Thursday, 22 October 2009

The Commanders


.


File:Demolished vehicles line Highway 80 on 18 Apr 1991.jpg






When the Medina Luminous Division marched into
Divine Anger in the Energy Refuge Theatre --
Bottle green starlight chaos,
Blood rivers in the sand, dust flecked with bits of Sumerian gods --
The Commanders felt good about themselves,
They said Say hello to Allah
And the Medina Luminous Division said hello to God.



File:Sumerio orante (M.A.N. Madrid Inv.2001-110-1) 01.jpg











Next the In God We Trust Division was drawn out of K City
It was Bravo-20 on the Basra Road
Rockeye and Hellfire lived up to the instruction manuals
As the fireballs digested the convoys of the helpless
The Commanders paused to gas up
Their F/A-18s, their humvees, their Apaches
Then moved out to incinerate the Hammurabi.




File:3 F-111 1EF-111.jpg























Demolished civilian and military vehicles lining Highway 80 (aka The Highway of Death), route taken by Iraqis fleeing Operation Desert Storm, 18 April 1991: photo by Tech Sgt. Joe Coleman (US Air Force)
Figure in prayer: Sumerian statuette, 2550-2520 BC (National Archeological Museum of Spain, Madrid)
Three F-111 Aardvark and one EF-11 Raven, First Gulf War, 1991 (US Air Force)

5 comments:

  1. Well, you gotta break few eggs to make an omelet..

    only thing is who's gonna eat this nasty beastly thing.

    well, intelligent apes is already a pretty spooky combination,

    bucket does sublime.
    this shit will make ya cry.

    seem like bucket
    the only one who knew

    genius, stupidity,
    and complexity

    all the same thing.

    ain't a damn reason for any of it.
    bad idea to start with.

    these bugs
    are buildin guns
    right outta the soil

    jus like capn kirk
    against the lizard man

    stuff blows up
    when ya put it together.

    [shrugs]

    it's crazy stupid.
    works like gangbusters
    tho.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lanny,

    Well, the linguistic "advance" in ape technology that led from the first jungle bushwhackings to the arid triumph of Desert Storm does seem to have been the worst imaginable evolutionary blooper. Though as I worked on this piece a small hammer kept knocking at the tin hull of my mind, suggesting that the unanswerability of the superior hardware, which seemed to have been proven forever by ODS, was a mere decade later brought into question and the hardware itself made to maybe even appear obsolescent by a new more "advanced" warfare of image perception, dispersed cognition, conceptual concert.

    Wish I could say this new omelet seemed more savory to me than that other one, though.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Gary Snyder once said the industrialized nations of the world
    were entirely dependent on oil as
    a fuel and that they would do anything to get it.
    If there is a car culture it's
    California...Hard to change the
    world isn't it.
    And harder still when people from
    the 8th century are given wealth
    and technology of the twentieth
    century without the historical
    struggles of acculturation to them.
    Saddam with bomb would have produced much glass....more in his
    own country than anywhere else...he
    was less of a warrior than he thought he was. The delusions of the Tyrolian hat.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Charlie,

    We haven't owned a motor vehicle since 1968.

    But yes, that puts us in a minority in California.

    I was never an admirer of SH but I'm not sure that the target practice turkeyshoot on Highway 80 produced great permanent benign historical correction.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I agree but atleast it was a
    contact high.

    ReplyDelete