"After all, there's a war on."

Before it was impossible to be casual about it. 'War' required shocked gasps, downward or upward glances, grimaces, groans, worried looks, calls for prayer, calls to prayer, prayer, profound head shakes, and a subtle disturbance in the artificial cheerfulness of invitation-only parties.

With all the work it brought to social interaction, the very best people stopped using 'war'. A flurry of euphemisms and allusions were trotted out, spun around, and quickly discarded. In the end, we found it more proper to over-ritualize the responses. Once the gasp-prayer-look-shake system was condensed to a soulful upward shaking glance it became clear that any response was superfluous. We had the phrase and the phrase had us. Clever accountants assured us that the savings yielded by our innovative economizing of spirit would go straight to the support of our troops, who were, of course, performing their orders with exemplary dedication and professional panache.

Thus, it became possible to use, 'After all, there's a war on.' as an epistolary comma with no fear of social or moral disaster. The phrase forced one neither to excuse nor condemn the failings of impersonal, interpersonal etiquette.

After all, there is a war on, perhaps more than one. So we do what we want and say that we do what we must. What we want and what we must become one in the propaganda of our senses and so in the standard hypocrisies of our rhetoric. We take the mildest stoicism in dealing with an emotional hangnail equally as an example of the greatest heroics or of the most pathetic cowardly mewings.

That suffering is, indeed, bad in some vague way justifies everything we do, and we do not suffer a mad dog to live unmolested. To slice someone's belly open with a razor sharp knife with a splash of alcoholic fluid and glee so that one might root around in the gory viscera with careful abandon so that one might feed on power over life is either the act of evil by a sociopathic murdering sadist or an act of good by a dedicated life-saving surgeon. In the end, that inflicting of red-laced wounds is as simple as a bullet to the head -- suffer as one does, the surgeon or sadist is comfortable with an ego well-fed.

And so our striking surgeons wield their weapons of flickering light against those we know not, those we see not, those we touch only with our flattened imaginations. With our bland spirtual sadism, our reduced rituals become piquant, a subdued orgy of masochistic denial. We reduce our anguished fury with the most general anestheticsm, placing heart and hand and rivers of tears behind the groggy mesh of odd duties.

And if the sophsticated surgical schools preach a back-to-the-good-old-future-days doctrine wherein hacking, slashing, smashing, clubbing, and the odd amputation work well with our more gentle narcotic devices, well, so be it. Violence is violence is a violet glow around the darker bits of our reflections; but our innocence remains regained indeed grows ever stronger and more chaste, so long as our eyes are closed, our fingers crossed, and our thoughts devoted to the denial of empire.