
Herbsparky
I like that.
I do believe the american public is finally waking up to certain things now. Too late for some? Yes...no doubt it's to late for many just like Glen, but it's never too late to finally open one's eyes to tyranny and stand up to it. As the article says....nothng over there is worth the lives of our service men and women. They are but pawns in a game played by elitests and power mongers who must have tiny dicks. The sickness is in all of them...not just our leaders but the leaders of the world in general. The common man needs to stand together in every country and get rid of these fucks once and for all. if they wanna kill one another so damn bad...stick um all in one room and let um! Just leave the rest of us alone for God's sake.
