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| Perry Brass in May, Battery Park City. |
My friend Toby Grace, whom I adore and who is the editor of Out in Jersey, one of my favorite gay papers, and one of its founders, has an interesting weblog on WordPress called, “The End of DADT - The Begining Of The Right to Die For Insanity,” in which basically he iterates all the reasons why beautiful young gay men should stay out of the service, and by extension, out of war. He’s right: war is not just hell, it’s Shit & Hell. The best thing, in my opinion, ever said about war was from Oscar Wilde. The divine Oscar said: “As long as men feel that war is evil, they will continue doing it. It is only when they realize that it is downright vulgar that will they stop.”
War is downright vulgar. It’s sloppy, ugly, ruthless, and goes directly to the mangled corpse of the human soul.
It’s the game where all rules are off. Which is probably why at heart humans love war. They adore it. It goes back to those scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 when our near-chimp ancestors duked it out with sticks, stones, and bones.
The only problem is that war has outstripped our capacity to control it. We can’t control war no more. (Forget about “I ain’t gonna study war no more!”—that only worked in a Pete Seeger song.)
