Ghost Troop Home Page    April Fools Part 4

 

December 31, Happy Birthday to Barbara Phillips, Wall Street Journal

Yo Barb(ie)!  Happy Birthday!!!  Hey, just tugging affectionately with the Barbie bit, but it seems like I remember you writing something reflective enough for me and mindless enough for your Wall Street readers at the same time based on Barbie’s twenty-fifth birthday.  That’s some accomplishment, darlin’, and that’s why I’m writing you, today ‘cause I only consort with the best when I have my way about it!

Hey, you remember when Major Daniels and I came to visit you in New York while were in town for Geraldo to smack the hell out of the Army generals for condoning institutional sexual harassment?  (Yeah, I know, things are still the same)  I remember that you said you’d take us down to a real deli for dinner...  I asked you where your car was and you said you didn’t know how to drive!  Shucks, you were the first person my age (older by a week!) I’d met since I was twenty who didn’t know how to drive!  Strange breed, you New York girls, kinda sui generic – and I like that.  Anyhow, we took the subway to the deli I tried to show off for you by bragging that I could break a brick with either hand (when the truth is that back then I could only do it with my right hand) and worse, by talking Spanish to the Mexican gal who was waiting on us for a couple of minutes.  Yep, it was impressive, especially when it turned out that the gal serving the pastrami was Punjabi or some such thing!  Heck, I learned a lesson about New York diversity that will never leave me:  When you’re in the Big Apple, you don’t know which word is a food and which word is a nationality!  [Editor’s emphasis, in all cases]

I guess I’m just simple, but you told me I was cute once – I remember it if you don’t.  Yep, you’ve said it before when you were going off to be bored with some dumbass Yankee boyfriend some weekend when I called from Texas, and I told you I’d ride up there and smack him one and take you out on the town myself, but you said that was bad manners and mama taught me not to argue with a lady, Miss Phillips.  Must have been five or six years ago…  I always think of you New Years Eve, Barb.  You’re lucky your birthday isn’t January 9th like Richard Nixon and me!

You know, I think I’ve got me a pretty good story going in April Fools, Captain May, the collection of my writings since April 1, 2003 (it’s a bit over six hundred pages – but that’s draft form, mind you)  I’m thinking about the subtitle a weapon of mass deductionwhaddaya think?

It all started out with me crying on my living room floor April 4th (US date) because I knew the boys were catching hell in Baghdad, and the 3/7 Cavalry was getting killed at the airport.  I wished I was there to save my comrades – that’s what made me volunteer for Desert Storm, after all, and it’s natural for Army officers; in the pit of my stomach though, I was glad as hell that I wasn’t.  I’ll bet you that every man at the airport that night wishes he had been where I was, too!

I waited for the American president and the American media to act right, but they didn’t act at all – and that was dead wrong.  Barb, I knew that this meant we weren’t America any more, and I made a solitary protest and collection for two weeks (40 hours) for the widows and orphans of the US war dead at my old college.  Barb, they totally dissed my comrades – not as in disrespected, but as in disregarded.  The little shits ponied up twenty dollars for the kids who had gone to serve their country, as I did when I was their age – and one day when my back was turned one of them stole five dollars out of the donation bucket.  They laughed with glee because they were sure that Bush had assassinated Al Jazeera in Baghdad.  They bragged that America could kill anyone it wanted, anywhere it wanted, and that presidential assassinations were the way to go.  I sat and heard the Nazi party taking root in the same college where I’d studied Socrates, and it disturbed me, so I rose to give them a word of warning.

“Do you know what I think?”  I asked, calmly?

“No, sir, Captain May” (I’ve taught them to use manners) “what do you think?”

I think that people like me are telling people like you what to think, and if I were you I’d be scared as hell of that.”

Then I played a sad little tune on my guitar for Al Jazeera and asked for collections, with my knuckles glaring in their direction and keeping their pale asses in their chairs.  None of them cared any more about Al-Jazeera than they did for American GI’s, though.  They just listened glumly until I was done, then I left them grumbling like the cowards they are.  They’re our next generation of professionals – they are the seed whence sprang this generation of Judas Journalists.

That’s how it started out in April.  And what has gone on in between is epic.  I rode a bike a thousand miles to Ft. Stewart, along the way evading a gang of robbers, shutting a robber with a stare and four words, walking across the Mississippi River on a six-inch rail, then topping it off with a showdown with a Green Beret colonel at Ft. Stewart.  The showdown was surreal:  It turned into a pleasant warrior-to-warrior talk about the psychology and techniques of homicide (armed and unarmed), Zen, Old Testament war techniques and the like.  Charming man, Colonel Dennington – he felt like family, and I miss him.  He did me a big favor just before I left him:  He told me not to have survivor’s guilt when the story of Baghdad breaks and the details hit home.

I came back to Houston thinking that what I’d already done was plenty enough for one book, and that I’d just give the proceeds away and get back to teaching martial arts and learning guitar, then spruce up on my Greek a while, and quit practicing stick weapons so much.

Then in July all Hell broke loose!

