North Korea got to keep its nuclear missiles. American got 55 boxes of bones.
Shrewd.
Apparently, North Korea has figured out who we are now.
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We are an America content with symbols and flags and fireworks and the anthem. We're a big, squalling, narcotized baby, and North Korea tossed us a ring of keys to make us stop crying about a mini maniac with a Moe Howard haircut and a bushel basket full of nukes.
We bought it, and why not? The symbols are all we have left. A memorial to a dead Confederate traitor can loom over the poverty of a Southern city, and we'll fight over the monument before we'll fix the poverty.
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And you can't disagree. You can't say we got the fuzzy end of the lollipop because, if you do, you "hate America" and don't "respect our troops."
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"Those aren't just BONES," they'll tell you. "Those are the remains of dead HEROES!"
You want to see the bones of heroes? Wait until North Korea's whack-job leader finally figures out how to lob a nuclear warhead into Tokyo.
Or Los Angeles.
You'll see bones when that happens, and they'll be easy to find because they're gonna glow in the dark.
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But the nukes are gone now. Oh, they're still in Korea, but they're gone from our mind, numbed away by the boxes of bones and the heroic soldiers saluting them as they come off the plane, and soon, very soon, perhaps an orgiastic thumbsuck of a military funeral for the bones of guys who died when America still had a sense of honor and an attention span.
It is a filthy thought to bring those Korean War dead back to a nation so cracked and split, to a place where it's so hard for a high school graduate to get a job that'll feed a family, to a government that seems to miss the segregation of the 1950s but not the prosperity.
"Yeah, boys," I tell the bones in the boxes. "The segregationists still march in the street. They killed you, and they let you rest for a while, and now they've shipped you home to this America where we cover every ugly thing with the flag. We should have left you where you were because, if the spirit goes with the bones, your spirits are coming home to a failed America."
No matter. Those boys served once, and they'll serve again, except this time they'll serve at home, as puppets in a creaky patriotic show, dancing and gibbering in the wind, while the stock market speaks their lines from behind a curtain, and the crowd chants "CNN SUCKS." This will be done, in part, to help the re-election of Donald Trump, a man who didn't even have the courage to burn his draft card, and was rewarded with the leadership of the country. Those boys got blown out like a match, but Trump was still climbing on porn stars decades later.
Yeah. It's a rich man's war, and a poor man's fight, and the winner is the guy who stays home, and grows old, and corroded, and richer and richer.
And one day, that hog-fat rich man, convinced of his own intense patriotism, dickers with a dictator, not for the safety of the living, but for the mute bones of the dead.
Play taps. Play it soft and low. Play it for the bones in the boxes, and for the betrayed people who stand, bleeding, in the ruins of their country.