Strange
Day

Watch out. They just used the term ‘regime’ to refer to the leaders of Syria.
Fucking hell. You know somebody is holding a pro-war rally here tomorrow? How fucked up is that shit?
Just how mentally diseased and thoroughly mind-fucked do you have to be to be pro-war? I don’t personally know any soldiers who are pro-war. Most military people I’ve talked to say that war is the result of a failure. They don’t like having to do the job, but they do it because someone has to.
Some old man was on NPR this afternoon saying that he was very impressed with modern warfare. That unlike when he served, the weapons are much more precise. The body counts are much lower. Compared to 30 years ago? Maybe. Fewer soldiers, better equipped.
But modern warfare really sucks for the audience. Battles used to involve a couple groups of pissed off people throwing shit at each other in the middle of a field or forest. The only civilians killed were the dumb-asses who climbed the hill to watch the battle. But in the last fifty years, war has gotten to be very personal. Battles have moved into our cities and homes. That precision bomb strike to take out the foreign leader ONLY takes out maybe 10 civilians.
In the spirit of the oh so popular reality TV shows, I think we should get to vote a few celebrities into the army. I wanna send DCs police chief. The only time you see this man in the news is when he’s talking tough about taking on Protesters. Especially when they’re teenagers. He keeps his mouth shut during the real national rallies. But if it’s a bunch of high school kids pissed off at the world bank, he becomes dirty harry.
Fucking dickless wonder. Forget the friggin’ kids and do something about the increasing crime rates. About the increasing gang violence. About the police neglect and mistreatment. About the insane burglary rates and car thefts.
Why is it when some kid wants to yell at a businessman and stick a bumper-sticker on his window, I find no shortage of jack-booted, armor-plated, baton and shotgun wielding stormtroopers. But when five guys decided to do a dance on my head in the middle of the street, I waited an hour and a half for two patrol officers who wanted to search my apartment for signs of me abusing my nonexistent wife.

Have you seen the front page of today’s Washington Post? Color picture, above the fold, 3/10ths of a page:

By itself, this is a moving image, though not unexpected during an invasion.
But it immediately occurred to me, this is Baghdad. While all the news reports might show you pictures of jeeps and tanks rolling through open deserts or ramshackle villages, those are not Baghdad.
Baghdad is a city of over 5 million people. There are over a thousand grade schools, three major universities. Baghdad was arguably the cultural center of Iraq, and most of the arab middle east, until the late 80s. The city itself is almost 1,300 years old.

This is a city entire orders of magnitude larger than most of you have ever lived in. Modern and huge. And yesterday we rolled through there with a column of tanks. In and out. And judging from pictures like this, leaving a trail or wreckage in our wake.
Man… I am such an American; because I just cannot imagine what it would be like to live through that.