Jeez, this puppy had a typo in like the thirty-fifth paragraph. One little extra word “be” there. It’s gone now. It was in one of the two Russian-folk sections. Those might seem like typos but they’re not: that stuff was flying around the living room and it felt propitious so I grabbed it and stuck it in. In fact the Suvorov stuff, about a guy who is blind and deaf and who does some serious Helen Keller shit, puts all our wordy stuff about war into serious perspective. I know this one is long, I guess my longest ever on Substack, and it’s undoubtedly offensive in parts to my main core (corps) of readers (what isn’t?) but it goes quickly, actually, and my main group shows a surprising persistence, given…me. And now back to our originally scheduled broadcast:
+++++++++++++
What’s this “veterans of foreign wars”?
Do I have friends and family who are veterans and (more often) enthusiasts of foreign wars?
I do.
Who doesn’t, am I right? I have these friends. I have this family. These enthusiasts.
Foreign wars.
But the phrase has to go. Not that I don’t love you guys. I’ve sat decades across the dinner table from you, been in the orb of your hospitality for sure. Now I’m looking down through the coke bottle of interneticalness and you’re in there somewhere.
But seriously, foreign? What went wrong? How does this word foreign even get close to the word war? How did it ever get on your lips without admitting you just lipped some nonsense?
As far as I can tell from studying your culture in the culture machine, or netflix I think you call it, you’ve soft-pedaled the meaning of war. You seem to think it’s this thing with rules or something. Like it’s a game of dress-up. Like it’s so organized that you can chuck your girls into it now. Like that’s progress.
But it’s ineffable. That’s what you seem to not get. War, real war, is ineffable. There aren’t words for it, in other words, says the guy using words. Anyone—and this includes me—who discusses war and the discussion is words and not a high thin keen coalescing downward out of a blank sky into a scream beyond the ken of keen that just, won’t, stop, is lying. Or stupid. And probably both.
War is beyond you. Your words are ridiculous. Mine are too, but a little less.
We got whole oceans between us and where we shouldn’t be, and we’re still unable to grasp the concept of staying home.
Real war is not anything at all, not one teensy weensy bit, like the way you’re going on about. Sacrifice and virtue and cute costumes and “helping,” like you speak nine languages and have it figured out across an ocean. Your war idea is absurd, as is mine. But my way’s a little less absurd than your idea. Little red exit-wound flowers of forgetting, seriously? The poets almost always get war wrong, but they’re the only ones who could ever get war right.
War.
It starts with that high thin keening but it can go on for years and you might just think it’s the tinnitus.
War. Far off.
There’s a war idea far off somewhere. Meanwhile everything we need to know about life is implicit in a watershed. Food gardens in a watershed. In a watershed, you’re above and below everyone, so the idea of responsibility is organic. Nations, by contrast, are silly blobs scrawled on continent maps by incontinent old men. Discontent. Nationalism=incontinentalism. Flags are objects people wave to signal their willingness to keep thinking inside the box, although box kites would probably be a more useful metaphor than a flag. Flags are so lazy they can’t even be bothered to be shaped like the continent maps of the incontinent men. You couldn’t even make your Canada flag shaped like Canada. Wow.
To understand how stupid nations are, look no further than a smart idea: watersheds. It worked for half a million years.
A nation is a scrawl. But a watershed is us. Branching branching branching, the fractals of blood water responsibility. None of this nationbusiness of blaming leaders and getting leaders to tell us what to do. Watershed, nothing more. Get together in the ‘shed, and talk it out. We’re a tree. A watershed is a tree is lungs is blood circulation is us. Add sky rotation of the water cycle like you’re Bible Ezekiel. Rings within rings. Water to sea to sky to us to sea. Your nation notion is just graffiti on our watershed. Your nation is squatting on our watershed. On yourself. If you want to be patriotic and scrawl on yourself, just cut to the chase and go to the bathroom and scribble lipstick on your face.
Watershed is for adults. Nation, for kids. Come on, come on. Don’t just read this. Change everything. If not now, when? Thinking it’s safe to just read something like it’s an idea, like it doesn’t have to touch you, that you don’t have to do anything, that’s already the distancing mechanism of warness. Come, now. Now is the hour.
Meanwhile that keen is increasing in pitch, is how war approaches. Not something on the telly, not in the olds or, as you call it, the “news.” Fake news? Seriously? You had me at news, as King Solomon could vouch.
