Walking by the television on my way upstairs, I caught an address by a representative from the Democratic party, right after the state of the union. She said that the Democratic party wanted to keep the nation's military "best equipped for peace". Now, this is one of an infinity of statements that makes me really wonder what's behind politicians' reasoning, because frankly, I don't see how the words "military" and "peace" even go together at all.
I suppose I understand what she's talking about, as paradoxical as that sentence is. Probably something along the lines of "peacekeeping forces" which is one of those neoteric euphemisms we've invented to abbreviate the much clumsier "big, husky, armed men that shoot suspicious civilians and run over children with tanks". Sure, order needs to be kept--there's always at least one wacko in a city willing to strap TNT to his chest and run screaming into a toy store--but it's gone to painfully expensive (I think the Democratic representative said 200 something billion dollars) ends just because we have a bad habit of interfering. Police force? Sure. Stealth bombers and napalm? Maybe we shouldn't get involved if we're just going to end up rendering a couple hundred square miles of land arid and inhospitable for the next 20 years.
You know, Americans used to be cool, according to my History textbook (which contains so many newly wrought Americanisms which I mistake for typos, such as "advisers", "blond", or "refrigerator"), like, around after WW1. After inhaling all that mustard gas and having their ribs repeatedly splintered by leaden projectiles, a lot of Americans realized a really blatantly obvious fact: war sucks ass. People die, economies get fucked up, and angry Germans try to stab you. So these Isolationists, as they were called, thought it was a great idea to keep the hell out of foreign wars that have nothing to do with America. Unfortunately, president Roosevelt took office, and despite the ban on selling arms to foreign warring nations, he decided to take China's side when Japan started invading Manchuria, and magically repealed the act that he passed, somehow authorizing the sale of guns and knives and flashy, explosive objects to the Chinese, so their country could grow up to be just like America: murderous and warlike, kind of like the Vikings, or those Romans, who loved those gladiators so much. I think that my idea here is that it only takes one asshole to be elected to propagandistically change a country's stance (or the majority of the country's stance, which is enough for an election) in world affairs. People will follow anyone with an American flag pen and a good speech writer (George Bush is not one of these people, but is followed anyway--I guess--because he's such a cute good ol' boy). Think Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
And while I'm tirading on about the world I can't change, I ought to mention choir. For the past week or so, we've been reviewing such simple concepts as the fucking names and values of notes. It pisses me off. I'm forced to sit there and move my hand around like a down syndrome child (Mr.Raddin's teaching us to conduct, for some unfathomable reason) and count to four over and over again. How many beats is a whole note? As many beats as it takes to render you unconscious. I'm sorry. I'm usually faithfully on Mr.Raddin's side on matters like this, but I blame this whole atrocious affair on him.
Pathetically, a lot of the guys in the choir--you know the ones I'm talking about, the jerkoffs that stand around for their fine arts credit and care little about music--can not identify an eigth note, which seems to make these constant rhythmic chants almost necessary, until you realize that since those people suck and will never change in the first place, teaching them to count will not benefit our choir as a whole at all. In fact, it will help to destroy it. Mr.Raddin said we'd start rehearsing our new song a week ago. Instead, he had this infernal epiphany that we should review what he's taught us all for the past TWO YEARS, and not only that, what I've been taught for the past SIX. More than that. We did this in elementary school.
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