Each time I find my blood boiling these days I’m surprised.   I feel that my blood should have learned how not to boil by now.  It has been several years now,  trying to make myself a mild man, with modest success.   The surge of anger some things stir, often things on the radio news, still takes me by surprise.   Like doomed children in NYC I’ve never met, and am trying in vain to work with, the anger often flares over a seeming abstraction– like the senseless death of another doomed kid. My abstraction-inspired anger seems weak compared to the concrete things most citizens of an immature nation become enraged about.

A fanatic takes a large sharp knife, forces one of ours to make a speech to a video camera, then brutally cuts the man’s head off.  Unspeakable savagery abhorrent to any decent person.   We can be dismayed that our Saudi Arabian allies publicly behead people for a variety of crimes, but at least that is a sovereign government rather than some random vicious asshole with a sharp knife and an internet hook-up.

Murderous fanatics launched an ingenious and horrific attack on America thirteen years ago that succeeded in changing many things in the nation they hated.  They killed thousands of random citizens.  They caused unimaginable emotional and economic devastation– the immediate economic costs of the attack alone were literally billions of dollars (some sickening graphs are here).  

America changed overnight from a nation coming to terms with the necessity for international law to one that justified torture and any practice that could inflict damage on this inhuman international enemy.   The 9/11 attacks provoked two decade long wars, one a “pre-emptive” war entirely unprovoked, shoddily planned and disastrous, that cost over a trillion dollars, stalemated America, left the Middle East shattered, angry and violent and thousands more Americans dead, maimed, disabled for life.  Not to mention Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Lybians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Pakistanis– countless millions displaced, orphaned, torn apart.

Recent polls showed that Americans are finally sick of endless war, even if it is far away and fought only by those who sign up and an army of highly paid mercenaries.   Even if American military dead can no longer by shown on TV, Americans are sick of the wars.  They accomplish nothing, cost zillions, make the opposite of friends for the U.S.A., are pointless, less than pointless.  Some argue they play directly into the hands of terrorists bent on destroying the West.

Even if there are no American “boots on the ground”, most Americans seemingly have come to realize that bombing raids over impossibly complicated conflict zones seem like a stupid idea for solving knotty, centuries-old problems. Particularly when this American murder from the air often makes things worse in unforeseen ways. Particularly when those knotty, centuries-old conflicts are being played out thousands of miles away, across an ocean and another continent.

While Americans were telling pollsters they are not anxious for the next war, the president was lambasted by his many enemies as a weak, vacillating, nuance-pondering  sissy for hesitating to authorize a “muscular response” to the latest provocation, for not immediately ordering the slaughter of guilty and innocent alike each time a new horror happens somewhere in that oil rich region.  Recent polls showed that most Americans have come to support this hesitation to use state violence as the first option.  It’s almost as if we have finally tallied up the results of our bold, muscular war policy of recent years and realize perhaps a bit more reflection, and less reflexive muscular activity, might have led to a better result than rushing in boldly to blow things up and declaring ourselves victors before the battle was won.

What had my blood boiling the other day?  The newest polls found that a majority of Americans are now behind the president who finally stopped wringing his hands and did what good red-blooded patriots have wanted him to do since those horrible videos of the beheadings came out.   Recent polls show Americans love the bombing of these monsters, these ISIS savages.  ISIS, crucifiers, beheaders, rapists of children, using an explosive public relations campaign, did what American advertisers strive to do all the time — dramatically sold a brand and inflamed imaginations to change hearts and minds.  The president’s friends and enemies alike applauded when he finally announced that America would kick ISIS’s fucking asses.

I think of this endless cycle of blood-crazed lynch mobs, the vicious haters proving their point over and over.  I can provoke you and make you kill, make you step over your mother and even kick her in the face, to rush out to murder and, in turn, justify my revenge killings.  Nyah, nyah, nyah nyaaaaaa-yah!   I put my smirking picture on the internet cutting one of your people’s heads off and you’ll kill more civilians than I ever slaughtered (and I crucified, disemboweled, burned to death, shot, stabbed, hacked more faceless chumps than you can count).  “YOU SUCK, AMERICA!!!!” I taunt on viral video.    Then I sit back and wait for American bombers to help me do my important work.   You fools are my greatest recruiters!

Here’s the wild part about living in an immature nation– we have little sense of anything outside of our own immediate concerns.   We’ve been raised and trained this way.  We think of ourselves as exceptional, different and better than those born in slums without sewer systems or even outhouses.  It is truly not in our nature to equate every other human life with our own.  We will, of course, knit our brows in true sorrow when we see footage of a dozen little children’s bodies, blown up in some remote village where we also blew up many adult men we had good reason to believe were mostly terrorists.  Sure collateral damage happens, but way over there, you know, it happens to “f-ing sand n-words”, if we picture them at all, badly drawn faceless creatures randomly scurrying on a computer screen.  You can blow them up for extra points while fighting the haters of our freedom.   Just don’t accidentally kill one of our own!  LOL!