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Show Acting Alone Page 333 zits and glasses. Or, fastidiousness failing us, let us simply outgrow the military man the same way we outgrew our neighborhood friends who now work in gas stations, or who own the best darn vacuum cleaner sales-service-repair center in the whole darn mall. Career men, which is what our Spikey, our walking object lesson, originally intended to be, should be the first to be outcast. Sam looked into Spikey's beady eyes now, and the imaginary sermon was imaginarily interrupted by these imaginary words, voided into this close refectory air which Bopp/Wamsutter/Edwine unfortunately shared: But, Mr. Chaplain, sir, my dad and my Missouri-Synod Lutheran Pastor, they both says that the best detergent for all-out nuke-you-ler war is a strong conventional army: and that means you gotta have soldiers out your butt. That may be true, my son. But that doesn't mean fully developed Christian adults have to associate with soldiers or respect their civil rights or consider them anything more than bloodworms with legs. I mean, just because they save our neighborhoods from roving bands of dogs, do we associate with or respect garbage men? Brute logic had backed the composite preacher into sarcasm's corner, and Sam's finger-worm moved another centimeter toward the play button. With a single flick of that self-animated digit he would forsake all the good influence of old What' sername. Sam tried to stay that finger by telling himself that it wasn't the archetypal military man, nor even Shanny with her cute bod and her Flag Flake-smelling hostage brooch foremost on his mind at this moment, but rather poor dead Dr. Abraham; and, like his hero |