20 April 06

Two Tonys Philosophizes

“I’m feeling’ philosophical,” Two Tonys said.
“How so?” I asked.
“I was watchin’ some show on PBS about the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen. To get to the South Pole without dyin’ he lived with the Eskimos for a few years, and learnt how to live in harmony with that environment. That got me thinkin’: prison is my environment. I ain’t goin’ nowhere for the rest of my life, bro, except on a trip to the hospital every now and then. Instead of fightin’ my environment, I need to be livin’ in harmony with it. I can’t be raisin’ my blood pressure because the breakfast biscuits were cold, or my cell door didn’t open at exactly one forty-five for rec, or I didn’t get called to Property when I was supposed to. I’ve gotta go with the flow. Why should I be blowin’ gaskets over the small shit when there’s people gettin’ blown up in Iraq, mudslides are killin' thousands in the Philippines, and there’s earthquakes in Turkey? Shame on me. Shame on me.”
“Yes, there’s a lot of bad stuff going on in the world. At least we’re alive.”
“Yeah.”
“So what do you think about the war in Iraq?”
“It’s a fuckin’ joke. You don’t hafta have read Robert Fisk’s The Great War For Civilisation to know it’s about oil. We’ve got pricks life Wolf Blitzer talkin’ about how great America is as we bomb Iraq and plunder their oil.”
“Oil’s a part of it. Defence spending is too. The US is spending over half a trillion dollars a year on the military: destroying the Middle East with bombs, while their own inner cities, and health and education systems, are suffering cutbacks. Then they pretend to wonder why crime is so high. The British liberated Iraq twice last century, and pulled out because of the high casualties and the fact that the Iraqi people didn’t want us there. History rhymes.”
“And your Tony Blair is helpin’ Bush right now, I might add. Those motherfuckers in Washington are brainwashin’ eighteen year old kids – who just wanna get college scholarships – into goin’ to Iraq, and the next thing they know the kids are comin’ back with their nuts blown off, headin’ for the nearest VA hospital, never able to fuck again. And what have they got to show for it? They went to Iraq for George Dubya Bush – fuck that shit! I was a seaman in the US Navy 'cause I didn’t know any better. Now, if I had a son, I’d talk him outta goin’. When it was Bush’s turn to go, he dodged the draft.”
“Yes, he’s a chickenhawk,” I said.
“What’s that?” Two Tonys asked.
“According to Michael Parenti – other than the doves who are for peace and the hawks who are for war – there’s chickenhawks: the current US leaders who dodged military service and are now getting richer by being pro war. War is good when they can profit and not have to fight. Bush isn’t the only chickenhawk. Other draft dodgers include Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and John Ashcroft. And get this, Rush Limbaugh – one of their mouthpieces – dodged the draft because of anal cysts, a treatable condition he managed to suffer from for the entire duration of the Vietnam War.”
“I can imagine that big fat motherfucker with boils on his ass,” Two Tonys said. “The world has become more of a fucked up place. It’s not like the old days of the British Empire. It’s all corporations now: it’s the likes of Nike goin’ to the Philippines payin’ poor peasant motherfuckers a pittance to make sneakers, while givin’ Tiger Woods one-hundred million to wear the Nike swoosh.
I was raised in Detroit, in the shadow of the Chrysler plant – literally. I told the time as a kid by listening for when the whistle blew in the Chrysler factories – and then it was American owned. Now it’s Chrysler-Daimler. If you’d o’ told my old man back when your people were getting’ bombed by the German motherfuckers, that the Germans were gonna own half of Chrysler, he wouldn’t have believed it.
It’s the New World Order, bro. It’s here. And you know somethin’, I’m kinda glad I’m in here and not getting’ fucked over by those motherfuckers in Washington, like some old people in America, who have to make a choice between buying medication or eatin’, or figurin’ out which nursin’ home they can afford.”

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Copyright © 2005-2006 Shaun P. Attwood