Question: What do our troops do when they’re stuck in some god-forsaken, outpost firebase in Helmand province, with no tv, spotty internet access, having worn the print off their one copy of Mad magazine, read and re-read Catcher in the Rye, and then receive a welcome box of books from a random stateside do gooder, eagerly tear it open and find 40 copies of Pinheads and Patriots?
(I wonder if these burned shard will be counted as sales on the New York Times best sellers list?)
From the Everqueer tumblr, which is maintained by an anonymous soldier:
“Some jerk sent us two boxes of this awful book (SPOILER ALERT: George Washington – Patriot; George Soros – Pinhead) instead of anything soldiers at a remote outpost in Afghanistan might need, like, say, food or soap. Just burned the whole lot of them on my Commander’s orders”.
The soldier later noted that the book burning was mostly a space-saving measure:
“The motivation behind the order to burn them was not political. As mentioned in the original post, we are in an extraordinarily remote location. We don’t have a post office here, so sending them back wasn’t an option. Extra space is scarce and alternatives that a few mentioned, like recycling, are nonexistent. All waste is burned on the base and in town; wood and paper goes in that barrel. I was getting rid of a bunch of cardboard boxes and the books were in the burn pile. There were 20 of them. I saved one for the bookshelf. I’m aware of the historical implications of book-burning. I won’t say I didn’t take pleasure in removing a few copies of this bigoted twerp’s writings from circulation, but the reason for doing so was military necessity”.
What a fucking patronizing thing to do. Sure, O’Reilly had to offload his worthless crap somewhere, but to use the troops as a personal dumping ground for his unwanted, surplus propaganda is just gross, even for him. He even seems perfectly okay with using his “I send my books to support the troops” trope as a promotion to sell more to the Teafolk back home (under the guise of “Books for the Troops,” O’Reilly strong-arms viewers into buying his latest bestseller by promising to send a copy of each one sold to American soldiers serving overseas). Sure, Pinheads and Patriots would be one of my three choices of “things to bring” if I were stuck in the desert, but maybe tough and highly trained soldiers aren’t sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for 40 copies of a book written by a blowhard whose didactic, insufferable, paint-by-numbers shit earns him millions of dollars. Perhaps they don’t want to be told what to read by a shrieking tv actor about how the “good” half of Americans needs to fear, despise and fundamentally question the sanity, motives and spiritual virtues of the “bad” half? He is so high on his own backdraft that he actually thought his propagandist tripe was just what a 19 year old on the front lines would want. God, I fucking hate this blustering, gay-obsessed pervert, who came barging into our living rooms uninvited, his sneering death mask and snarling lips spewing lies and certitudes, titillating a demographic who had previously been shut out of the self-righteous TV news-and-analysis psycho-loop.
The conservatoids non-critical idolizing of the “troops” has of course, given way to righteous anger at those who dared burn this stupid book. The usual deep reverence and chasmal benefit of the doubt afforded to the troops from conservatives could also be applied here, even if a serviceman does something that flies in the face of their fantasies about their “troops” pop culture consumption habits. As someone with many family members in law enforcement and the military, I find that the kind of tough-guy bullshit spewed by conservative broadcast warriors like O’Reilly to be a dim, banal parody of the point of view held by the folks who actually have to do the job. My uncle, a high ranking sergeant in the air force, retired to open an antique store in Vermont and tool around town in a Model-T. My other uncle, an army officer, retired with his vegan wife and 4 dachshunds to write a feel- good column in the local paper. Maybe these outraged, flimsy-skinned teatards should do what liberals, moderates, libertarians, communists, nerds, tweakers, hobos, tools, sports cocks, headbangers, crips, and dickheads do if they find their dainty feelings violated by the troops: STFU and thank them for their service. Whether these servicemen/women volunteered out of patriotic fervor or just dire necessity, the chaotic, nihilistic hellhole W and Rummy and Dick sent them to has turned lots of their compatriots into fucked-up paranoidal, hair-triggered outsiders, so do we really need O’Reilly’s racist, psychotic, bloviating vomit helping speed this along?
Perhaps this is just what happens when you let gays in the military — heresy from the conservative media.Anyhoo, note to O’Reilly and other celebs: if you want to promote yourself by using “supporting the troops”, maybe take some of your filthy riches to buy a couple of wii systems, some video games,a freaking Barnes and Noble gift card, and hand those to the front. And don’t FedEx it. Deilver it in person.