Napalm As Entertainment: This Is What We've Come To?

NAPALM ENTERTAINMENT Air show in Brunswick, Maine Aug 25, 2012 Source: The Forecaster

You cannot make this shit up. Napalm was used to entertain the masses at an air show last month in Maine.

If you're as old as me or older you will remember the iconic photo of Vietnamese children running and crying as their skin was burned by jellied gasoline called napalm. It was nothing to be proud of.

Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut won a Pulitzer Prize for his photo of napalm victims taken in 1962.

My husband says he wants to cry because "Now jellied gasoline is entertainment" and he's older too, and things seem to be getting worse rapidly as the U.S. spirals down into endless sensationalizing of the trappings of war. Delegates in either Tampa or Charlotte -- it didn't matter -- chanted USA! USA! USA! And the small towns we drove through on our way home today had flags lining the streets, so many flags a person could not count fast enough to count them all. And he had watched parents hoist their children up into the cockpit of military planes at the private-public air show where ordanance was displayed like eye candy, and kids gazed lovingly into computers that spilled arrays of weaponized aircraft and the killing devices they are "capable" of carrying.

And Canada withdrew all its diplomats from Iran last week, and gave the Iranian diplomats in Canada five days to clear out. And our tax dollars are flowing toward supporting Al Qaeda and other militants in a bloodbath to topple Assad out of Syria. And the two "good" things cited in a debate between the fiery and righteous Glen Ford versus a mealy mouthed progressive claiming wins for the current administration: killing bin Laden, and bombing Libya. WTF?

Ok, I'm ranting, because sometimes it gets so scary watching militarism gobble up every resource while most people stare into a screen and pretend it's not happening. Or, they stand up and salute pretty willingly when it seems they'll have to comply or else make waves.

Making the rounds on the the Internet: Hamburg, 1936, a shipyard worker photographed being the only one in a crowd not giving Nazi salute during the launch of a navy ship. Source: Washington Post

As the ice sheets melt and tap water catches on fire like napalm when lit after fracking. As Fuji-san rumbles within and the spent-fuel at Fukushima teeters in the bathtub on stilts -- men are lighting vast swathes of napalm and calling it entertainment.