One thing you notice more and more the longer you hang around this sleazy world is the way mainstream types can’t admit to the obvious. They always have to act shocked. So it’s like, “Bond Mogul Convicted of Fraud”-oh, the shock! Like they didn’t know, like everybody over the age of nine doesn’t know, that insider trading is the whole point of the market. So much lying. Makes me sick.

And if you say you weren’t surprised, you’re the bad guy. You’re “cynical.” I love that word, “cynical.” Why not call the guy who discovered germs “cynical”? That’s a nasty theory if I ever heard one: armies of little monsters too small to see, just waiting to turn your mucus membranes into their orgy pools. It’s true, sure, but gosh it’s so darn “cynical”! Let’s pretend it isn’t true.

No, see-nobody calls germs cynical because they don’t want to die of typhoid or diptheria or all the other stuff that people stopped getting once they faced up to the cynical facts like grownups for once in their wuss-ass lives. But just ask them to face up to anything that real where big animals like people are concerned and eeeek! They’ll scream like a cartoon elephant in a tutu at a mouse.

So take Blackwater. It’s shock’n’horror time because a couple of ex-mercs blew the whistle on Erik Prince’s Onward Christian Steroid Casualties operation in Iraq.

Yup, from shock’n’awe to shock’n’horror in only goin’-on-seven short years: that’s how fast normal healthy people can face facts. Give’em enough time, like at least until the statute of limitations runs out, which just happens to be seven years, and they’ll face facts like anything. A decent interval, that’s what they love.

The Blackwater defectors have filed a sworn deposition in federal court that Blackwater zapped Iraqis at random, aimed to kill Muslims anywhere and any time they could, paid little Baghdadi girls a dollar a head, so to speak, for sexual services and just generally behaved like cartoon baddies. David Axe at Wired.com’s half-assed Inspector-gadget military blog “Danger Room” yukked it up with a headline calling Erik Prince a “super-villain” and called the defectors’ story “a fantastic litany of crimes, almost too fantastic to be believed.”

This is crap, of course. There’s nothing unbelievable or even unusual about what these Blackwater mercs did in Iraq. It’s what mercs always do, wherever they go. The only way you can be surprised about what happened is if you’ve been lying to yourself for your whole life.

Number one, and this will be bad news to all the computer dweebs at Wired: insurgency and counterinsurgency war is made with people. Not gadgets. So it comes down to the quality of the people you put in the field.

While we’re letting that sink in, and believe me it’s a real bummer for these Popular Mechanix war fans so it’ll take a while to sink in-while we wait, we’ll go on to bad news item #2: We hate the Iraqis. We didn’t go there to save them or help them or paint their thumbs purple, we went there to punish them, hurt them, fuck them up. This is one of the biggest and dumbest lies around, this “saving Private Iraqi” crap. Before the war people were a little more honest: we’re going to blast the fuckers, make them pay. “Pay for what?” wasn’t very clear but then who was asking? Nobody cared. Just make them pay.

Then they turned out to be unarmed, WMD-wise, and we were stuck like a Bakersfield cop standing over a dead cholo. What do you do, plant a .38 on him? Not in Iraq, not after you stupidly invited every damn news crew in the world on a ride-along in your big barrio-patrol adventure. So suddenly it was, “Uh…we shot this guy to, um, save a buncha other people, yeah, that’s it, because we love his cousins and his neighbors!”

So officially we love Iraqis, but the people saying that didn’t volunteer for Blackwater. You know why? Because everybody, and I mean everybody, in America knows that the “I heart Iraq” thing is a total lie and always has been.

The guys who volunteered for Blackwater didn’t go there to build peace-corps girls’ schools, they went to get rich in a free-fire, no-rules video game. And those men are still volunteering, by the way, you can go to their site and sign up at one of their regional HQ right now:

Here’s what I mean by people never ever looking at the obvious facts: go to an internet café if you can still find one and look over the shoulder of every male in the place (which is usually everybody except one weird girl in the corner). You’ll find every one of those guys is playing a first-person shooter game or something like World of Warcraft–you know, Eric Cartman and his friends vs. Dragons or Wizards or some crap.

That’s what’s going on in the heads of every male of military age. Now most of the guys in that internet place are nice Asian boys with moms who’d skin them alive if they volunteered for Blackwater–can’t blame them either. If I was Asian I wouldn’t feel all that safe on a Blackwater training compound, I’d make my will and wait for an “accidental” frangible round in the back of the head from some redneck training buddy. So they won’t actually go to Iraq to get head from little slave girls and shoot civilians for fun.

