A beautiful mess of a post, have an upvote. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it seems like in the first paragraph you are bemoaning people who build their life around poignancies and who act on the belief that "that our desires could never disappoint us, so long as we remained loyal to them." But then in the…

I'll bite. Another sucker for The Giving Tree here, who would love to hear what other books you feel hit that same emotional note.

@avclub-5171864ab150444a2bcff2d4c52d3064:disqus - I think it would be more accurate to blame the Bush Administration (or Obama's, or Regan's, etc) more than the military, although placing all blame in one basket seems silly.  The case that military-industrial complex always wants war is not hard to make, but I don't…

@avclub-e14267dedd4e1d0cc0093bc13643fd59:disqus ; if you've got info on why the Bush Administration is blameless in Iraq I'd love to hear it.  

I agree that broadly shitting on the military is pretty naive. If trilobiter said instead of the "the institution of the military" the Bush Administration, and traded "telling lies about the world to promote the interests of capitalism" for cherry picking and aggressively promoting known faulty intelligence to promote…