Sick. Sick sick and more sick.

Here's the point: too sick to do my own research. To any and all available netmonkeys who still bother to show up here:

Who's the guy who wrote that book about his interviews with Osama bin Laden? I seem to recall it's titled something like "Talking to Osama." Along those lines, anyway.

I heard him talking about the book on the radio (late last year, I suspect); the salient point o the book was that in it, bin Laden specifically states that al Qaeda's long-term goal was to draw the United States into a endless guerrilla war in Afghanistan, where the mujahedeen could whip up on our military and break us the way they broke the Soviets.

This is pertinent because Our Glorious Bush cleverly avoided this trap (well, almost), and then -- perhaps out of a sort of professional courtesy, one nutjob fanatic to another -- created an all-new, improved version of Afghanistan out of a previously stable state (this being Iraq). Where we promptly locked outselves into an endless guerrilla war that is breaking our military, and our republic's will to fight.

I bring this up because it suddenly occurred to me that the Bush Administration could actually be correct (gods forbid!) in one thing: that the war in Iraq actually HAS been the reason there have been no further attacks here in the continental US. They haven't attacked us because they don't need to -- we're already doing exactly what they WANT.

This would be the al Qaeda version of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Which means that if we do pull out, there really IS an increased chance of a new attack. It also means that as long as we stay in, we're automatically losing. No matter how many people we kill. Because keeping us in is exactly bin Laden's strategic objective. Which Bush is intent on doing, which (from my limited political perspective) sounds a hell of a lot like giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Does anyone out there know the phrase "monkey trap"?

Well, we're the fucking monkey.

Kurt Vonnegut died last night.

God damn it.

Never met him. Never wrote to him. The year I was born, he was writing his fourth novel. When it was published the next year, it sold 500 copies. It was called CAT'S CRADLE.

I don't feel bad for him. I feel bad for me. I feel like I've lost family.



The last lines of "Requiem," the final poem of his last book:


When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

"It is done."

People did not like it here.






God damn it.