[NetBehaviour] A Slip of the Tongue

[Edward Picot]

What alarms me is that I find myself hoping the west will deliver heavy 
artillery to Ukraine in time to stop the Donbas region being overrun - 
but of course that means I'm really hoping for a lot of Russian soldiers 
to get killed, enough for them to get deterred and stop their advance. 
As if a load of Russians being killed was acceptable, because those guys 
are the bad guys. But there are no good solutions any more, no right 
answers.

Edward


On 6/14/22 5:47 AM, Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour wrote:
>
>
> A Slip of the Tongue
>
> http://www.alansondheim.org/buildings.jpg
>
> -- > I wrote the following satirical piece after using images
> from traffic and route applications, as a way of dealing with
> my own desire to leave the city I'm in. I was not, did not,
> think about Ukraine, not this time; I was thinking about
> Lowell, Mass.; we had just returned. All right. But that is
> insufficient. How much time should we devote to thinking about
> the butchery of Ukraine? How should we approach that? The
> images that we see now, in this stage of the slaughter, are
> worse, if that is possible, than some of the earlier; now the
> policy is scorched earth and total universal destruction
> within a region, the planet be damned. So that what I wrote
> below is preposterous, a satire where there ultimately there
> is none. Yet I wake in the morning often weeping at the
> thought of my own oblivion, my own isolation. It's not that I
> feel I should be "grateful" for what I have, but that what I
> have is irrelevant, as long as the world devours the world.
> There is no way to deal with this. I suggest again and again
> on a practical level to donate, speak out, do what one can,
> but always remember we are here and what is there is, in a
> sense inconceivable to us, not withstanding the daily images
> available to everyone outside of Russia.
>
> Again, I wasn't thinking at all about this, when it should
> perhaps for the most part be at the top of what we think about
> or at least we should not give us the luxury of forgetting it.
> Not now, and we should have had the same lack with Syria, with
> the Uyghur territories, with our response to Iraq, to Vietnam,
> to a litany of so many actions that as the Republicans might
> say, there are folders full of them.
>
> I don't want to deprecate my own work; that's for others to
> do. But I want to draw a line through this piece in relation
> to an emptiness which can only be full/filled by considering
> what it becomes with this introduction as the slaughter in
> Ukraine overshadows everything else we might be thinking about
> or through in our work or daily lives:
>
> "Help! Help! Get us out of here!
>
> http://www.alansondheim.org/Getusoutofhere.jpg
>
> Here we are! Now get us out of here!
> We, who have done so much (nothing!) for you!
> Get us out of here!
> We are dying in traffic! No! We are just dying!
> Read my books! Listen to our music! Watch my videos!
> Watch our videos! Get us out of here and we will never!
> Never! Never! Bother you again! Such humiliation!
> Such a waste of human talent! Us! Here!
> Now get us out of here! Get us out of here!"
>
> http://www.alansondheim.org/buildings.jpg
>
> Get us out: of here: of this transmission.
>
> __
>
>
> We're in Providence, image from Lowell.
>
> __
>
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