Desert Storm

“Horus thereupon did battle with Set…”
—Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, R.T. Rundle Clark 

I tell ya, the idiocy makes my widow’s peak tingle. The much-vaunted Arab Spring is barreling toward a Nuclear Winter and America, in typical imperialist fashion, is looking to hasten a mushroom cloud by claiming they want to stop it.

The devil in me loves conflict and moral crusades are my food and drink. Individualists thrive when idealists do battle. As long as the war is kept from my doorstep, I’m as giddy as a pre-teen with his first Playboy. How can I be so callous, you ask, when innocent civilians are doing the Sarin Shake in Syria and Egyptian protestors are being shot? Because I recognize these things as the growing pains of the universe; an integral part of its ancient, thrilling, continuous dance.

Ever since life bubbled in the muck, it’s been struggling to survive. This struggle is gruesome and cruel and cannot be stopped. It is the inevitable entropy of vital existence. Cooperation is the balancing act, not the negation. The keys to success in this bellum omnium contra omnes are strength and intelligence. And one of the tasks of intelligence is to determine when violence should be avoided, when it should be undertaken, and when it should be lessened or increased.

Get used to it.

Right now the Middle East is a mess—that can’t be helped—and US involvement will only make it worse. Precision bombing is a misnomer and if US boots won’t be touching the ground, as Secretary Facelift and Bush III assure us they won’t, our intervention in Syria would amount to nothing more than a feeble “Please don’t” in the face of a schoolyard bully with a balled up fist holding a scrawny kid off the ground. A scrawny kid who, let’s be honest, would probably stab us with a sharp stick if he had the chance.

Why are chemical weapons such a big deal anyway? Last time I checked, bunker busters and Mark 77s kill people just the same as nerve agents do. What, is watching your skin boil really better than watching it vibrate?

I say we send McCain over there with an M-60 and a case of Ensure and see what he’s made of. I bet he’ll have more trouble getting a war boner when enemy rifles are taking potshots at his crusty, malevolent skull instead of appearing as statistics in a Senate briefing.

Moving our discussion southwest, Egypt is also in an uproar. Once he was in office, the democratically elected Mohammed Morsi changed the rules to give himself more power. The people protested, the military backed them up, and now the former President is under house arrest and crying in his, well, not beer—how ‘bout plum juice. Sic semper tyrannis novitatis. (Man, I miss the days when dictators went out with some style.)

Yet ay, here’s the rub: Morsi is a big kahuna in the Muslim Brotherhood and he has his supporters. They’re protesting, but placards are no match for bullets. We’ll see how long it takes for fight to give way to flight. Firmly rooted, the head of the military, General Al-Sisi, took to television a few weeks ago to assure the Egyptian people that he would step down the moment new elections concluded. I think that line’s been used before.

Then again, maybe he’s telling the truth. Either way, we should have nothing to say about it over here in ‘merica. The greatest samurai is the one who lets his sword rust in its scabbard. We’ve got enough domestic shit to worry about without getting involved in every war in the cosmos, especially ones that have nothing to do with us. Except some of us can’t help it. Some of us can’t accept the nature of things and waste our lives vying for an ethereal, eternal peace.

For President Obama, bombing Syria is a matter of saving face. He shot his mouth off with that red line foolishness and now he can’t appear weak. I think McCain just wants to leave a mark before he dies. The other ‘yeas’ will say so for many reasons: power, votes, sadism, stupidity, money, loyalty, fear, all of the above. We can hope there aren’t enough of them, but history is not on our side.

So it goes. This too is part of the nature of things. Run wild all you utopians and idealists, you humanitarians and politicians: argue, cajole, debate, lob explosives and opinions and pretend it will make a difference. It’s what you’re supposed to do. Rebels, dictators, and soldiers: keep fighting. It’s your duty. The big-hearts and the thickheads can sit back and cry or stand up and shout all they want. Meanwhile, “I adjust my monocle from my box in the amphitheatre of my skull and applaud the Show.”