From the Highest Tower

This morning, I walked to work. It was tough going, what with the fuzzy lungs and me allergic to cashmere. While I was dramatically infirm, I noticed a new recruitment ad for the military that made me delicately irate. In it, an older man of color asks an olive-skinned woman if her son is still talking about joining the military. She says the young man talks about nothing but. The older man asks if she is still opposed to her son joining. She says her son can be very persuasive, and her mind is opening to the idea. The older man says he's impressed with both of them.

Congratulations to the US military, which has finally managed to convey what some of us have known all along: our sons are born to be cannonfodder in self-perpetuating imperialist wars. It is only our stubborn belief that children matter individually preventing the military from snapping them up like dropped pennies and turning them into gravestones or worse. And if mothers and fathers would stop being so damned picky about that whole PSTD-head injury-full-thickness burns-lost limbs-depression and suicide thing, it would just be so much easier to conduct these endless, pointless wars that are such a boon to the military-industrial complex. So this morning, when I walked around a ROTC flag raising ceremony because the sidewalk was blocked by shivering crew-cut teenagers, I was in a bit of a snit. But why talk about architecture when we can dance about war?