Purple Passion Pearl Harbor

In a surprise attack that has the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff flummoxed, and the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment hamstrung, American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and numerous military bases around the world, as well as sailors aboard Navy ships at sea, have erupted into mass demonstrations of hugging and kissing, and repeated and disorderly shouting out that they are gay, “happy together,” proclaiming that they are “telling without being asked,” and “ready to go home now.” Encryption experts at the National Security Agency (NSA) have determined that “telling without being asked” is a defiant retort to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) personnel policy of the U.S. military.

All the military brigs and stockades are filled to overcrowding with such disorderly service -men and -women, but the number of offenders is so vast that the services cannot confine the entire population of “sexual orientation mutineers” (SOMs), as the top brass have dubbed them. This “purple passion military awakening,” as advocates from national LGBT organizations have labeled this phenomenon, is a surprise to everyone and has instantly undone ongoing military operations.

The obvious problem is that as openly gay soldiers, sailors, airmen and airwomen are deemed unfit for the U.S. military (because of DADT), the services now find themselves without personnel to implement the many campaigns being waged. In frantic emergency meetings at the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense are struggling through what is reported to be acrimonious debate to arrive at a consensus on what to do.

One option advanced by fiscal conservatives is to proceed immediately with mass discharges of current military personnel (which these conservative advisors recommend be “dishonorable” so as to dramatically reduce the future cost of veterans’ benefits) and then try to quickly recruit and train a new mass of acceptably ‘gayless’ — or at a minimum, undetectably gay — soldiers, sailors, airmen and airwomen.

This tack is seen as too damaging to military readiness, and the continuity of military operations, by liberal military advisors who instead recommend the issuance of a general letter of reprimand to be inserted in current servicemen and servicewomen’s personnel files, with a penalty of the forfeiture of one week’s pay, and then offering each SOM service person an otherwise clean record and elimination of any pending charges (for nonviolent offenses, including insubordination) in exchange for an immediate return to duty.

The proponents of this liberal approach counter the howls of conservative protest that it is “a pusillanimous pandering to prurient pilfering of patriotic pulchritude” because it is not just a complete negation of the existing DADT policy, but its active antithesis. This liberal approach would accept openly gay troops henceforth. The popular advocates of this policy tout it as “pink patriotism” while the enraged opponents deride it as “poisonous pansy-ism.”

While the policy debate rages, U.S. military operations around the globe are in abeyance, and one immediate consequence of this lull is a dramatic drop in both military and civilian casualties in the various war zones and occupation zones manned (and ‘womanned’) by U.S. forces. Such casualties as have occurred this week seem to be simply due to the usual types of household and road accidents, and not armed conflict.

Unless the problem is solved quickly, the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere will not be able to proceed, and the entire thrust of U.S. foreign policy will collapse amid a hail of ridicule from around the world. The President warned that unless the U.S. military can overcome “this pink tide of emotional pacifism and interpersonal distraction” that “clouds our national resolve to maintain the rigor of our thrusts in many sensitive vital areas,” the United States “will disappoint our many partners, who want us behind them” in their struggles “to secure a satisfying state.”

Despite such concern, the collapse of U.S. war-fighting efforts has received a worldwide happy reaction. A spokesman for the U.S. State Department dismisses this initial overseas positive reaction as “no doubt due to a lack of understanding about the true meaning of the situation, and on sober reflection foreign governments and populations will soon realize how dire the situation will be for them unless the U.S. military can return to its traditional role and stabilizing activities around the world.”

The Israeli government as well as a number of Kings and presidents of nations in the Middle East echoed this concern, pointing to it as “the major security issue” for their administrations, though the government of Iran and the general popular sentiment “on the street” throughout the region remained “rapturously gay” on the subject, as characterized by the Iranian press.

In a recording sent to Arab language media, a spokesman for Al Qaeda said that their franchises would certainly be on the lookout for any “homo-erotic infection of our cadres by the degenerate Crusader occupiers” nearby, and they would be quick to behead any Al Qaeda member who exhibited “this disease from the West.” A Tea Party congressional member of the Military Affairs Committee, commenting on the Al Qaeda communiqu?, agreed with the idea claiming “it would do a world of good for the U.S. military to enforce a similarly high standard of moral discipline.” However, a recent poll of likely U.S. voters shows them to be cool to the idea of firing squad executions for military personnel court-martialed for purple passion mutineering (PPM), with 49% opposed, 34% in favor and 17% undecided.

The purple passion pacifism (3P) crisis that has collapsed U.S. war-fighting capability is still unresolved tonight, and the world waits with bated breath to see what will transpire. Never has the fate of the world been so precipitously punctuated by such a precarious period pendulous with perilous possibilities. Professor Algernon Illingworth, a retired Oxford don and aging classicist, quipped to British television reporters that we were “witnessing an inversion of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.”

It was later reported that Illingworth was placed on a “no fly” list by U.S. anti-terrorism agencies, and a search was initiated for the operative code-named “Aristophanes Lysistrata” (dubbed “A-List” by the CIA, and who has not yet been identified but is expected to be detected soon and tracked by anti-terrorist imaging from space satellite, ATISS). Once identified, A-List’s web-purchasing accounts will be blocked to thwart terrorist activity. The work of freedom never rests.

MANUEL GARCIA, Jr. is a retired physicist who puts two and two together. (When unblocked) he can be reached at mangogarcia@att.net.

 

Manuel Garcia Jr, once a physicist, is now a lazy househusband who writes out his analyses of physical or societal problems or interactions. He can be reached at mangogarcia@att.net