PulpLit.net

The Worst-Laid Plans

As usual, my grandoise plans to dazzle my five or six readers with a serial short story have fizzled entirely beneath the sunlike blaze of my lassitude.

The 'good' news is that it seems my depressive ennui over the start of the war has passed. Given time and acclimation, I and many others have once again started the good fight. As one friend said to me when I admitted my weariness of raging against the machine: keep raging. And I shall do so. If I stop fighting the neocons with every ounce of my intellectual strength and don't voice my dissent, then the terrorists have already won...

Speaking of the "neocons," I have become exceedingly fond of this term lately. Over the last thirty years or so conservatives have successfully turned the word 'liberal' into an epithet. But now that they have become so drunk with power that they think they can have blatant conflicts of interest and get away with it, the tide is slowly turning against the powers-that-be in Washington, and as the progressives unite (yes, I'm going to rename we liberals 'progressives' from now on, implying that conservatives are 'regressives,' just as Pro-Lifers intimate their opponents are 'Pro-Death') we have found a new word to rally around: the neoconservative, or neocon.

Personally I love the term; to a child of the '80s life myself it conjures up Megatron and the Decepticons, the evil villains of the Transformers cartoon. Decepticon teams included the Constructions, the Predacons, the Seacons, etcetera. 'Neocons' fits in nicely; the question is, what would, say, Richard Perle transform into? Perle would, mostly definitely, transform into a mechanical chickenhawk - albeit one that's still capable of consulting defense contractors. Wolfowitz would, of course, transform into a long-jawed, slavering wolf, and Bush would transform into - a shrub. Or maybe a monkey.

I will still be commenting on the war - it being, as mentioned in a previous entry, the proverbial oliphaunt in the room - but I'm not going to agonize over my position anymore. I've come to a stance, and it's a complicated one, and I'm not going to announce or explain it here - largely because there's no reason for me to do so. I'll simply provide links and make the occasional insight or offer an opinion, but I'm not going to shout out my position. For one thing, my stance is quite fluid, changing with circumstances, though it generally revolves around a balance between maximizing the freedom and minimizing the death of as many innocent people as possible. That is not necessarily an antiwar stance; war could, for example, give freedom to the Iraqi people and prevent the deaths of Kurds and Americans by terrorists (and please, note the could).

Well, Biggerboat's second issue, our Spring 2003 issue, will debut this week. The fiction, art and articles are selected and ready to go. Allow me to take this opportunity to once again thank our website designer, Stewart Rosenberger, for the excellent site he put together for us, free of charge. His hard work, effort and ingenuity gives people like me the chance to rant and people like you to read reviews of quality films like Old School. Thanks again, Stew. We appreciate it.