"Viva La Muerte!"

Millan Astray was a gnarled gargoyle of a man. By the start of the Spanish Civil War, this founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion, a militant supporter of Franco's Nationalists, had lost his left arm and right eye fighting colonial wars in Africa. He was a bloodthirsty, war-ravaged tryant whose endorsement of Franco was driven more by a desire for continued warfare than any ideological commitment. He taught his Legionaires the rallying cry "Viva La Muerte!" or "Long Live Death!" The only thing that got his desiccated old pecker to stand at attention was the smell of gunpowder and the screams of the dying.

Right now, this country is being run by a pack of Millan Astrays: all of them in love with death and utterly disinterested in helping those who are still living. They are abetted by millions of tiny little Millan Astrays who are even more repellent than the original: at least he, for all his cruelty and blood-lust, paid a physical price for his addiction to murder. These modern day variants cry for carnage and death, but from the saftey and comfort of American living rooms, expounding from their ergonomic computer keyboards, commanding others to shed the blood for them, so they can enjoy the fireworks on Fox News without any threat of injury.

Witness the vile, scumfucking right-wing commenators (Jonah Goldberg, Mona Charen and Glenn Reynolds among them) who, having spent the last five years calling for the September 11th attacks to be met with blood, and blood and more blood spilled, demanding that the slow-motion massacre in Iraq continue indefinitely, now have to confront the non-terrorist-related disaster on the Gulf Coast. Without a Bin Laden to demonize and Arabs to destroy, the only comment that most of them can be bothered to make is to CALL FOR THE SUMMARY EXECUTION OF LOOTERS. Considering how many questions are raised by this tragedy, considering the massive charity mobilization that must take place to alievate the continuing misery, the only sentiment that these people, with their paid positions of punditry, can think to express is not compassion or righteous anger at the murderous ineptitude of the rescue operation, but rather the fantasy of machine-gunning people carrying big screen TVs. Only violent death dealt by vicarious authority figures can arouse their imaginations.