Mr. Fish cartoon: "Our" increasingly impotent empire

As a (violent) peace activist back in the early ’80s, I used to rant on about the penis envy of both the U.S. and the S.U. (Soviet Union: ever notice how their initials were mirror images?) to think they each needed 50,000 nuclear missiles trained on each other’s cities in order to “deter” the other’s attack. Back then, many people were horrified that I used such overt sexual language to describe the obscene absurdity of where our M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) had led us.

Back in September 2011, when the earthquake (or was it a direct hit on one of the Deep Underground Military Bunkers (DUMBS) hit close to the Washington Monument and cracked it so badly that it is now closed to the public, I immediately likened this “fail” of our greatest monument to Empire to a flagging penis:

“Could it be that even in daring to ask if the Washington Monument is leaning, we are collectively recognizing that this possibility symbolizes the beginning of the end of the obscenely bloated U.S. corporatized military hard-on that has been battering, poisoning, raping, ravaging, and devouring the weak and the vulnerable and the entire Earth ever since the Soviet Union went through its own collapse and, rather than dismantling our own bristling defensive/offensive MAD doctrine, instead swelled into the world’s single, utterly dominant “hyperpower”?

“Is this humongous cancerous monstrosity that has taken all our treasure, ruined our values and ideals and what remained of our innocence actually beginning to deflate, to go soft, to become impotent? If so, let us breathe a sigh of relief, let us celebrate, and let us pray that it falls all the way to the ground.”

Now we have Mr. Fish, weighing in. Aaaaah. Should I publish this extraordinarily overt piece of obscenity? Well, why wouldn’t I? Do I want to treat our sensibilities delicately, to continue to cover up the mass atrocities “our” military/industrial/corporatist/pharmaceutical/medical/educational Empire continues to casually conduct? No. Decidedly not. No. Here you go.