“The word war is far // “Furry” says my boy / about the cat // I think anthrax / and small pox vax // Pour hot water on dried nettles” – Hoa Nguyen, “Up Nursing”
But first, your weekly Vine. Monday was Chapter 32: “The Lewis Twins.” Tuesday was Chapter 33: “One Day They Went Silent.” Today is Chapter 34: “Hank Goes To Visit Kenny, and What He Saw.” Don’t forget to check out the Lazy & Entitled podcast, where we are reading Vine as an audiobook!
Speaking of podcasts, The Line Break was thrilled to welcome Sandra Marchetti to the show this month! Sandra is a great poet and interview, we had a lot of fun talking baseball and how imagery involves all five senses. Here’s the show on Apple, Spotify, and Soundcloud.
This isn’t really going to be a letter. I don’t love that format. Let’s talk about NOFX instead. “Not my president,” as I first came to understand it (around age 14, probably), was a slogan in reaction to George W. Bush and the stolen 2000 election. Old heads will probably correct me—pretty sure they made “not my president” stickers for the Reagan admin—but the way I understood it, “not my president” was a statement made in powerlessness. Gore won the popular vote, the Florida recount was shady, a bunch of Brooks Brothers-wearing preppy losers who would go on to work in the Trump administration rioted, and the most unqualified dipshit possible got the presidency.
Wasn’t shit I could do about it, wasn’t shit Fat Mike could do about it, either. Except write “Franco Un-American.”
I never had a single positive feeling towards George W. Bush, but I was 13 when I found out who he was. 13 is a cool age because if you’re middle class and white, you might still have some illusions about things like “respecting elected officials” and “loving the country you live in,” but you’re probably about to learn that you either shouldn’t do those things, or, if you’re gonna do those things, it should be way more conditional that you previously thought.
The biggest thing I feel when war breaks out: I really fuckin hate war, dudes.
Add the particular brand of racist jingoism that infects every mainstream politician and cable news host in the United States, add the flat denial of obvious hypocrisies and conflicts of interest, and I get fuckin bummed out, dudes.
War is a wonderful time for losing respect for people. You might think, “surely those people who make six figures to write for the New York Times or Washington Post or The Atlantic are peace-loving and anti-racist,” but you would be wrong for thinking that. You might even think, “the people who go to my church, they’re sure nice, I bet they’re not hurling anti-Muslim slurs and calling human beings ‘animals,’” but no, you would be wrong for thinking that. You might think, “MSNBC is supposed to be the reasonable one, surely they wouldn’t resort to infantile, Bush-era narratives of good vs. evil and forcing every single Muslim person they deign to look at to denounce Hamas before speaking but never once asking anyone else to denounce a bloodthirsty racist like Nethanyahu,” but you’d be wrong to think that—MSNBC gave that smug, condescending, soulless woman who used to be Joe Biden’s press secretary a show. You might think, “Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen certainly will not say the US can afford to fund two wars, we don’t even have universal healthcare,” but you’d be wrong to think that.
I’m not here to pick sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict, I am an idiot USian with a blog. Sure, apartheid is wrong, occupation is wrong, settler colonialism is wrong, and a riot is the language of the unheard—but enough about the country I live in.
What is really infuriating, hypothetical young reader, and what will continue to be infuriating for the rest of your life, is how many people were salivating for this. Not Israelis, not Palestinians, but politicians and pundits, neighbors and family and friends. Wannabe posers who cosplay and eat MREs for fun. Burger-chomping golfers who don’t feel safe if their car is smaller than a blitzkrieg tank but have Bible passages memorized. People who see children dying and say—out loud—that they deserved it.
Those people are literally all around you, right now.
I remember being 15, on the brink of the invasion of Iraq, a war I knew was stupid, unjustified, motivated by greed, and destined to cause untold suffering. I felt angry, alone, insane, like a bad Christian or bad citizen, like I couldn’t trust what nightmarish thoughts lurked in people who I had known my whole life. I watched these people cheer the destruction of cities, and eventually, I eventually watched other people shrug off the indiscriminate bombing of weddings because the liberal news said it was okay.
War sucks.
Bummer this week, huh? Real bummer stuff! I’m sad. Sorry to make your email sad. Wanna watch Jesse and Tim from Operation Ivy reunite in February 2022 and sing about the one thing we can all depend on? Go ahead, you’ve earned it.
Like when I was 15, I’m gonna go play guitar. Sound system, bring us back home.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris