Be prepared

Just a warning. I'm going to get grim. I mean, way grim. Grim like Nick Cave opening for Leonard Cohen at a concert full of war widows, terminal AIDS patients and crying girls who just watched their kittens get run over by a truck.

Okay, you’ve been warned.

Maybe it's my nihilism coming back into perigee. Maybe it's the pervading gloom of non-stop clouds in a Seattle winter. Maybe it because part of me, that savage animal which likes to sublet my soul and is bored with all talk and no action regarding Iraq (Christ, if you are going to attack them, do it already and change the headlines).

War is coming. I found myself watching highlights of last night’s Big Speech and I stared deep into the black pits of eyes belonging to a man who verbally swaggers when he talks about torture and the killing of terrorists. Here is a man, guided by the hands of a failed king, to kill for peace, to plunder for prosperity, to lead by defying his friends. It’s all just a matter of time. A man who believes so much in Jesus is ready to go Revelation on us.

And retribution will follow. It may happen first on the verdant plains of England, maybe the shifting sands of Saudi Arabia, the holy history grounds of Israel or the erotically intertwined streets of Paris, but it’ll happen. Despite what the inoculated man in the expensive suit behind the podium tells you, it’ll come and you won’t always be protected. Death will come in the spores of bio-weapons, the clouds of chemical agents or the irradiated dragon teeth of a suitcase nuke.

Whatever it is, I’m close to not caring about the possibilities of weapons of mass destruction anymore. Sure, I live in a city that's a possible target for terrorist attacks, and nothing ruins your day like smallpox blisters or the involuntary convulsions due to VX, but I'm reaching a point where I don't care.

Part of it comes from the ongoing mystery of the Anthrax killer. Remember that fellow (or madam, who knows)? Killed a few postal workers and at least one in Florida. Sent anthrax (fever, cough, then death) to Democrats. And then, disappeared into the ether. People dead, part of our government crippled, a vital part of our infrastructure used as a delivery device and, poof, no one caught. If we can't get the person or people responsible when it happens here in such a small attack, how can we take on a suicide bomber willing to release a vial of Sarin in our airports or at the next All-Star game?

Another part of it comes from my childhood, recalling some failed actor talking tough with 20,000 missiles under his belt, joking about the bombing of Russia happening in five minutes. Oh, that jokester. I suppose I’ve been waiting for the end for quite a while now. And in a fit of juvenile-sized Stockholm Syndrome, I took comfort in understanding that the one side would get wiped out if it tried a pre-emptive strike. After all, thanks to technology, we could figure out the origin of launched missiles and send something to the return address promptly. Hey, we’d all go out together. Now, with this asymmetry, no one knows when and where or even who. When the next major strike hits, it’s going to be a matter of cleanup, not protecting the castle walls.

I don't believe my government will protect me. I don't want to bunker myself and stock antidotes. I suppose it was easier during MAD, thinking that a nuclear blast would kill you instantly. Here, with bio and chem weapons, even dirty nukes, you linger with enough time to tune in that the government or rescue teams won't get to you in time and you'll die by degrees, written off as an acceptable loss, a learning exercise.

Before 9/11, I carried the belief that eventually there's going to be a kind of pocket warfare in neighborhoods and large cities. Thanks to the Web and the non-stop engines of invention and bitterness, people can figure out how to make crude explosives and even basic chemical weapons to get back at the neighbor or attack the home belonging to "the wrong kind of element." And it’s not all that hard. Give some household chemicals, a copy of “Chemistry for dummies” or say, a Costco card and a copy of “The Anarchist's Cookbook” and I can level your local shopping mall, “Fight Club” style, faster than it took God to create the world.

George Case, in the slim and remarkable "Silence Descends," imagines war with nuclear weapons in south Asia as a way of settling first millennium grudges with second millennium technology. It doesn’t matter who has what, it's why we think we need them.

And that’s why I’m terrified the most of what’s coming next. Why countries and despots are armed with such weapons has never been asked. Even the bare ounces of reason that all the protesters, letter writers, scientists, authors, experts and concerned souls pushed forward in marches and missives for peace are going completely ignored. We have lost all reason.

War is coming, and so will retaliation. With a foreign policy like this, the best I can hope for being at ground zero during a full-on nuclear blast, as I did when I was a child and another cowboy king was in office. A bright flash and maybe time for a last thought of something, lingering on my mind like fresh flowers or the smell of coffee on Sunday mornings when my wife gets out of bed long before I do. I want my mind trapped there when revenge comes calling and my eyes are burned away. I know I’ll have little choice where I’ll be when it happens (although I don’t want to be at the mall, a la Coupland’s “Generation X”), but I know I’ll have the choice to go out thinking what I want.

I shall think of my wife, her soft eyes and flowing hair.

I shall hear the purr of my cats, curling up with us in bed as night gives way to the subtle stirrings of morning.

I shall remember when I saw the ocean for the first time and thought, “Japan is over there on the other side.”

I shall see the constellation Orion swirling above my head, like a piece in a grand clockwork.

All in that nanosecond between skin-wrapped thoughts and doomed vapor.

Think of it as a last line of defense for a civilian with little recourse left to him.

Note: this was inspired by a discussion at Salon.com's message boards, a place I sadly lurk like a junkie does at a crackhouse.

Today’s Word: Process

From One Word, grammar errors and all.

Yuck. What a generic word. Sounds as if it’s be dredged up from all those corporate-speak seminars, lessons where you say things that have no meaning or weight. Reminds me of buzzwords from the dot-com era: synergy, outsourcing and all those poisonous non-words.