Why 2001 isn't like "2001"

I think we're like the first wave of Israelites. The ones who crossed the desert, looked over the mountains and said "Fuck, there's giants there." The ones God sent back into the desert to die.

We took one look into the 21st century and said "Fuck, we don't like the future, the future's scary." We panicked. The stock market crashed. We elected an idiot for President (or let an idiot steal the presidency which amounts to the same thing) so that idiot could build a bridge back to the 19th century.

So forget all the complicated horseshit the experts tell you. There's a very simple reason we're in the toilet now.

We lost our nerve.

But maybe a good war would fix things. Isn't war fun?

Correct me if I'm being paranoid, but it seems somebody somewhere is spending at least as much money rehabilitating the notion of war as they are propping up the sagging CD sales of Michael Jackson.

Tom Hanks a great idea: let's clog up the mall in Washington DC with a WWII memorial. Jesus, I don't want to sound like a fucking ingrate, but the WWII gen already has a memorial -- it's called the USA -- the whole fucking thing is their memorial, really, they don't need an additional neo-fascist handball court. Hell, they'll all be dead soon anyway...

And now here's this "Band of Brothers" thing on HBO. I haven't watched it because, uh, well, I don't get HBO. But, at least according to the teasers, it all seems nice, warm, fuzzy and throat-catching.

War is not warm and fuzzy. War sucks. This is not something to look back on with nostalgia, anymore than you'd look back with nostalgia on the time you had to fight off Ed Gein when he was attacking your grandma with a chainsaw. We're talking Dresden, Hiroshima, the Bataan Death March, V-weapons falling on London -- a world of shit. Goddamnit, I don't wanna live in interesting times. If the Gary Condit whodunnit and the Summer of Sharks is all the news they can dig up, that's fine with me.

One of these days somebody should do a study of first, second, third generation war movies. Re: WWII, seems like the first wave was obvious patriotism; the second wave was either cynical or anti-war ("Kelly's Heros," "Catch-22") or objective historical ("Tora, Tora, Tora!"); and we're now, again, in a wave of patriotism ("Pearl Harbor") -- except that, now, the folks doing the movies didn't live through the events and they're getting it wrong. (