Explorations of the faith-based economics of pro-war pulp.

I've been trying to figure out what ties together the array of reading that I've been doing lately...I mean, after all these years of punishing excursions into the writing of power-obsessed megalomaniacs, dictators, werewolves, sociopaths and others that wield their power like a unyielding, telekinetic force...is my real reason "Know thy enemy? Or is like when people that find epiphanies in the writing of the disenfranchised because for the first time they hear own their story being told? Hmm...maybe then, it is in dwelling amongst the words of the mountain sages, transcribed in the rarefied, frozen world where only the exalted and strong can survive that I find myself at home?...but it occurs to me...maybe not everybody considers the Fort Lewis Ranger and the Weekly Volcano (the South Puget Sound Arts and entertainment weekly) important, quasi-essential reading... But in the attempt to understand the situation that I find myself in,(my real motive for reading!) I feel that I must consider all things in their context including myself...and I, am in the South Puget Sound Area, down the road from a very active air force and army base that ships military vehicles covered in Iraqi dust and depleted uranium in and out of the Port down the street...and there are army helicopters and planes droning overhead...in a time of war...and then I realize what ties together all the reading I'm doing lately is that it is about Now. Even if now began in World War two or the Crusades...in reading the articles in the local weekly papers about government compensation for sexual dysfunction in war-wounded veterans, I feel like I'm reading the clairvoyant litanies of like, oracles, who, speaking in riddles and burdened by the their gift of sight...reveal, cryptically, the big forces moving just below the surface...the Fort Lewis Ranger reporter's unflinching eye that gazes equally upon the cataclysmic and mundane, always seeing the one in the other. I'm tentative at times like these, afraid to cause ripples in the information-pregnant air in the room all around me as I read on...that these ripples would cause irrevocable mayhem at their furthest extension. And so pulling reality inside, I read more, learning but not really understanding...triangulating my position but like, two-dimensionally...still missing the z-axis, the third dimension, and frozen there while the world goes on all around. I now know for instance, the Weekly Volcano says that the best costumed karaoke in Tacoma is not the Java Jive but some other place...but that doesn't help me understand the loaded gesture of people coming back from the Port of Tacoma protests singing 'Rock the Casbah' with a recently divorced 18 year old Iraq War Veteran...and that this all happened before, in 1991! Besides the local weeklies, this summer I've been reading these books:

On the Lower Frequencies, a Secret History of the City by Erick Lyle
Beyond the Green Zone by Dahr Jamail
Falling Man by Don Delillo
Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin R. Barber
Baghdad Burning by Riverbend
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Terry and the Pirates ('43) by Milton Caniff
The Film Factory edited by Richard Taylor and Ian Christie