A few days ago, North Korea said that the imposition of sanctions by the United States amounted to an open "declaration of war" and went on to state that in response to military exercises to be carried out by the US and South Korean armies, that they are "fully ready to cope with them with nuclear weapons any time,” Okay. Let me just make one thing abundantly clear: these jokers have been talking this game for the last four decades, and it has all amounted to precisely nil
As regards Kim Jong-Un, I will ask that I be excused by my reader for the brief detour into contemporary African-American Vernacular English that this piece will now take. (crack knuckles, clear throat, hawk phlegm, adjust junk) Dear Kim: You ain't ****. *******, and your little ***** *** on some old *******. You ain't ****, you ain't never gon' be ****, and you never was ****. Furthermore, you ain't standin' on **** but a failed state and a fast-fading personality cult. All we hear is talk, talk, talk, talk, every year from you and your decrepit, syphilis riddled father before you; and quite frankly, it's getting old. Boring, even.
Do it, we dare you. See what happens, you glorified, overfed man-baby. You blurry greyscale xerox of Mao's bloated corpse. You, who have mistook a flimsy house of cards for an ironclad fortress. You naked emperor. You, whose very 'empire' is the deformed and emaciated plant which reluctantly sprang from a salted and desolate earth. You, whose 'hermit kingdom' constantly shrinks toward zero while the entire world watches, laughing!
We rest assured of the emptiness your threats. We can topple your house of cards at the flick of a wrist. In one fell swoop, our elite tactical urban forces will subvert and destroy your poorly trained, weakly organized, and honestly pitiful excuse for a nation. Why, if we wanted it, you'd be gone in a New York minute. And don't even try to come at us with tough talk about nukes. *****, we been had nukes, and here's the thing: ours are bigger, better, and more numerous than yours. You push that button, and we bomb your sorry little ***** back into the stone. You EMP us, our allies bomb you for us. Bearing all these considerations in mind, I once again reiterate:
WE AIN'T SCARED OF YOU. COME TEST US!
(drop mic, walk away)
But in all seriousness: There's just something deep down in the collective consciousness of this country, perhaps even humanity generally, that secretly yearns, that requires, desires, and *pines away* for the glorious spectacle of the theater of war, isn't there? Something in us seems, beneath a surface layer of fear, to ask, nay to *implore* with all the swaggering braggadocio of a drunken frat boy: "Fight me. I dare you. See what happens." That subconscious, primal need to attain brute superiority in outward, tribalistic displays of dominance projects itself onto the global stage: But how, then, are we to understand this mechanism, and what are some of its consequences? Upon closer inspection, we will find the practical consequences of this act to be twofold. On the one hand: By generating this spectacle, the media are able to use it as a tool for maintaining within the public a mixture of frenzy at one pole and detached complacency at the other. By giving them a violent conflict to participate in vicariously, the war at once (a) creates for them an abstract, nationalistic identity, (b) sublimates their violent impulses, and (c) distracts their attention away from the material conditions of life in the country where the spectacle is being broadcast; effectively stifling the imperative to rebel against those conditions where they might otherwise have been taken as unjust. War pacifies, war stupefies, and above all war unifies. On the other hand, the previously mentioned tendency to outwardly display dominance serves as an effective means for geopolitical elites and those striving to be such, to affirm reaffirm their hegemony on the world stage by making ****** examples of those that would presume to cross them. In this regard, there is perhaps no greater or more apt an example than the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war.
There is much more to be said about these matters in seriousness, but for the sake of brevity, I leave it here.
