The hits just keep on coming for Combat! blog. I am not back in Montana as originally planned, having rerouted myself to Des Moines to see to a family hospice situation. I have no idea how long it will last or how often I will post during whatever length of time that is, so why don’t you read Camus in the meantime? Or Ecclesiastes. Either way, all roads lead to Rome.

Everything that rises must converge, as the lady says, and after nearly two weeks on the beast coast, Combat! blog must rise into the air along with its breakfast and converge on Missoula. Never mind that one thing can’t really converge; the point is that it’s been an awesome two weeks from the perspectives of camaraderie and half-assing stuff, and tomorrow I will wake up in my apartment. Will everything be exactly as it was before? Never. Will the blog be exactly as it was before? Yeah, probably. Or maybe it’ll be all recipes and cat videos. You just don’t know. Read this interview with Chuck Klosterman while you wait to find out.

So we have finally made one thing absolutely clear: you do not fuck with the United States of America for more than about ten years. I’m not going to believe anything until I see the long-form death certificate,* but it would appear that the one person in the world it was unequivocally okay to hate has been shot in the face via our tax dollars. Nice job, President who did not consistently evoke cowboy imagery in explaining his intention to kill that guy. Clearly, Osama Bin Laden was one of the better people you could make dead. Yet ambivalence remains. The picture above—in which someone who was 13 years old on the original September 11th wilds out like the New England Wasps just won the Super Bowl—captures the problem nicely. Insofar as there are Enemies of America, Bin Laden was America’s enemy. All he did was sit in a cave and plot to murder us, whereas we sat in offices and did same while also inventing the automobile and curing polio and producing some really well-lit pornography. You cannot have a society with people like him running around. Popping his dome therefore must have been good for society, but how do we acknowledge that? One does not high five in response to death unless one is playing Call of Duty. One does not take to the streets and jump around draped in flags unless one is, um, a fan of Osama Bin Laden. Killing OBL was something we all wanted to do, to the point where we once evaluated our politicians based on their expressed degree of interest in doing it, but it’s not the kind of thing you can really get jazzed about having done. I submit that America is the place where we pay our government to kill people, but not the place where we publicly rejoice over it. Whether that is good or bad is another question. Anybody else have a big problem with America? Any other cave-dwelling sociopaths have a totalizing critique of modernity? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Greetings from Veselka, where I am A) stealing the internet from hard-working Ukrainian mafiosos and B) about 30 hours out from Micky McKeon’s wedding. There will be no Combat! blog of any quality while I prepare for that improbably wonderful/wonderfully improbable event, but we’ll be back on Monday in all our squinting glory. Until then, how about you listen to this song? Seriously, just chill out for five minutes, would you?

 

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg5403yj4II

Greetings from the food court at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where my breakfast burrito has barbecue sauce in it for some reason! I’m midway to our nation’s capital, where I will inflict humiliation on my brother for turning 30 before passing out without considering my own advanced age for even a second.* Between that crucial endeavor and Micky’s wedding the following weekend, Combat! blog will probably be extremely half-assed for the rest of the month. Fortunately, American culture continues to write itself. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the news that Paul Ryan, the man who wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare, paid for college with the Social Security benefits he received after his father’s death. The grandmother he credits with raising him got ’em, too. Of course, Ryan was not yet a rising conservative star who recognized that the nation’s budget crisis was so dire as to require the dismantling of 60 years of public safety nets back then. He was also not yet a college graduate with a dependable stream of income. I will leave it to your discernment whether this news shows that Ryan is an incredibly principled idealist who considers what’s good for the country independently of his own personal experience or if, now that he’s on board, he thinks we should pull up the lifelines so the boat can go faster. I suppose it could be both.