wormwood under the ice cream

And the name of that star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood, signifies the infernal falsity from which their self-derived intelligence is derived, and by which all the truths of the Word are falsified. – Emmanuel Swedenborg. The Apocalypse revealed

Robert Kagan is a bloody old soul, one of war’s puppet intellectuals – not The war, not the war in Iraq, but war as a system, the War system in which we live – and as such, he sometimes speaks the truth. Ask Belzebuub about the anatomy of the fly, and ask Kagan about the tendency of Americans to … well, not fight so much as rain destruction down on their supposed enemies. His column about the Republicans, the Dems, and the American love of war – or, rather, War’s love of America – is right on target:

“In this respect, there is even less debate over the general principles of American foreign policy than during the Vietnam era. In those days, opponents of the war insisted that not just President Richard Nixon was rotten but that the "system" was rotten. They did not just reject the Vietnam War, they rejected the whole containment strategy of Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, which, they rightly claimed, helped produce the intervention in the first place. They rejected the idea that the United States could be a benevolent force in the world.

Today Democrats insist that the United States will be such a force as soon as George W. Bush leaves office. Although they pretend they have a fundamental doctrinal dispute with the Bush administration, their recommendations are less far-reaching. They argue that the United States should generally try to be nicer, employ more "soft power" and be more effective when it employs "hard power." That may be good advice, but it hardly qualifies as an alternative doctrine.
Many around the world will thrill at the defeat of Republicans next week. They should enjoy the moment while they can. When the smoke clears, they will find themselves dealing with much the same America, with all its virtues and all its flaws.”

War’s puppet here can display his tone of preening certainty because he knows the props and devises of court society. It is a society surrounded, on every side, by the prosperity brought on by war system. The harms are all out in the beyond, which is a place tv cameras roam for the odd freak footage.
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Which brings me to what I was going to write in this post, and which I just wrote, part of, to our far flung correspondent, Mr. T. in NYC. A little personal reminiscence from the fumes of last night:

… Last night, I went to see Maidstone, that rarely seen Norman Mailer film. Which was great - it was funny, Mailer was in his prime asshole decade, the misogyny was over the top, and the way he kept taking the piss out of people, just begging for some hitback, and the end of the film, which is famous, lived up to its sheer... weirdness. Rip Torn tries to kill Mailer in front of his family with a hammer. Or at least flails away at him, drawing some blood and much wrestling – with Mailer sincerely trying to save his head. I saw this with my friend A., who doesn’t love Mailer – but I do. I long for that spirit to be set lose in the U.S. again. That is, the spirit of testing oneself, instead of immediately responding to vulnerability by seeking absolute cures: gated communities, ever more technically advanced militaries, ever fewer rights, ever creeping encroachments on what we do by the Polizei.

And then I went to the continental club and listened to James McMurtry. Anyway, dancing and hopping away to McMurtry, and seeing the usual UT undergrads there, so damn and briefly happy, such plausible lovely girls, such awkward guys, and the stuffed milk fed sports bodies raising their beers every time McMurtry mentioned the joy of shooting guns, drinking beer, or the state of his hardon, I started thinking about the ice cream we live in and how I just fail to enjoy it - in fact, under all that ice cream, I feel there is an apocalypse, that the structures are falling in very, very slow motion. And so all our personal agonies all seem to dissolve in sugars – but the sugars, I think, really mirror the agonies, they don’t destroy them. They will crystalize later - or so some daemon tells me.

And I wondered if this is just because I'm mildly deranged.

And then I got home and decided that it didn't matter, since the apocalypse under the ice cream is my subject, God fuckin' damn it.