But they’ll think about it. It’s the world most male human beings, if you wanna call us human, inhabit by preference. In our free time, online, that is. We don’t actually live like that because our parents told us, you have to do your homework and get a job eventually. We don’t want to; we want the world on that screen, killing and raping. It’s just not practical as a career.

Except around 2003 it was practical, for a whole lot of guys from places you wouldn’t want to live: Tennessee, Alabama, North Georgia, Oklahoma. Guys who’d never had a choice worth making, or only had a choice of WalMart or the Service, no money with no benefits vs. no money with at least VA for life. Suddenly these guys were making $700 per day–yes, that’s right, per day–to do what every boy at that internet café is doing: strutting around in armor shooting people.

And the people they were hired to shoot were already officially designated targets: Iraqis, ragheads, whatever. I’m not even gonna focus on the hate-speech crap, because (and damn, I get so tired of having to repeat this, but I know you bastards will avoid reality if I give you half a chance)—because, I repeat, hate speech is normal. The human norm. The only way you can think hate speech is weird or criminal is if you don’t know anything about history and never ever even listen to the people around you. I guarantee, even if you live in San Francisco–Hell, especially if you live there–you’ll find most of the talk you hear is hate speech, because that’s how people talk and always have and always will. In SF maybe the hate speech is aimed at rednecks, fat white losers like, uh, me, but it’s the same hate speech. That’s how one bunch of primates keeps itself together: by hating on another buncha primates in the next tree.

It’s that simple. The reason the SF haters don’t go volunteer for Blackwater is (a) they can make more money without risking their necks; and (b) they wouldn’t get to kill fat rednecks like me, so it wouldn’t be any fun for them. I promise you, if Blackwater got a contract to “protect” someplace like Enid, Oklahoma from “Christian Extremists” you’d get half of SF volunteering and they wouldn’t even ask what the pay rate was. It’s who we are, it’s what we do. I wouldn’t blame’em. Imagine the fun it’d be for some Noe Valley yuppie, driving down those Okie alleys with your barrel playing eenie-meenie-miney-moe, catch an okie by the frontal lobe, or just making up games, “Lessee, I’m gonna shoot the next one I see with buck teeth…or a cowboy hat…no, maybe the next four-door pickup, I hate those things, shoot the next redneck driving a crew cab….”

And then you go home, take your steroids for the day to stay nice’n’pumped’n’pissed off, and wander over to the canteen where they’ve got some nice orphan Okie girls, around ten or maybe twelve years old, and while you’re getting head off them for a dollar you’ve got the extra zip of knowing you’re the all-conquerin’ bastard that offed their parents at the traffic light last week an’ orphaned them, so you got them into their present line of employment.

That’s how Genghis Khan felt, folks. He was just honest enough to say so. It’s been a while since anybody was that honest, and it never did take hold on this side of the ocean. We’re liars, mealymouthed gospel-puking liars from the get-go, but once it gets dark–and it got nice’n’dark in Iraq for a while there–once it gets dark, we act just like every other stinking male ape who ever got handed a gun.

So just stop lying and acting surprised. That’s all I ask. Just stop lying for once. Reminds me of that old NWA line, oughta be the national motto: “Bitch, stop lyin’.” You ain’t surprised at what these Blackwater apes did, you’d do it yourself if you didn’t have better job ops stateside, and if you ever even looked around you or just remembered what you felt like when you were nineteen you’d know there’s nothing “almost unbelievable” about any of it.

Of course they did all that shit. What did you think? More and more I think most moral, normal people spend most of their energy NOT thinking about anything–history, stats, money, or even remembering what they were like when they were still alive. They spend about a gigawatt per hour NOT thinking about stuff, and anything left over goes to some crap peaceable-kingdom fantasy.

You see that even in the nature documentaries. I’ve noticed there’s always some supposedly clean kind of ape, you know? When I was a kid they thought chimps were the nice ape. Then somebody filmed chimps hunting down monkeys and eating them alive, tearing off KFC arms and legs still hot. So much for the nice chimps. Then it was the pygmy chimp, the bonobo…except some other party-pooper just filmed these nice little feminist chimps doing the same thing, just with smaller monkeys. Whoops! Where’s the nice ape?

And who ever said there was one?

Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to brecher@exiledonline.com.

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