War, real war for a wise strong woman in the midst of her watershed is like this:
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away wrath.
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away wrath.
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away. You can do without the wrath.
A soft answer turneth away wrath.
You can do without the wrath.
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away.
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away.
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away.
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away.
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away.
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away.
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away.
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away.
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away.
You are the work of love in the age of mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin might have said.
Someone insults you, you answer softly and turn away.
And so on. 490 times of this, to fulfill Jesus’s recommendation to turn the other cheek seventy times seven. But Jesus also correctly predicted that if in his day four-hundred-ninety would be needed and that a long time prior seven turn-aways had sufficed, that in a couple thousand years it would be many, many times seventy times seven. That’s a lot of soft answers. Of brooking, we used to say: enduring. Putting up with. Love endureth all things.
War is the last thing on the mind of a wisewoman in her watershed. She has cucumbers and watermelons in the foremind. For their alkalyzing effects, not to mention their tastiness and crunch. Factors that make us more acidic include hearing or saying harsh or bitter words, loud music and noise. This last sentence is from Green For Life by Victoria Boutenko but I won’t put it into quotation marks because I’m trying to lull you, dear reader. It was a sentence that was flying through the living room air so I just grabbed it a moment ago as it flew by. Hey if you need to be sciencey then yeah, Boutenko’s quoting science studies and all that. That stuff used to impress me. Like we don’t already know how to be healthy but we need a man to scienceplain it to us.
Love in a watershed is what I’m saying.
Give peace a chance.
Be gentle.
Love.
Some guy pushes you a little, then bend a little. No biggie. It’s sumo, it’s judo, it’s willow. Bend.
Some guy pushes you four-hundred-ninety times, just relax. Cucumbers, watermelons.
War needs two to tangle. Bend. Love. Go play a musical instrument. The oboe is a good one.
Laugh loudly, love well, and one of the time’s the guy pushes you, step back and turn aside like you always do, which means that he can’t see what your right hand is doing (Jesus said let not your left hand know what the right is up to) because your body is blocking the right hand, and smile to give peace a chance, then float your left hand up in a slow, distracting flutter, and strike forward with your right and bring that shiv up hard under the solar plexus moving upward into all the soft bits. Cover his mouth as he goes down. We’re not even nine seconds into the war and already much of it is won. Let’s say the guy’s got a thousand or ten-thousand fellow invaders in your watershed, they’ve long been marked, and every citizen down to the least little child is a soldier striking with surprise, at speed, disappearing after a quick removal of heads. The heads, strategically placed in the next few minutes, will be important to help sway the hearts and minds of invaders who have misunderstood how watersheds and women work.
Please be advised that Dr. David Thor and associates are not offering health or legal advice. We do not diagnose disease. All opinions expressed herein are for entertainment value and may not reflect the opinions of Tim Denning. In fact it is unlikely that Tim Denning would ever agree with anything the author has ever said in any way. Compare Tim Denning’s annual declared salary with the author’s, if any, for further explication of the phrase “entertainment value.” All articles have been or may have been written in English, translated into Japanese, and subsequently translated back into English. Some settling of contents may have occur’d during shipping. We cannot be liable for the empty spaces between lines. Or for anything at all. In case that wasn’t clear.
Every child who can sit upright can handle a bow or a fusil of some sort. Shoot along the perimeter of the visual field, then clean up towards the center. Adults do the close work. Afterwords, older children move through stripping bodies. No talk is necessary. You are never a prisoner of war. In the next few days if any of your people are taken while fighting, you hold a quick funeral. They’re gone. Alexander Suvorov, not the warrior but the brave man, was alive in Moscow in the 1970s while my dad was figuring out ways to blow him up—I love my dad but that’s the God’s-plain truth—and he’d gone blind and deaf when he was three and he did everything, more than everything of the kind us regular people do, so anything is possible, says Boutenko about Suvurov. With people like him alive in the world, who knows what we’re capable of. Move move. Quietly. If an invader catches anyone in the watershed it won’t matter. The prisoner will know nothing but how to be stupid and after an hour how to scream and you’ll learn nothing but lessons in your own cowardice and the impossibility of ever subjecting such a people. Steal the land, blow it up if you want, burn it with nukes, and you’ll have a useless pit but you’ll never enslave these people. There’s nothing to them. Nothing to catch. They know how to die, which is a lesson in how to live you can’t possibly master. Kill every last one. You better, or some night one of them will get into your tent and club the lot of you with that oboe.
