When Ivan Meets GI Joe

Like the late great Hunter S Thompson was fond of saying res ipsa loquitur – it speaks for itself. When Ivan meets GI Joe all bets are off. No decent person wants that hard rain to fall. Now I hate to be flippant and disrespectful, no I do really. People are dying out there, and they are worth more than a few quips from a long gone British pop punk outfit. That said, this is all a joke isn’t it? It is ridiculous that some small meerkat looking bastard who rides bears in his spare time (while posing for a portrait), clearly a joker of the first degree, a man well versed in being Lord of The Edge, is now threatening the west with ‘…consequences greater than any you have faced in history.’ 

… He tried his tricks that Ruskie bear
The United Nations said it’s all fair
He did the radiation he did the chemical plague
But he could not win with a cossack spin

The Clash knew where it was at, there we are, all dancing and having fun, carefree and happy, and then, bam, radiation and ‘chemical plague’. They didn’t quite get it right, after all there has been no dancing for a couple of years, since we have all been softened up by some bioplague from hell, our morale already low. Of course it is easy to dismiss such ramblings as ‘insane’, but to be frank I have come to the conclusion that ‘sane’ categorization is strongly influenced by the amount of money and therefore power that a person has, whilst the poor and marginalized are by virtue of their standing, automatically ‘crazy’ and wrong. I might add to Hunter’s ‘it speaks for itself’, a proviso to ‘sequi pecuniam’, or follow the fucking money, people.

There is a lot of advice that rock and roll as to offer the megalomaniac. From James Taylor, “The plans they made put an end to you..” a little nugget of sad wistfulness for those lost due to the visions and plans of others. He also asks God to help him ‘make a stand’, but what use is that? God is in his bunker and all the fallen Angels are getting outta Dodge. Bowie urges us to not ‘let the sun blast your shadow,’ but to be frank what choice do any of us have in the matter? We don’t get to choose who is taken down by Roger Waters’ ‘two suns in the sunset’. These are the end of the days of Van Morrison’s ‘endless summer’ , and the start of a long cold hard nuclear winter.

I had hoped my son would never live with the threat of nuclear war hanging over him, as it hung over his ancestors in Japan, before a vengeful America made it into cruel, wrong and hellish reality. I asked him what he thought, after falling into a mad panic, in which even I momentarily considered whether I would be behind nuking Putin first to save ourselves. He looked at me, and with tears in his eyes reminded me of our humanity. We are not the kind of people to stoop to even considering it. He is right.

Look at the photograph below. I haven’t shrunk it, really look at it. What do you see? Danger? The enemy? People who should have been considered combatants? Or do you see the eyes of your own child as they scream from wounds that will never heal? To allegedly save a few American soldiers fighting Japanese soldiers by conventional means (no the Japanese did not have nuclear weapons), America was willing to nuke this child, this woman, and many others like them, and damn future generations to radiation related birth defects. I love this country, but damn the people who did this to hell. Never again. Look in his pained eyes, and ask yourself. Do you really have the stomach for this? If you do, please stay far away from me. I have had enough psychopaths in my life. I need to be able to smell humanity on someone to want them anywhere near me. The danger is too real, too intense, too present in this moment of history.

This is not just a fork in the road, this is the whole damn flatware collection in some Walmart in Hell. I can barely handle the seasons. Vlad the Bad is not just ex KGB, he is a flat out Stalinist dictator who has been biding his time for his entire career, waiting for this moment to shine, to show us who he really is, and how Russia never really ditched their previous ideological cancer. I have a soft spot for the old marxists and their devotion to equality, but dictatorship of the proletariat is never temporary. No man will give up almost absolute power once he gains it.

If this is going to be our last day before brinksmanship tips over the edge into flat out hard rain nuclear fallout, then I know how I want to spend it. I want to walk in the sunshine. I want to wander with the person I love most in this world, and drink tea together. I want to look at the flowers, and watch the boats come in on the Bay. I want to stand on the pier and smile as the painted ponies go round and round like the seasons as they turn. The only season ahead of us, I suspect, is a cold hard winter that lasts longer than any winter should. Bob Dylan sang that ‘if another war comes’ he would not be going ‘underground.’ Good for Bob. Me, I have a desperate imperative towards survival, Ill be digging my fox hole as the blast flashes over the Bay and bleaches everything white. There really isn’t any need for any of it is there?

It is just the wars of men, the machinations of the power crazed, the inhumanity of those driven by greed and power, and one small bear riding meerkat with a hard on for war and destruction and suffering.

I am going out. The sun is shining, the day is not yet destroyed and perhaps there is a few more drops of happiness to be wrung out of life. I hope so. After all, in any of this, it is the mothers going to be mourning the life and future stolen from our children, trouble is when we start seeing other people’s children as expendable, when we ‘other’ and justify the unthinkable, then we are all going to lose.

Good luck. Amun…ra…something like that….we are all gonna need to believe in something…I suppose it would be too optimistic to hope the Russian bear is a teddy bear pretending to be tough? I don’t think I would have the guts to see if ole Bruin there blinks first. Anyone got any bear spray…..?