There’s talk of a draft. I think we should dispense with the talk, forget about the worrying over the details, and get down to business. We need Americans to participate, every one of them, in the national project of murder and destruction overseas. Not just the youth. They know how to kill; they have been trained for years watching friendly terrorism on television but are barred from watching humans in the act of love. Contrary to popular wisdom, the draft should not ignore the capacity of old farts like me ? at 38, ready to run away with the best of them ? nor that of any good American in shape enough to pick up a weapon and make a fool of himself. The draft should extend to every able-bodied male and female aged fetus to corpse. A widespread, unerring, unsympathetic draft that allows for no escape due to employment, class, race, position, influence, heritage.
Consider first the usefulness of the fetus in the conflict. Imagine the sheer moral impact on our enemy of the deployment of the unborn in battle. The fetus flung through air at high velocity, let’s face it, is a terrifying thing. Imagine you are a jihadi in one of the distant outposts fighting the empire. You’re enjoying the usual falafel and rat. You hear the warning of incoming ? fetuses! They fly, flapping, amniotic, bloody, half-formed. They land in your midst, smashing like egg yolk. In close combat melee, our warriors can swing the newborns overhead, holding the belly cord and setting the black-matted mother-wet thing on fire with kerosene.
Corpses alike: Stand them up, with smiling rotten visages, and place them as such on the ends of drone robot half-tracks, propped up with specially designed corpse-propping rebar sure to induce a corpse-propping rebar investment bubble. Let these dead, with the helpful investment of Wall Street, bring the message. I say stuff the dead with stock options, Bibles, pork, jello, and smartphones. Meeting the newly born and the newly dead, the enemy will be sure to know our seriousness, the gravity with which we face them.
So let us train under this new dispensation, the national project made clear. Even the dung-beetling men and women on Wall Street and elsewhere in the corporatocracy will not be spared. They too will serve the god. Let us be psychopathic lunatics, but let’s do it together, and let’s do it honestly. Let’s not outsource to the mercenaries, or give up the task to the lower classes. Let this be a true national patriotic effort. Let us work with the M-4 and the Beretta and the bayonet. Let us understand how to kill at close range. Let us understand how to choke a man when the ammo runs out, to crush his larynx, to cut his artery where it matters. Let us know, each of us, the meaning of the phosphorous bomb, the smart bomb, the fragmentation bomb, the burning bomb, the bomb against our own children and friends and lovers and towns and cities.
Come to think of it, as we enlist the fetuses and the corpses of the nation, let us have demonstrations in major cities as to the power we unleash. Let us test this darkness, preferably on ghettos of darkies. In New York City, I know lots of neighborhoods where the people, if they get together a petition of protest and a city councilman to make sure it goes nowhere, will be hustled with nightstick and mace-spray. Bomb the niggers first ? we need test subjects. Then, when their neighborhoods are leveled, the fathers and mothers imprisoned or burnt to husks, the jobs gone ? except where we can outsource a corporate reconstruction ? get the bereft sons and daughters to join the army of empire.
There will of course be a downside in a program of widespread forced conscription if indeed it ranges beyond the ghetto and the underclass. Because if we really want every American to participate, no matter his privilege, there will be protests. Not, of course, because of a moral objection. But because of physical cowardice. This current generation, my generation ? by which I mean my own class, the cheap mindless bought-off bourgeois bohemian class ? is probably the most physically cowardly generation in American history. It is as sure as sun-up that a draft engaging these young worms will result in the worm’s turning, en masse. The worms might even end the wars.
Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer who splits his time between Brooklyn, NY and Moab, Utah, is writing a book about secession movements. Contact him at cketcham99@mindspring.com
