The Coward’s Stage...

Do not mistake my disgust for virtue.
I have no interest in being counted among the righteous, and I will not perform the tedious pantomime of moral cleanliness. I have trafficked in violence. I have regarded it as one might regard fire; dangerous, useful, and never to be mistaken for divine.

But what has unfolded in Venezuela is something altogether more repellent.

Here we have men who mistake spectacle for strength, who clothe their appetites in flags and parade their insecurities before cameras like medals. Soft bodies in rigid suits, lacquered in artificial bronze, eyes darkened, hair stiffened into defiance, puffing their chests as though volume might substitute for substance.

They crow, they preen, they prance.
No Americans killed, they boast; relieved, not restrained.

And so the bombs fall. Buildings collapse. Civilians vanish into statistics. But the oil flows, and that, apparently, is what greatness smells like.

Let us be honest, since honesty is so conspicuously absent.

This was not done for principle.
It was not done for freedom.
It was not done for peace.

It was done because there was money beneath the soil and the will to take it by force.

I have never pretended otherwise when my own hands were involved. I did not sanctify my actions with rhetoric. I did not wrap them in hymns. I did not demand applause while the blood was still wet. My violence is naked, principled, and confessed; an ugly thing, but an accurate one.

Yours is draped in hollow pageantry.

You speak of nearly two hundred of your “greatest Americans” as though proximity to devastation confers nobility. You dare anyone to question the carnage without accusing them of betrayal. A clever arrangement: weaponize loyalty, monetize death, and call dissent treason.

But when fear is the mechanism, civilians are the collateral, and profit is the prize, the word remains unchanged by uniforms or accents.

It is terrorism.

It does not cease to be so because it was executed efficiently.
It does not become respectable because it was televised.
And it does not transform into greatness simply because it was committed by men who believe themselves entitled to the world.

I am a monster, and I am an unambiguous one.
I do not confuse my hunger with justice.
I do not mistake extraction for destiny.
I do not require an anthem to excuse my reflection.

You do.

And you are beneath contempt.

History will not remember the spray tans, the excessive hair products or the slogans. It will remember the crater, the ledger, and the lies. And when the applause fades, what will remain is not power, but exposure.

And no, before the symphony begins, this does not make you great again.

It does not make you the best.
It does not make you powerful.
It does not make you feared in any way that history has ever mistaken for respect.

It makes you familiar.

It is imperial terror by another name, indistinguishable in its logic from the very atrocities you invoke whenever moral outrage is convenient. There is no meaningful difference between raining death from the sky for profit and raining it down for spectacle. Ask the civilians crushed beneath the rubble if your flag mattered. Ask the survivors if the American exceptionalism changed the outcome.

Pearl Harbor was terror.
September 11th was terror.
This? This is the theatre of monomaniacal jingoism dressed up as national pride, it is no different.

Calling it patriotism does not absolve it.
It indicts it.

When military leaders, swollen with complicity, direct their subordinates to follow orders that marry themselves to illegality, when obedience is prized above law, and loyalty above conscience, that is not service to a nation. It is devotion to an idea so fragile it must be cloaked in ambush and enforced at gunpoint.

That is not patriotism.
It is jihad by another vocabulary.
Seditious. Treasonous.

I must admit, there is something almost amusing, darkly, queasily so, about the pageantry of it all, the interpretive dance of the weak, and the useless. A commander-in-chief who covets a peace prize while bombing half a continent. A man who has overseen strikes across seven, perhaps eight nations, sanctioned deaths on suspicion alone, and still fancies himself an emissary of peace.

The resurrection of titles long thought embalmed; Secretary of War, Department of War, even the grotesque efficiency of war.gov; as though rebranding brutality might make it palatable. Irony, it seems, did not merely die; it was buried without ceremony.

Attila the Hun, at least, never pretended to be misunderstood, or feigned masculinity.

No, this is not greatness reborn.
It is a mafia of the feeble-minded, rotting in real time.
A nation mistaking appetite for destiny, obedience for honor, and terror for strength.

History has seen this before.
And it never ends the way its architects imagine.

Greatness does not require terror, and terror has never been mistaken for it.

You are not for sale…
#ProjectBlackbird
J\L