Wake up dead man
by Matt Worley

I've been having candle problems all weekend. It all began when I put a new candle in my nearly blackened votive holder. For some reason, the wick slipped down a bit and the candle hasn't been able to stay lit for very long. I've chipped bits and chunks of candle away in hopes that these preventive measures will once again produce a healthy flame. Unfortunately, some of these seven for a dollar votive candles just aren't up to snuff. Eventually, if the problem isn't cleared up, I'll just have to take a big knife, hack away until the offending candle is obliterated, and replace the defective with something new. Probably a different colored candle.

What can I say? There are problems on the horizon. And even with the UN General Secretary Annan talking for hours with (the Big Bad Wolf) Saddam in Iraq, the U.S. seems to be ready and willing to bomb the hell out of the desert again. And while this might help those who export glass to Iraq, it certainly won't help the Iraqis' real problems: the ability to eat and sleep in peace.

This has been building up for months, by the way. It's not just something that "happened" in the wake of the whole Lewinski affair. And while the folks at Ohio State had the right idea, someone should have said something sooner. Say in January. And not to berate the protesters even more, but what the hell is "1-2-3-4, We don't want your racist war?" This war, no matter how you look at it, isn't about race. It's about power. How much the U.S. is willing to give Saddam and how much the U.S. wants to keep for itself. And at the bottom of the pile there is another doozy: perceived threat.

The United States has been in love with perceived threat since World War II. While WWII was about turning the tide (for freedom, I think), every other war our country has been involved in (well, I don't know what the hell Grenada was) since then began because of perceived threat. Instead of waiting until the Big Ugly Head of Evil actually sticks its hairy neck above the foxhole, the U.S. has been pounding other countries into submission so we don't have to get shocked like Pearl Harbor again.

This attitude is shared by many of the citizens in the United States as well. Not in the "wave the flag, we're going to war" type thing, but in other subtler ways. Car, burglar and fire alarms. Life, car and lawyer insurance (that's right, just in case you might get sued someday). Seat belts, driver side airbags, child safety seats. Movie, TV and music ratings. For some reason, we're so in love with protecting ourselves from stuff that might happen, we've forgotten that most of the time nothing does happen.

As a sensitive young man growing up in the 80s, I was always on the alert for Nuclear War. Since I lived near an Air Force Base for 10 of those formative years, we heard air raid siren tests every month. Just in case we ever had to use those air raid sirens for something real, the city made sure those suckers were cranked up at 5 p.m. every third Wednesday of the month. I don't know why I wanted to know I was going to die a few minutes before actually dying, but I sure thought it was important.

Now I have to wonder if all of our "Be Prepared" strategy has turned into a first strike mentality. In the Cold War, decades of spending decided the outcome, not decades of fighting. We spent billions on thousands of nuclear missiles, super secret bombers, silent running submarines and other neat gadgets of war. We hardly ever used any of these things because the threat of using anything against the U.S.S.R. was certain annihilation on both sides--and probably most of everything in between. And we believed the perceived threat because we had pictures from WWII of what happens when people use big bombs to solve problems.

And maybe it was all that "commie bastard" propaganda that has sullied my taste for war. I just don't believe their press releases anymore. No matter how cool the movie Platoon is, you gotta wonder if any of that was really necessary. Did we really need to kill off a bunch of our young people when nothing was accomplished in doing so?

And now the candle is responding to my ministrations. The flame is burning high, melting away wax like a seasoned pro. I didn't want to pull out the big knife and kill the candle, even if it was only worth cents on the dollar. I knew if it persisted in its uncandlelike activity, a hostile response was inevitable. But luckily the candle has come around. And maybe, to extend this idiotic metaphor worldwide for a second, the rest of us will too.

Matt Worley is predicting air strikes to begin on Wednesday at the latest. He'll let you know next week if he's wrong.

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