HW: Death of a Dick

It seems like just last week we finally fucking buried John McCain's stinking corpse and it's already time for another 24/7, month long, imperial funeral marathon. Since the very second former president and well known war criminal George HW Bush finally dropped dead (What was he, like 900?), every channel from CNN to Nickelodeon has been surgically attached to his decomposing dick. "Oh, what a great man!" "What an American hero!" "His breath smelled like roses and his jizz tasted like mayonnaise!" Judging by the coverage, you would have thought the man cured fucking cancer rather than twiddling his thumbs while a whole generation of queer people died of a plague he refused to even address so he could keep cutting checks from those Millennarian fag-bashers in the Christian Right, OH WHAT A HERO!...

We're all told how humble our 41st president was, yet his obnoxiously opulent funeral put some of the African dictators he bankrolled to shame with all the subtlety of a goddamn Master P video. Pre-pubescent quires and blazing guns and fluttering doves and balling bitches. I'm surprised they didn't drag his gilded casket away behind a solid gold tank. I've seen North Korean missile parades with more modesty. The bastard even had some saccharine Josh Groban knock-off warbling philosophic about his Greek godlike achievements- "He swung his golden sword, and spilt blood for our lord, and when he unsheathed his dong, his interns swore it twas a gourd..." I would have burst out laughing if I didn't have to swallow a mouthful of vomit.

We're all told about HW's hallowed career as a death defying war hero. Few people mention however that our heroic flyboy strafed two life boats escaping the wreckage of his latest target in the South Pacific in clear violation of international law. If Tojo had managed to get the upper hand on our burgeoning American war machine, it would have been "war heroes" like old HW standing trial at Nuremberg. Greatest Generation my ass. The core philosophy of our much vaunted "Greatest Generation" was best summed up by those would-be-war-heroes in the Waffen-SS, "We were just following orders!...", yeah, now drink yourself stupid in suburban purgatory and cheer on the National Guard while they shoot your long-haired kids for refusing to do the same.

And of coarse, we're all told about George Bush, the great and humble statesman, who oversaw the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War. They swiftly glaze over his "victories" in Panama and Iraq without delving into the towering horrors those conflicts entailed. They can't really even be accurately described as wars. Wars require two sides. They were more like carefully staged massacres, choreographed bloodbaths, the thorough annihilation of two defenseless third world countries by the last superpower standing. All while the rest of the world watched in despair at what could easily become their fate if they dared to cross the only bully on the block.

After provoking the Panamanian National Guard into retaliation with months of Marine Corpse hooliganism along the border of the still illegally American Panama Canal Zone, our newly elected fearless leader unleashed all out hell on the tiny Central American nation, supposedly with the sole intention of taking out his former lackey, a coke smuggling rapist named Manuel Noriega. Apparently this task necessitated burning the nations poorest barrio, El Chorrillo, too the fucking ground, displacing some 20,000 people, and filling mass graves with nearly 3,000 civilian bodies. The country never recovered. When asked if all this carnage was really necessary just to nab a tin-pot money launderer who use to be on his CIA's payroll, that sweet gentle statesman responded that every human life was precious but not precious enough to give up the opportunity to prove he wasn't a wimp. Compared to Iraq, however, Panama got off easy.

The first Gulf War began much the way Panama did, with a formerly allied tyrant, Saddam Hussein, goaded into an attack over a highly disputed territory. Hussein only invaded Kuwait after receiving several green lights to do so by high-ranking members of Bush's staff. When HW called for blood atonement for the subsequent invasion, Saddam was utterly stupefied by his former chum's total about face and made several desperate attempts to reach out and make some kind of face-saving peace deal. But it was already too late, HW's geostrategic Grand Guignol show of post-Cold War power was already underway.

A fierce rain of bombs was unleashed upon the desert nation and its people, obliterating power plants, radio stations, nuclear reactors, oil refineries, factories producing toxic chemicals, bridges clogged with civilian traffic, and pretty much everything and anything else that fucking moved. A civilian bunker miles from anything of strategic importance was blown to smithereens, killing 408 cowering people inside, most of them women and children. Iraqi troops were slaughtered in cold blood after waving the white flag of defeat, tens of thousands more were roasted alive retreating on the infamous Highway of Death where 60 miles of fleeing soldiers were boxed in and then systematically annihilated by a swarm of American bombers so thick that it only cleared up after several near collisions. More Iraqi GI's were buried alive in their bunkers by US Army bulldozers and shot if they tried to escape.

The shear scale and variety of sadistic torments over the span of just a few months remains baffling. What's all the more baffling is that the majority of these acts of barbaric ultra-violence occurred after Iraq had already been roundly routed and defeated. 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were murdered in total. Over 3,000 civilians were killed by the initial bombing but within a couple years the near complete devastation of the nation's once modern infrastructure caused the untimely deaths of another couple hundred-thousand. By the end of the decade that number had creeped up into the millions as a result of the crippling sanctions started by our last true warrior president, all while his beloved colleagues in the American mass media covered and covered up the massacre with the Vaseline gloss of a Hollywood blockbuster.

The closest thing to a reason for this devastating carnage given by Bush was that it was necessary to usher in a new era of American dominance, a single polar world in which one country called the shots. Other nations could be built like the US dictatorships in Panama and Iraq, and they could just as easily be ground into dust. The lord giveth and the lord taketh away. The mammoth blood baths of HW marked the birth of the neoconservative era of American super-imperialism, or as Bush put it, "a new world order". In short, the man destroyed two entire nations in four years because he could. There was no more Soviet adversary to check his influence. He murdered all those people to send a message. A decade later on September 11, 2001, the Middle East gave its response in a manner cruel enough for even a simpleton like Bush's son to understand. That's the true legacy of the old bastard, or at least it should be. Osama Bin Laden didn't start the War on Terror, his fellow monster and former sponsor George HW Bush did. In a parallel universe, Bush's long life would have been ended by a shot in the dark from a Salafi Seal Team 6 and Bin Laden would have died in a palace, surrounded by loved ones. Strange the way things work out.

Beware of heroes, dearest motherfuckers. They have an uncanny tendency to be villains with better luck and sharper PR campaigns. HW was a dick. The fact that he's dead doesn't change that.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

* We Appreciate Power by Grimes
* Cult of Personality by Living Colour
* Leave Him Now by Cloud Nothings
* Family Man by Nitzer Ebb
* Danny Nedelko by IDLES
* N.W.O. by Ministry
* Ironic by Alanis Morissette
* What Do I Get? by Buzzcocks



Dedicated in loving memory to Pete Shelley, a man who only bombed our ears with beautiful noise, and who's death was overshadowed by the death of a dick. Godspeed my brother. The next pint's on Christ.