The Sisyphus of Kabul (Part One)

 

"Yea and I beheld Sisyphus in strong torment, grasping a monstrous stone with both his hands. he was pressing thereat with hands and feet, and trying to roll the stone upward toward the brow of the hill. But oft as he was about to hurl it over the top, the weight would drive him back, so once again to the plain rolled the stone, the shameless thing. And he once more kept heaving and straining, and the sweat the while was pouring down his limbs, and the dust rose upwards from his head..." -- Homer, "The Odyssey", Book XI.

I would like to speak for a while on the subject of futility.

But first, a little background for those who do not know very much about their future dictator. It is necessary to get this out so that you may understand my current state of abject, murderous rage.

The Overlord is a 9/11 "survivor".

I put that in quotes for the following reason: I was not inside the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001. In fact, I had just exited the building at the time Mohammed Atta and his 19 religious douchebags unleashed their Kamaikazes for Allah Shitstravaganza. I had just left the Concourse beneath 1 WTC and was passing by the southeast side of 7 WTC when the first plane appeared directly overhead.

I am alive by a matter of yards. Perhaps 40 feet. The half-a-dozen or so people 40 feet behind me were not so fortunate: they did not have the luxuries of either time nor space when the debris rained down, knocking off a piece of the granite facade that clad 7 WTC which efficiently and gruesomely crushed them to death.

I do not remember the "boom" that came with it. The sound I do remember is that of 6 or 7 people being instantly crushed. One does not forget that. Ever. I can sometimes even still see, in shadowy memory, the cloud of dust, perhaps tinged red -- I honestly sometimes don't know -- escaping from beneath the stone.

The clang of metal as steel girders fell from the sky; the sound of great masses of glass shattering into trillions of pebbles and falling to the street like heavy raindrops.

And the rest of it. The ringside, as it were, seat for the horrors to follow: the smoke billowing from a massive hole in the building 80 or so stories up; the collapses; the mushroom clouds, the massive wall of dust speeding up the West Side; the millions of pieces of paper suspended high in the air hours after the event; the chaos as those capable of doing so fled for their very lives, only to be buried by debris and dust.

And then came the next 18 months working near Ground Zero, the worst of which -- once one got used to the near-constant smell of burning everything for weeks and months on end -- was the nightly ritual upon arrival home.

That was when one would take a shower -- a necessity after a day in Manhattan at that time, for the thick, greasy black dust got into the creases in your face, clung to your hair, eyelashes and eyebrows, and left a foul taste in the mouth. It even managed to get inside your clothes, so that you would find a pasty gray film in the folds of your skin and inside your undergarments.

The water would run over your head, and you could watch the stream of now-black liquid travel down the drain, and the though that occupied one's mind at that moment was always :

That's somebody's ashes. Fuck, it might be everybody's ashes.

What followed was not pretty: agoraphobia, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The slipping of little pieces of paper inside shoes and clothing (in case something happened and they only found a piece of you, at least they would know who it belonged to); the endless funerals and memorial services that would repeat upon the discovery of a new portion of someone's lost remains  (I went to the funerals of one guy three times, and they still, to my knowledge, have never recovered his entire corpse); the avoidance issues when it came to airplanes, mass transit, or crowded spaces; the repeated Emergency Room visits and the usual 12-14 hours testing and unmitigated terror before someone would tell you "No, you aren't having a heart attack. Go home".

Ten years of my life...gone. That's how long it took to finally get all of the collection of mental disorders under control. That was ten years of not being able to work regularly. Ten years of living in fear of the words "cancer" or "sarcoidosis". Ten years of unexplained rashes that came and went, with no one having the slightest clue as to cause or meaning. Ten years of intensive therapy.

As we come upon the 20th  anniversary of this monstrosity, I will celebrate it in the same fashion as I have the last 19. That is to say, I will be locked in a darkened room, isolated from everyone in my life, the electronics turned off, undertaking no activities beyond drinking and excreting, crying my goddamned eyes out.

At least I don't do it curled up in a fetal ball on the floor, anymore.

