It looks like some war may indeed break out in Asia and we don’t seem to care that much. Not quite a Cuban Missile Crisis (all rights reserved Associated Press), or another Iraq I or Iraq II, but there is a slight risk today that did not exist yesterday. That we can wipe another nation off the face of the earth because some kid slips on a trigger or some deranged leadership decides to push the button (take your pick if this means us or them). This may be good for both parties. We get to unload some of those bombs we’ve been building for some time and take out another nation of the Axis of Evil (was this a Bushism or Rumsfeldianism?) and North Korea gets to turn itself into one huge BBQ. Which would be so retro to have a “nukular” war now. After all these decades of worry, SOVIET threat, survivalist this and that,we find ourselves engaged by the one place in the map we don’t have light pollution because they’re literally in the dark. Great. First world vs. …. what, the fifth or sixth world. I don’t even think they are Third World anymore, I think you need at least a few cell phones for that these days. And, radioactive or not, we don’t seem to care.
As this story develops, it seems strange that this is but a side story. Doncha think a decade or two back we’d be all peeing ourselves over this? All we would talk about. War? Ya mean a war in Asia, ya mean WWIII, ya mean take Debbie and little Billy and run to the hills, evacuate the cities, “remain calm people, no need to panic” the announcement would say. Fucksake, when was the last time we tested the Emergency Broadcasting System, does that thing still work?

In the event of an actual emergency, this station would broadcast instructions….

I mean, did that miniseries the Day After or the Morning After or whatever tell us that the lucky ones would die in the initial heat flash? Oh snap, I don’t even know where my fall out shelter sign is. Do I have batteries in my Geiger counter? I should pack my go bag. I should make sure I have a wound so I can’t be drafted. I should hide somewhere far from NORAD, NASA, or the original Starbucks.
This seems dire. The North Korean Twitter account was hacked. Their Flickr account was disabled for a few hours. What is going on? This isn’t top news? No? Anyone want to play thermonuclear war? No? A nice game of chess? Does anyone have a VCR, I have Red Dawn, we can review what happened then, how to defend ourselves from…. oh…. Seems the world has moved on from screaming no nukes. Seems that our alliances and opponents have shifted off the script and we have bored with anything so analogue as a 12 megaton bomb. I mean, it isn’t digital, doesn’t have “cyber” in it. Better coverage of the “cyber attack” of Twitter than the actual attack of an army of 2 million strong. Those dudes don’t have to launch anything. Just a wave of hungry solders hyped up on Dear Leader and his father’s stuffed animal collection to come into South Korea and beat them to death with sharpened sticks. However, again, so mid-80s. Fuck this nuke war shit, we’re done with that. We fly drones now. Friggen North Korea so not an issue. Which is strange. Since Iran isn’t even to the build-a-bomb stage or ready to test anything other than a really loud speaker to call the nation to prayer and Israel and the US is ready to bomb the shit out of that country. We’re up in arms at the slightest noise, the least veiled threat, the stupidest unveiled threat, and the papers have headlines about the danger of this rogue state. I mean, rouge state or not, they’re not ruled by a family that collects DVDs of American action films or builds a museum devoted to all the dumb shit normal people would hide away and like all eccentric families, could do something really, really, stupid and not in their interests.
Like launch a war.
Meanwhile, Iran must be stopped because they think about enriched uranium when they jerk off at night. It is strange to see who we shit the bed for. Guy living in cave. Shit the bed. Oh the terror. Oh god, fucked up country has weapons of mass destruction, yeah the country that lost every war it was involved in (Iran/Iraq war technically a stale mate), that country will cause terror, that nation will rise up and destroy the world. Afghanistan? We must stop the goat herders, if not for the sake of the goats, then the rights of women. We must invade them, find a guy in a cave, and give women the sort of rights we fight tooth and nail to prevent in this country (a little hyperbole but just run with me).
Now. We have a country run by an actual crazy person. A nut-von-coocookachoo. A nation run as a cult. A cult of crazy people. Craxy cult nation run by a nutter and this nation has bombs. They may not be able to launch them far, but they have actual weapons of mass destructions. Where is Collin Powell? Where is their a vial of something for him to hold up. These fucking people actually have mobile missiles on trucks, we need not pay some RISD flunky to draw these up on posters…. Yet, page A2… Three stories down on the NYT online, after a story on… the morning after pill. Yes, tweens being able to get scripts are more important that a war. A war with Atomic bombs. The duck and cover type. The “oh that shit will float right over to California” type of fallout.
Perhaps what North Korea needs in order to be taken seriously, to be a threat to the world, to Israel – our only democratic ally in the Mid East is to have some oil under their soil. Yeah, that would make this very scary, then I guess we would take this seriously, to place our Terror on Red, to go to DEFCON… uh… been so long I don’t remember which way it goes… to 4? Is 4 bad? Yeah, to DEFCON 4 and sound the air raid thingys… Then we’d see Colin Powell hold up a vial and tell us today mushroom with ginger BBQ, tomorrow, a mushroom cloud.