Isis E. Prosser

@IsisStormDragon

Writer, Procrastinator

She/Her
lairofthestormdragon.com/

Demiromantic asexual lesbian in love with Samus Aran. White. 28. Dragon who hoards stuff. I designed a small game once; hope to design more someday.

(IsisDreamWeaver, from Twitter, for any who know me from there)

Isis E. Prosser @IsisStormDragon2/17/2024, 5:05 AM

@krveale

kavita @yrgirlkv2/16/2024, 8:30 AM

During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in - and which we lost - every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

—kurt vonnegut, interview with nuvo news (alt source)

#kurt vonnegut #art #writing

Average Choster @IkomaTanomori2/16/2024, 9:04 AM

The power of custard pie depends whether the stepladder is positioned over an important person's face.

The USA government completely restructured how they pursue war to avoid the counterculture movement ever repeating. The massive consolidation of media companies allowed a coordinated move without any active coordination into a news landscape where no residence movement could possibly be portrayed as successful.

The enemy certainly thought that combined power was potent. So much so that they spent billions to redirect, recuperate, and disperse that power.

The idea that justifies the act is formed in the imagination and usually based on a story. A weapon is merely a device for making an enemy change their mind.

I think Kurt had a strong double sided metaphor there. I don't think his choice of a kind of food which not only goes splat but which is known for being used for such on people's faces as humiliation was coincidence. I think it's precisely on point.

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in reply to @yrgirlkv's post:

oriana @oriananonexistent2/16/2024, 6:41 PM

maybe what we need isn't more power, but more custard

i don't know what this means but maybe someone else will, and make something work

Gadfly Goods @Gadfly-Goods2/16/2024, 7:00 PM

clearly the solution is to aim the pie at somebody's face rather than the ground

kavita @yrgirlkv2/16/2024, 7:06 PM

you are, i think, interpreting vonnegut's simile more literally than may be useful

Gadfly Goods @Gadfly-Goods2/16/2024, 7:09 PM

perhaps

in reply to @IkomaTanomori's post:

ROTSHARP, mirror-ape ogre @rotsharp2/16/2024, 10:51 AM

but the american people did not hate war, they hated conscription and there is a strong argument to be made that what finally ended the war was the propensity of officers to end up dead behind friendly lines. there was countercultural moral outrage sure, but there was also a statistically significant amount of officers being killed by their direct reports. this is the origin of the term frag, which as a verb meant to blow up your sleeping commander

Average Choster @IkomaTanomori2/16/2024, 3:18 PM

Well no the origin was in WWII with frag(mentation) grenades (the use of) but the connotation became as you say in 'nam, yes.

I think we're actually pointing at the same phenomenon here. Completely ending conscription as a practice even though it's still there in the law is one of the biggest things that was completely changed about how war is fought by the USA. Instead, social programs were gutted so that the veterans supports for medical and college and housing could be used as big draws for recruitment. With that, bam, every vet you talk to who hasn't been shattered in combat or had buddies who were, treats the military as this great personal growth experience and they're so grateful etc. This happened because they simultaneously made a change in the moral language used about the military, so that it became about service, not glory.

The tactical doctrine was also changed - all that stand off air striking, and once drones became available, even more stand off. The Gulf war, the first invasion of Iraq, actually had a big tank battle (though with extreme materiel advantage on the US side). After that, you never see that again. Troops on the ground are police in regions claimed after any identifiable military force has been bombed into the ground. It's blatantly obvious the difference between this and the infantry offensives of Vietnam - and the effect was to limit the number of casualties reported for the US troops while ensuring they were all technically volunteers.

And circling back to fragging your CO: that's where revolution was happening. Military mutiny. That's why the US government shit its collective pants. And why it was right to. If the soldiers refuse to shoot who they're told to, that's when popular revolutions succeed. It's also no accident that we've seen a systematic transfer of military hardware into systemically white supremacist police departments. The revolution that had their trousers bricked was the Black revolution. You didn't see white hippies armed to defend themselves, robbing banks to fund their operations. And that racial divide between white counter culture (mainly, as you pointed out, against the draft) and Black revolution (more fundamentally opposed to the national system) is how the movements were ultimately defeated, and white counter culture and elements of the Black revolutionary movement recuperated in the way civil rights and Woodstock are taught in school.