Now compare real life with our life as softies. With our warriors who grow up as softies on couches and then lift weights under the mistaken impression that land mines care about how big their soft flesh is. They go off to places like Afghanistan and commit foreign war. Good luck with that. Couch softies fighting actual fighters. Wow. I’ve known plenty of these guys on the streets of Toronto after they’re done. By the time they get to me, they actually are brave, as it turns out. But not the way the culture thinks they ought to be.
Compare real people in real watersheds with, random pick, last night’s Gray’s Anatomy, which tells you everything you need to know about what our culture of softies thinks of women and children and safety and war. Crazy white man in wheelchair grabs scalpel and uses it to threaten a woman (played by a strong young woman with very black skin and the big buttocks of an athlete—don’t tell me this actor isn’t a serious athlete!).
What our culture believes from this part:
A scalpel is a serious weapon. [In real life, short sharp objects do lots of longterm damage but are far less effective than long blunt objects in the crucial first seconds. I would never carry a knife of any sort as a weapon. I don’t hate anyone enough for that. You would hurt an attacker without slowing him down. I’m a club man, or would be if I didn’t think my words were enough. They almost always are enough.]
Women are weak.
Athletic, powerful women with big buttocks honed by (from the looks of it) dead lifts and squats and sprints are especially weak.
White men are up to their usual tricks and are scary and powerful even if their livers are shot and they’re so weak they need to be in a wheelchair.
Athletic powerful women aren’t faster runners than weak white men in wheelchairs.
Yada yada, on and on like this. So let’s skip ahead to the part where, as you will have guessed, the “safety” doors are locked and the strong athletic woman is locked in with the smallish weak white man and the inevitable child. What our culture believes:
Locking internal doors in hospitals increases safety. Somehow.
Security can’t see any of the hallways or rooms in the hospitals on their monitors, so we must not be getting spied on.
If there’s a giant explosion on the fourth floor with a fireball that smashes out onto the street, fire personnel already on the premises have no idea where that happened and will need hours to figure it out.
After the internal doors are unlocked, surgeons with college degrees will take a while to figure out how to open a door by pushing on it with their hand.
I could go on for a half hour like this, and most viewers presumably could, but if that’s the case and viewers are so smart, why does this show exist? Anyway, let’s skip ahead to the war room, as I’ll call it for this essay. The strong black athlete has missed like nine opportunities to poke the weak guy in the eyes while he vaguely waves his small sharp object around and mutters distractedly. She’s also passed up who knows how many long blunt swinging objects, like those metal rods that hold i.v. drips, which would way outclass any small sharp object. Apparently she doesn’t want to beat this guy to a pulp. Reasons not explained.
Add child.
In real life, this idiot kid who is constantly described as “smart” would have stripped herself out of the gene pool the third time she offers assistance to her own murderer. But let’s pretend the kid’s worth saving. Me, I’d cut a deal with her first: I’ll save you, but you have to promise to never have babies.
Personally I love not just Gray’s Anatomy but all the movies, and there are so many of them they’re practically a genre of their own, in which our culture reveals what we really think about children. In basically every movie ever made in which there are children and a bad guy, the movie teaches us that children shouldn’t run away from the bad guy. Shouldn’t quietly disappear and run on their home turf where they could easily outrun a bad guy. Shouldn’t quietly disappear and get the heck out of there. Five miles away for starters. Or if they want to hang around, the movies teach us, the kids shouldn’t go to their stash, grab a .38, and come back for the bad guy. Nope. What children are supposed to do is not only forget how to run, not only forget how to walk, but go over to an adult and start yelling so the bad guy can find them. Then the kid is supposed to get carried. Because the adult loves the kid that much. Good grief. If I had a nine-year-old that ridiculous I’d leave him to the bad guy. Well, I wouldn’t, but I should.
And so it is in the war room. The internal doors are locked. There are no cameras in that room and no cameras showed the long trek of the bad guy and the athlete across several floors of the hospital, because that’s believable. We’re stuck in here. All alone. Then the child shows herself. She could have hidden but no, revealing yourself to the bad guy’s the right thing to do in this culture.
What the culture wants to teach us here:
Fires don’t make smoke. The real danger is the flames. Flames don’t need fuel. They just kind of burn magically to light up the scene. You can cough politely to pretend there’s smoke.