The Times started heating up on Bush, Weasely Clark started heating up on Bush, and sister, I started heating up on Bush!  I zapped him with an op-ed July 8.  That was fun!  Then it got really fun when Dr. Kelly died strangely in the UK, July 18.  Right about at that time everyone else ducked for cover (especially little Thommy Shanker, the NYT boy who covers the Pentagon), and not a one of them thought to tell me, a source, that maybe I should watch my step.  I’m going to start teaching journalists a course on ethics, Barb, with a six-foot rattan staff in my hands for anyone who starts drooping.  One nod means one knock, a fair enough pact, in light of what has happened, wouldn’t you say?  Don’t you worry though, Barb, ‘cause you’re the teacher’s pet if I get my fantasy class!

Good thing I had my own friends, Barb, who told me to duck my bold but brainless skull.  I guess I’ve learned not to trust the media.  You know what, I think a lot of people are learning not to trust the media – or soon will.  Wanna know a joke:  The longer the media covers for George, the more credibility (i.e., market) they lose for it!  I named the whole fiasco perfectly before we even reached Baghdad when I called it quicksand in my April Fools day op-ed (which the Houston Chronicle published April 3).

Hey, thanks for talking with me in the summer, when all the other reporters were dodging left and right not to talk to me!  And thanks for keeping our talk confidential – I knew you would respect your source!  I’ve always been a WSJ fan, Barb, since I started writing for you back in the 90’s.  I’ve always believed that what the WSJ said was so true that the truth itself was a lie by comparison – and that’s the standard toward which all the others strive but cannot attain.  I’m glad you guys have been in my loop since we talked, Barb!

I’ve been in the open with my communications all the way – the First Amendment is my best friend.  You might pass it along to the New York crowd that’s backbiting me (per Shanker letter) that I’m fighting the InfoWar Alamo in Texas!  Damn, don’t anyone but me want to be Davy Crockett?  I haven’t killed a bear yet, but I back-handed a charging Rott with a six-foot staff the other day.  He came in snarling like a Japanese Zero and I gave him one for the Arizona, by God.  But I’ll say this for him, he kept snarling like a bull as he ran in retreat as fast as he’d run in attack!  He had heart – and common sense.  I respected that Rott because he knew when to back down.  Do you think our president could be compared to that Rott, Barb?  Naw, the Rott had more sense.

All I’ve got in my Alamo is an underground army of amplifiers – because that’s what my Gentle Readers are.  The Constitutional right to write is the best defense I’ve got.  (I got knocked back all the way to habeas corpus when Bush and Blair whacked a few folks back in July, but that’s another story, and it’s in the July Letters.

Who would have thought that so many of my little prophecies would have come true?  Read the published essays (the unpublished are even better, though) and you’ll see what I mean.  I called it right all the way along, Barb, while the WSJ (at least according to Frank Michel at the Houston Chronicle) was already blowing the bugle for the profiteering to come.  Shucks, does anything ever change?  We’re just trying to annex the Middle East for oil the way we annexed some stuff from the Spaniards by war (Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba) or most of the American west from Mexico by war.  It’s an imperial push, clear and simple, but realizing that your own country is just another country in the way it behaves is hard to do – especially if you’re a sawed-off C student from Yale whose family propped him up until he could hoax his way to success.  The secret of my success as a predictor is that the reality I was working with was so thoroughly veiled from the public and vague to the president!  I realized from April Fools Day that the media was prostituted for the duration of the war; that’s why I made sure to write in the first graph of my April Fools op-ed that the media was embedded, when I compared our current attack to the doomed German offensive of ’41 (after talking to an old prof of mine who had commanded panzers for the Germans).

I spent the summer months in a bunker because I thought I was a priority InfoWar target until the prez went to Ft. Stewart and gave them a presidential unit citation like Judas giving a kiss.  I hope to God that after this treason outs the 3rd Infantry Division will remove the presidential citation and Congress will replace it with a Congressional citation – George W. Bush has no right to decorate any military man or woman for anything.  He has shamed the office of commander in chief.

Well, I’m out now, just hoping that my prose will keep me on the lips of the muses (and you’re one) while it’s all going on and (if I’m not around) after it’s over.  You should have smiled on my poetry more, Miss Barbara – I’ll bet there are jewels in my stuff since those days that you’d like.

There’s another area of predictions where I’m on target (and it sucks, like all the rest of my predictions).  I started being in fear for my life when I knew that the media was working for the White House instead of America after the Battle of Baghdad – and that I would stand up to them, for America, no matter what it cost me.  I figured it would mean death, but that I was going to die anyway, and that it wasn’t worth crawling to have to endure old age.  Well, now the public is feeling the same way.  We just got told we might get bombed Christmas, but that we should have a happy holiday.  Times square is the most conspicuous place in the world every New Years Eve, and English bookies are taking bets on whether it will be bombed tonight.  It’s New Years Eve and we have snipers posted on buildings throughout the country.  It looks like everyone will soon be as paranoid as I was.  I’m starting to think that maybe I wasn’t so paranoid, after all.

 

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