Talk Jargony to Me.

For some reason this morning I have been thinking about that time General David Petraeus got caught having an affair with his biographer and how that is one of the most narcissistic things I have ever heard of.

And that has gotten me wondering what that pillow talk was like, in the middle of a war zone, conceivably in a big field tent, with that desert wind howling on through the night outside. And that is when I realized that there are no good asymetrical warfare sexual innuendos! How can that be?! Our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan provided us with a plethora of fantastic new jargon (Green Zone, IED, Oh-dark-30, red-on-red) but try as I might (and I have been trying mightily), none of it is funny! I mean, “cockpit” and “foxhole” are barely even innuendo, but how do you find the humor in the term “non-sectarian violence”? I guess “the Surge” has some potential, as does “the Sunni Awakening”, but I think using that last one as some kind of sexual innuendo might be racist (???), most certainly it would be culturally insensitive, so maybe let’s nix that one, I guess.

“Bunker Buster” is funny, but that term has been around since the at least the 1990s. Probably there is some crude potential in “KC-10” (the McDonnell Douglas KC-10 aerial refuelling plane that has a long phallic refuelling “flying boom” sticking out its back end) but that is (figuratively) a bit of a stretch.

“GWOT” (Global War on Terrorism) is fun to say (try it right now! “G-WOT”!), and although it sounds a lot like “g-spot”, I can’t conceive of any situation in which “GWOT” would be an appropriate thing to say. And not for nothing, can I just say that it is the collective opinion of the editors here at Standardkink that we should all take g-spots very seriously and not be flippant at all on the topic.

“Axis of Evil” seems like it should be funny, right? But what would be its practical application? Maybe some sort of very specific group-sex activity? As in, “I was in an Axis of Evil last weekend”, but I just don’t think that is going to catch on.

Do you see what I am saying here? None of this is funny. That is very depressing to me because I so deeply love the potential of language. I guess it is true what they say, there is nothing funny about war.

.
.
.

On the Move, March 2003

On the Move,

March 2003

by james bezerra

We drove east for days.

It always seemed to be the middle of the night.

I learned my body can’t handle

7-11 coffee

and diet Red Bull

in the same two hundred miles.

We woke in a New Mexico motel

as US armor swooped into Iraqi desert

and we sat there,

dumbfounded,

eating Egg McMuffins watching war,

live,

on TV.

Just like that.

No one had ever quite seen that before:

a TV camera on a tank.

We’re so used to it now:

The Forever War.

Anderson Cooper in a desert,

stylish black flak jacket -

makes one wonder if it’s custom tailored

and where do you find a tailor

who works with Kevlar? -

he looks square-y from a bad uplink;

Looks like he’s on safari.

Pink and yellow Tulsa strip club neon shimmies

like a mirage

of a lighthouse

when we pass on the 44 at night.

That’s all I remember of Oklahoma.

New forms of food we found along the way:

White Castle, Waffle House, Cracker Barrel,

Lambert’s Café home of the Throwed Rolls. Fried Okra,

which I thought were chicken nuggets, but which very much weren’t.

Other things we’d never of heard of then:

IED

and extraordinary rendition,

enhanced interrogation,

sectarian violence,

surge and hold,

and Abu Ghraib,

and Green Zone,

and Blackwater,

and Haliburton,

Oscar Mike and

oh-dark-30

and embrace the suck

and hollow armies

and The 80 Percent Solution.

It was harder to find a drink

in the middle west,

but on the same day

I did see

the world’s largest banjo

and its most giant fiddle.

Yakov Smirnoff had a theater then

in Branson Missouri

and on Sundays

they used it as a church.

How do you even measure a war anyway, -

we asked in Hannibal,

trying to skip stones across the Mississippi -

in tons of ordinance? In time?

In pints of blood

or un-beat heartbeats?

In Illinois

in East St. Louis

a guy told me they dig basements

with dynamite.

.

.

.

It IS a small World!

For reasons passing understanding, today this blog got hits from Finland, Iraq and Mongolia!

This is unusual, but totally cool, even if those poor bastards ended up here only by virtue of some cruel Google joke.

.
.
.

Extreme Vacation: Iraq.

For reasons passing understanding, my brother the Texas Diplomat is in Iraq right now as part of a sort of exchange program through his grad school (they exchanged him for some printer toner or something). Check out the blog he is keeping while he is there: iraqdotorg.

.
.
.