If a girl has done her best to assist the murderer and then a small machine tips over on her (like that’s not poetic justice!) she can’t possibly be strong enough to wiggle away. If she’s bleeding, she shouldn’t clamp her hand over the bleed because kids shouldn’t be taught first aid. She should just lie there waiting for an adult to figure something out. Lucky there’s a clever adult idea: leave the not-very-heavy machine tipped onto the girl like a giant bandage because it would be too difficult to describe the principle of direct pressure using your hand to the “smart” girl.
When the weak guy with the tiny sharp weapon gets a big strong weapon that looks like a crowbar but he’s too weak to pry open the door so he petulantly flings the nice big weapon over to the strong athlete, the strong athlete shouldn’t pick up the weapon and knock over the weak guy. Instead she should raise her hands to the stupid child and ignore the weapon and just kind of cower there so that if the weak guy wants to kill both of you he won’t have to strain himself chasing you.
Again, I could go on and on and on. Wherever there are a half-dozen reasonable options, wait a while or think hard and eventually you’ll think of something ridiculous. And yet my aunt wonders why I have difficulty in getting my not-stupid novels published in a culture that allows Gray’s Anatomy not just a respectful hearing but an apparently infinite number of seasons.
So.
My theory about why I watch Gray’s Anatomy is that I used to think it was just another primer in how to hate white men, so it was enjoyable for its freak value and also to remind me to keep a weather eye out on the culture. See if there are any new dangers arising. How many times have these surgeons gone into detailed fantasies about the violent things they would do to men if they had the chance? The show would have been shut down instantly if men had talked like that about women. But my latest idea is that I’m thinking that race and gender hatred teaching is only the show’s ostensible reason for existence. I think it has a covert agenda beneath the routine hatred of men and the routine promotion of race division between us all, and it’s this: it actually hates women.
And here’s the thing about hating women and its relationship to war: if your whole culture is set up to hate women and children, you have no real reason to fight. If you can’t protect your women and children, what in God’s name are you all about?
Whatever you say, your tv shows are revealing what you mean.
Real war isn’t like nonsense-war talk. Not like pretending women are stupid on Gray’s and not like all this verbiage (is that French?) and yada yada Ukraine this and Russia that, some nonsense across an ocean. Real war is something you avoid at all costs. No matter how much someone insults you, you don’t respond. Screw your ego. You think going to war because someone insulted you is worth it? There’s no “partial” war or police action. Walk away.
That’s it. Walk away. What were you even doing there in the first place?
Walk away. And pay no attention unless you think you’re so great you can help. All this paying attention across oceans just feeds the flames. We started a war in 1914 or so and it took thirty years to play out. The Thirty Years War, and we pretend we weren’t the aggressors. I love Tolkien and Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis but I’m definitely going to have to part ways with them on this one. Don’t, start, a, war. That’s my theory. There’s really only one mandate: stay away from violence at almost all costs. Real war is terrible beyond knowing. Only softies in softie cultures think war is something reasonable or a place to show off your courage or “duty” or “sacrifice” or other platitude. Avoid it. Don’t go somewhere to help someone with it—that just reveals your ignorance of war. Stay away. Stay far, far away. Don’t, don’t, don’t get involved. Not until the last moment, and you have no other option, and even then, you should probably avoid it. Not until they’re right here, right here, and there’s no other other option. Not all these pretences of no other options. Real lack of options. Nothing between you and death or, worse, lack of freedom. Then smile one last time, raise that fluttery left hand, and strike. And God help you, strike hard. I mean God help you, because the aggressor will be beyond help.
There’s only one kind of war and it’s the kind you should avoid at all costs. At the end, there’s either zero or one person standing, never two. That’s war. Everything else is some sideshow. There’s only one kind of war and it’s the all-out kind. Generally no survivors at all. Stay out of it.
Get, out.
Stay, out.
Stop giving it attention. Have you read my last thirty articles on war? That’s right, you haven’t. They don’t exist.
The last thing on the mind of a wisewoman in her watershed is war. She is all about love and peace and cycles and the fruit of the land. A wisewoman doesn’t do war, doesn’t engage in war, doesn’t ask for war.
She is war.
Don’t push her too often.
That wasn't even the main thing I wrote today. A spurt, no, a spirit comes into me.
seventeen minutes? Jeez. That just kind of spilled out of me in a couple of hours. I wonder what the word count on that would be. Talk about guaranteeing no readers. Anyway, it's in the archive for a century from now.