Gentle Observations Before the Bombing Starts
Of "Freedom Fries" and similar bullshit

Jonathan Hershfield, DMY Columnist, 3-17-03

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With all the bad headlines these days, it's nice to see the republicans have solved all those problems with health insurance, gun violence and unemployment and can finally devote some time to more fun ways of spending my money. Yeah I pay taxes and I vote and I'm tired of seeing it all go to this so-called "education". Nah, I wanna impress upon my country, in this time of danger and sadness, the need to remove the word "French" from as many menus as we can get our hands on.

Because they, like most of the planet, oppose the US illegally invading Iraq and creating a world-wide chemical/biological/nuclear/good old-fashioned fuckup, the word "French" can no longer be uttered. Now that's special. FREEDOM FRIES? Like if we're lucky, we'll bestow the same beautiful freedom on Iraq we so successfully granted Vietnam? El Salvador? Nicaragua? When is this bullshit going to end? How can we be pissed that countries are opposing a FUCKING WWWAAARRR when we can't come up with legal or even legitimate reasons we're PROMOTING WWWAAARRR?!!!!

And I don't even think french fries is a goddamn French dish anyway!!!!

So let's change all the vernacular to suit the climate. From now on, if I want to call someone a pussy but I really want it to sink in, I'm gonna use the term "bush". Someone'll be wimping out at his/her responsibilities and I'll say, "You're a fuckin' bush." And if I want to call them an asshole, I'll call them an "Asscroft" instead. They'll get the point when they're arrested under the Patriot Act for listening to publicly sponsored radio. Fuckin' Asscrofts. But I won't use the word "dick" anymore because the vice president's taken all the fun out of it. That motherfucker.

And while we're on the subject of how much things suck right now, what the hell is going on with this shift in the left from hating Bush and the world of hurt he's gonna bring about to volunteering that he's gonna get away with it anyway and we should feel bad for him because he may show signs of Korsakoff's syndrome? If I hear one more person tell me how they don't care any more, that they just want it to be over with so they can go back to watching Celebrity Survivor and stop compulsively checking CNN for the latest country count, I'm gonna buy a multi-roll case of duct tape and show them what I think it should be used for.

Is the rejection of international law and dismissal of the concept of sovereignty becoming an inconvenience for you? These people that say, oh the war's gonna happen anyway, let's just hope it goes quick. You know who these people are? At the very least you can be sure that they're people unlikely to be "inconvenienced" by any of the immediate consequences of this war. Fellow patriots in particular, so happy to live in the United Amusement Park of America, the very thought of any of these extravagant roller coasters coming down on a regular basis makes them queasy. Let's just not think about it, they say. Let's be like the president and not have thought processes in the first place. I don't hear this mentality from a lot of Iraqi children with cancer they got from the radiated agriculture, living in style in that one hospital that still has electricity but can't import detergent to sanitize the floors. Ironic since they're the ones that really should be used to it by now. They'd say, can't Bush just get it over with so I can go back to not existing?

The easiest way to test whether a war is absolutely inevitable is to ask, what would happen if we did nothing? And in this case, if we do nothing... ta-dah! Nothing will happen. But then, wait, are we even doing nothing right now? I'm not talking about globetrotting in search of insignificant regimes that know a good bribe when they see one, I'm talking about before the war-drive. Haven't we been bombing Iraq on a regular basis for more than a decade? Aren't we responsible for ensuring the sanctions are never lifted so that the Iraqi people are more preoccupied with finding drinkable water than with organizing an overthrow of a party the CIA helped take power in the first place? So maybe all you defeatists are right. Maybe we should give up, because we've been complicit in this war's existence long before that idiot and his henchmen stole the election.

All these people pissed off at France because we helped them out in WWII and they won't help us start WWIII. Yeah, who needs an ally in France when you don't have Russia and China either? Good thing we can count on the sly diplomacy of defense secretary der Fuhrersfeld. We'll find someone nice to protect us in our time of need. Someone with glowing human rights credentials, like Saudi Arabia or Turkey.

The United States needs to get its priorities straight. We have enough problems teetering on explosion at home. We can't let this government make us so bored that we're willing to accept this war as a diversion. It isn't going to "happen anyway". It's going to "happen because" and that's what we should never accept.