Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

To achieve intended effect, select a random part of video #2, and watch all three simultaneously. Replay as needed.

Ft. Whodunnit?

Senator Joe Lieberman, captain, cook and first mate of the USS Goonsville (the Senate), has made a shocking revelation today: the murderous rampage at Fort Hood was a “homegrown terrorist attack.” Let’s ignore for a moment that if Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had instead been named something like, say, Seung-Hui Cho, honorable monsieur Lieberman would have gotten no traction out of these allegations. Let’s even forget that for the entire six years Maj. Hasan worked at Walter Reid he was in constant conflict with his superiors, consistently received negative psychiatric evaluations, and that his fellow students and teachers called him ‘paranoid’ ‘belligerent’ and ‘schizoid’. Terrorists are pretty often anti-social unhinged psychopaths; it’s not impossible that Maj. Hasan could be both a nut job and a terrorist.
So let’s take Sen. Dopey at his word: Maj. Hasan is a “homegrown terrorist.” What exactly turns an unbalanced American army psychologist from bad couch jockey to violent maniac? The key is from Shoeless Joe’s own mouth: “homegrown.” Maj. Hasan’s work in an American psychiatric hospital did not expose him to extremist ideology: he wasn’t administering to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but traumatized, wounded, PTSD-afflicted infantrymen. Hasan was made a terrorist by the horror of the war, a fact most inconvenient for most of the congress and the White House. Lieberman is perhaps more invested than most in maintaining American denial of the trauma of these wars: he’s one of the most vocal and belligerent of the moldy-minded, mealy-mouthed old farts responsible for sending an ever-increasing number of our youth through the wringer.
Joe’s three-card-monte is pretty clear: imply that Hasan was receiving clandestine instructions from an undiscovered cave in Afghanistan, rather than direct orders from an undisclosed bunker in Wyoming, and slip the ace of spades off the table: these wars are so ugly that it turns the psychiatrists treating our soldiers into terrorists. Maj. Hasan sure could be a homegrown terrorist, but, without the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, without Hasan administering terrible psycho-therapy to the broken shells of twenty-one year olds, does even Joe Lieberdouche believe the slaughter at Fort Hood would’ve happened?
Maj. Hasan, a Palestinian fundamentalist Muslim, gave no ideological defense of his actions. No terrorist group has taken credit for his spree. He cracked, he was a lone gunmen, he is, indeed, a “homegrown terrorist.” The wars have crossed the Atlantic: they don’t only make more suicide bombers in Palestine, more Taliban diehards in Afghanistan, more Sunni extremists in Iraq. Now they are turning American soldiers onto the path of pointless martyrdom too.
Thank God Obama hasn’t given up this war on terror, but merely tried to euphemize it away. We’re gonna need all the experience we can get fighting terrorism for when the two-hundred thousand potential “homegrown terrorists” return to the US from our sickening misadventures in the desert.

- No Innocents

Towering Satire

Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

Q: Why didn't you go to school? A: I just didn't go man....

Just to let all the kids know, this blog, like any good station on a box, has more than one voice squirting on it. So while we may stamp a few fish to the boards over the hours and days, it doesn't mean we don't like them personally. We'll keep you turned to further updates, until then

HAIL COMRADE PELOSI!

Do Not "Support Our Troops"

Let's be clear. Mr. Nidal Hasan's faith is not the most important matter to discuss in trying to make sense of why he killed 13 of his fellow soldiers and wounded 30 others at Ft. Hood. All the patronizing defenses of Islam as "a peaceful religion" that we're hearing are equally as irrelevant as the bigoted screeds against it.

Mr. Hasan brought the war home. His actions cannot be understood outside of the political context in which they occurred. The people (excepting the security guard) who died were not civilians; they were soldiers in a military at war. Unarmed as they were, in their home country, they were no more or less vulnerable than the shitkicking Pakis who gets blown to smithereens by American remote attack drones on regular bases, and whose unnecessary deaths we write off as acceptable collateral damage. (It will interest the reader to know that between 2006 and early 2009, American drone attacks in Pakistan killed 687 civilians and only 14 Al-Qaeda militants.) Hasan's massacre constitutes a form of domestic anti-war terrorism, like that of the Weather Underground, although Hasan was obviously driven by different political and personal motives and to much graver ends. Hasan could have become a conscientious objector. He could have been dishonorably discharged, could have gone to jail as a resister, or could have fled to Canada, while his family went on lecture tours of Ivy League campuses campaigning for the anti-war cause. In a word, he could have been marginalized and forgotten like every other goddam hero who has sacrificed their military career to oppose these wars. Instead, misguided by religious thinking and a great deal of stress and terror, he chose the path of "martyrdom". As a result, we will not forget Hasan, unlike the others. But we will still overlook his message.

On the matter of psychology, we would err to attempt to understand Hasan's crime only as a matter of madness, as we would usually err to describe most massacres in such terms. There are reasons for madness, if not reasons to it. To say that Hasan did what he did because he was mad is to suggest that he might still have been a danger to others had these wars not taken place, were he not a Muslim in the US military after 9-11, if there had been no 9-11, etc. Such a notion is absurd. Hasan was driven to mad slaughter, at least in part, by an inability to make sense of the contradictions between what he was and what he thought he should be, between what he did and what he thought he should do, at this moment in history. That, and a good deal of religion and stress. Hasan may have been cracked, but he cracked for a reason.

Hasan brought home the war, as have the hundreds veterans who have returned physically and mentally mauled by war, who have committed suicide or violent crimes after their return. Only unlike with Mr. Hassan, whose life will be agonizingly scrutinized in media the next few months, we refuse to hear of, see, or think about the them.

We can expect more events like these, not fewer, if we continue America's wars abroad.