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Show Anting Alone Page 331 old-timey ail-American dad/mom with the traditional overabundance of testoserone, leadership-charisma, and pederast-sadistic tendencies, who'd whipped it into his/her boys that there's no greater pleasure than pain and no greater glory than guts spilled for Gawd. Hideous enough. Yet, even so, there was an abundance of materials available to all Americans back in the Vietnam era that showed what war was like. Television showed the bullets and bombs every night, even in the cheapest, the sleaziest, the most remote and savage and disgusting rathole of a family living room, even in Kiev, Nebraska. Yes, my friends in Christ, as has been observed dozens of times before, it is almost as if God the Father intended TV specifically for the benefit of those half-animals, like our Spikewell here, who possess neither innate morality nor imagination enough to learn to abhor the shedding of blood and guts without audio-visual aids. Even if the would-be soldier had been too stupid to catch the basic ideological and political lie of that particular Asian war, still, he could see the people getting their entrails spilled in Disneycolor every night at dinnertime. And that should be more than enough to keep any normal, un-bloodthirsty boy out of any war, out of the armed forces forever. Vietnam vets, unlike the vets of any other war before them, cannot claim brash youth or ignorance as excuses for their participation in that particular "police action" that all America has disowned "in hindsight." It was just gory self-indulgence and, yes, cowardice, fear of Canadian culture-shock (the mildest culture shock imaginable), that sent the boys to war. They ask us, my sisters, why we don't love them, and it's because we saw what they did. |