Fortunate son

I may be out of step. Henry Rollins is on a very succesful spoken word tour called "Shock and Awe - My Ass" but still visited the troops. His reasoning was that they get sent wherever the Brass tell them to go and are not ultimately accountable. System of a Down are not the first to ask "Why do we always send the poor?". The title of this entry refers to a Creedence song that points out the same thing was happening in the last unpopular conflict. Michael Moore may have had it playing on his headset when he got it in his head to confront members of the US Senate to see whether any of their sons and daughters would be signing up for a tour of duty.

Hey, maybe if we feel that this Holy War is not for us, we can feel quite guilt-free about our holidays, taken at a time when others are getting their asses shot.

And I don't feel personal outrage at Moslems being unkind to one another - at least not in a way that I believe my presence or my hostility or my hasty gunplay could broker meaningful change. No I'm not happy with terrorists grabbing any old westerner off the street and holding them hostage. When you look at the state of health of many of their victims, they must be gutless cretins if they think their actions will show in some positive light.
And if the average slob reading the tabloid can't see any merit in their action, what makes them think that God will see it differently? "Oh I see, you beheaded an aid worker and dragged the body of a civilian behind your truck before setting alight to the corpse. Well, of course, into Paradise with you then"
I know Christians do some outrageously contradictory and hypocritical things but they don't seem quite so clueless and sullenly barbaric.
Any Paradise built on such unpromising stuff would more resemble Hell.

None of which changes the fact that if it's such a shithole filled with fanatics, what are 'our boys' doing there?