I often tell myself that those who died on that day were the lucky ones. I don't envy them their manners of death, but they were spared much. They did not have to suffer the years of torment that come with memory; they are, indeed, fortunate to have not lived to see what has become of their country, of their culture, in the intervening years. Had those people lived, I reckon, they'd all be as thoroughly shocked, appalled and intensely angry as I am right this very minute.

The Invasion of Afghanistan, ostensibly for the purposes of "getting" Usama bin Laden and "bringing him to justice", with the ancillary goals of "giving" freedom to Afghans, depriving the Taliban of a base of operations, and demonstrating American 'resolve" in the face of Islamofascist terrorism, is a fucking farce.

Perhaps it always was.

It's bastard children -- the Second Invasion of Iraq, fishing Saddam Hussein from a sewer hole, getting involved in civil wars in Libya and Syria -- are beginning to smell just as bad. This nose knows rancid aromas -- I can still smell the World Trade Center wreckage whenever I go into Manhattan, these days, an acrid, sour, almost stinging stench of burning plastic, rubber, bodies and who knows what else, but who is to say if this is a real sensation or merely the physical manifestation of a psychological response?

I don't even know, anymore.

I just know the pungent perfume of Hell. I'm often told by other religious assholes that this is my final destination, and I laugh at them.

Been there and done that, my friend. Your God doesn't frighten me.

Those people haven't the slightest clue; just the fantasy that is inscribed in whatever book of bullshit it is that they prefer.

The images now coming from Kabul, the stream of information now flowing through out of the idiot boxes to our brains, all can be reduced to a single word.

FUTILITY.

For the last 20 years have been nothing if not an exercise in futility. In the process of "destroying the Taliban" we have, instead, destroyed ourselves. In the attempt to spread "democracy" to every shitty sandhole this side of Suez, we have fatally torpedoed our own Republic. We have, finally, although I think we all had a slight inkling of this thought before it all happened, discovered that the people we have entrusted with our safety, our security and "Our American Way of Life" are not up to the task... they never have been.

But then again, they never were much interested in such pedestrian goals.

How do I know?

The results speak for themselves. You either have to believe that 20 years of rule by the "Best and the Brightest" have resulted in such colossal fuckups completely accidentally, or you may console yourself with the idea that events simply exceeded ability, or you have to conclude that this was The Plan all along.

Or, you just might have to consider the possibility that the people in charge are seemingly so useless and ineffective because they don't live in the same reality that you do. They certainly don't appear to. That option seems most likely to me.

None of those four possibilities is an attractive thought.

In the coming days, I will attempt to document the events that have transpired ever since that fateful day when America lost it's collective backbone and sanity and decided that the only way to achieve "peace" was to make a blank space on the map full of inbred mountain tribesman mentally mired in the 7th century and enamored of sheep into a Potemkin replica of the 20th Century West,

I will try to explain why I think why it failed.

I will endeavor to explain something of what I think the motivations behind it all were (and continue to be), beyond the simplistic notion of "justice" that we were spoon fed by people who I have either defended or castigated vigorously in the past, but now just want to fucking kill.

In my business, Information Technology, it is axiomatic that your results are only as good as the quality of your input and the validity of your process.

Any error, any imperfection in either and your result is useless. It is now abundantly credible to believe that the input and process of the last 20 years has been dangerously, if not fatally, flawed.

And the results that this system vomited up were Bill fuck-it-if-it-holds-still Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Hussein Obama, Donald Fucking Trump and Clueless Joe Biden, an ignominious retreat, a culture obsessed with the minutia of it's genitals, consumed by it's often-childish and insipidly-vague feelings, spiteful and petty to a fault, that has come to resemble an insane asylum of overgrown children run by fucking monkeys.

Drunken monkeys.

It's Vietnam and the 1960's, all over again. And THAT is a best-case scenario from where I'm sitting. Only with Starbucks, Chinese Snotstorm and 5G.

Stay tuned.

Part Two can be read HERE.
Part Three can be read HERE.
Part Four can be read HERE.