[wordup] Frat Boys Rule The Earth

[Adam Shand]

From: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2002/04/26/notes042602.DTL

Frat Boys Rule The Earth
It's an angry, violent, warmongering world out there right now. 
You just live in it

By Mark Morford, 
SF Gate Columnist Friday, 
April 26, 2002

And all you really have to do is step away for just a short period of
time, break away from the daily news grind and the everyday wars and the
talking-head alarmism and the commonplace unrests and the wagging
fingers of hissing foreign leaders and then come back, and you can see
it clearly.

It dawns on you rather suddenly, especially if you've just taken a
relatively lengthy hiatus/vacation where the pressures of the world all
deliciously fell away and then you calmly return and peel your suntan
and open the paper and scan the wires like you always have and suddenly
it hits you, smacks your anima like a brick: There are no peacemakers in
the world right now.

Crusty macho hawks run the planet like never before in our generation.
Violent money-addled males with far too much power and far too little
perspective are in charge of far too many corporations and lobbies and
governments.

You are appalled. You are saddened. You are blackened at the karmic
level. You realize you don't have nearly enough wine or painkillers or
warm socks for the imminent nuclear winter.

But you are not naive. You are not stupid. You realize this is
essentially the same as it ever was. It's a tragic cliche: Wars and
violence and hatred and injustice and cruelty and angry old men ordering
their tribes to kill each other in the name of oil and money and land
and dogma. Film at 11.

Yet not all is bleak and bitter and Bush, of course. Plenty of good
remains, you tell yourself. It's just your average, bitter,
ultraconservative, anti-everything leadership right now and while it
certainly feels more sinister and savage than usual that's just the way
the cultural pendulum swings, you tell yourself, hopefully, trying to
shrug it off.

But then again, not. Then again, it all seems much worse than it ever
has in your lifetime. You don't want to believe it but you look and look
and cringe and wince and it's all renewed nuclear strategy this and
bloody Israeli conflict that, heightened tensions with Iraq here and
brutal civil war there and far too much hey get your holy hands off me,
Father, just about everywhere.

You can feel it. We're aching to annihilate Iraq. Craving some nuclear
explosions in any of seven newly minted enemies. Actively avoiding the
Middle East conflict like the plague, terrified our alliances could be
imperiled, our oil interests compromised, Bush family friendships
endangered.

World War III will not be two egomaniacal superpowers battling for
supremacy and bragging rights. It will be scattershot and bewildering, a
hundred different battles fought on a hundred different fronts for a
thousand ever-shifting reasons, each and every one twisted and distorted
by regulation GOP spin doctors who somehow convince the bulk of the
populace that it's somehow patriotic to be cavity searched and
fingerprinted and beaten with a stick when you buy groceries.

We are so close. We are on the verge of something very dangerous and
irreversible. You can hear Dick Cheney breathing hard, just aching to
press The Button. The human animal is capable of staggering atrocities
and deadly choices and the thick-necked frat boys in charge right now
are the most darkly capable we've suffered in decades.

No one is preaching peace. No one striving for genuine camaraderie or
balance or compromise. And too few of us seem willing to believe that
9/11 has mutated into a brutish hollow excuse for the Bush
administration to perpetuate a war for oil and to proclaim new enemies
and to chip away at the Constitution and your civil liberties in the
name of increased federal control and fewer dissenting voices.

And you have two choices, given your rather privileged American status
allowing such choices at all: You can either quickly close the paper and
turn off the TV and thank goddess that the world is variegated and
colorful enough that you can live in relative happiness without having
your soul pummeled on a daily basis by people who seemingly have zero
connection to any sort of healthy spiritual reality or perspective. You
can detach. Spin down. Avoid.

Or you can carefully dive back in, try to make sense of it all, get
informed and slog through the macho muck and try to keep your soul from
getting overly tainted, make a valiant attempt to make it though the day
without slapping both hands to your head and screaming and jumping in
front of a speeding ideology.

All the while realizing that if there's one thing the world needs right
now, it's positivism and laughter and good sex and connective energy and
an enlightened populace to counteract the forces that would drag us down
to cesspools of thin-lipped white-knuckle rage. Too simplistic? Too
naive? Hardly. Peace is always much braver and more difficult than war.
Just try it.

(Coming soon to this space: A happy perky column about sunlight and
oceans and swimming with dolphins in Hawaii, in which the world looks
bright and ethereal and perfect and all the above bleakness falls away
and none of it seems to matter and everything I mention above is all
contradicted in nice positive ways. Watch for it.)
Thoughts for the author? Email him.

--
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday
on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never
does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed daily email column
and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters/