Causus Pooterhead
From the depths of my feverish, cough-syrup fueled hindbrain I gotta toss this one out there – I’m not even sure of the original source of the quote (which was attributed to General Hawley) but it tickled me so much that I fell off my chair laughing and ended up coughing up a wad of phlegm that looked like Nixon. Again with the horking up dead presidents in mucus… whatever. It happens when I get really sick and it settles in my lungs. Okay, enough with the ad misericordium segue… read this and be as tickled as I was:
“‘Violence only leads to more violence.’ This one is so stupid you usually have to be the president of an Ivy League university to say it. Here’s the truth, which you know in your heads and hearts already: Ineffective, unfocused violence leads to more violence. Limp, panicky, half-measures lead to more violence. However, complete, fully thought-through, professional, well-executed violence never leads to more violence because, you see, afterwards, the other guys are all dead. That’s right, dead. Not ‘on trial,’ not ‘reeducated,’ not ‘nurtured back into the bosom of love.’ Dead. D-E Well, you get the idea.”
Call me bloodthirsty, but the concept of making a first strike the last strike isn’t a new one. And if you’re not making the first strike but instead are in the position of retaliation, make it stick. As my stepdad used to tell me, never be the one to throw the first punch, but always throw the last. (Actually, it was something more like hit them back twice as hard and make sure they don’t get back up even if you have to break their bones to see to it, but that wasn’t as pithy as my edited version and would have betrayed his professional bias in instructing his young stepdaughter in the fine art of self defense.) Not sure why any of this is relevant or interesting to anyone but me, but I’ve recently noticed that about 90% of this blog really shouldn’t be preserved for posterity, so what the hell. Here’s my fluey contribution to clouding the ether.