After having watched with a kind of mesmerized disbelief the long film Michael Collins, starring Liam Neeson in the eponymous role along with Aidan Quinn & Julia Roberts, I came away from the viewing as though I'd just stepped out of a death-house filled with the stench of rotting flesh. But I'm not writing a film review of this magnificient work of cinema.

     What do all of you think of the following phrase: "common, necessary slaughter" ? In other words, the very notion that human beings are condemned to wage warfare upon one another for ever?!!

     When does a man or, for that matter even a woman, who has taken up the idealistic banner of Pacificism in their youth finally realize that they cannot stand on the sidelines as though they were at some football game?

     Three years ago I wrought (wrote) a silly, fatuous, and satirical little piece which I entitled something like The Declaration of War upon All Other Wars!  Well, I'm not in a fanciful mood right now.

     Get this. Any man (or person) who has to defend himself with a gun is a coward. And based on that premise, ALL Republicans are not only stingy, greedy, hypocritacal—but they are cowards, some with a literal arsenal of weapons in their home. Now THIS, to me, is not only sickening, it is infuriating! All this clamour over the so-called Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, fabricated, let all of us not forget, prior to 1776 . . . has led (thanks to the machinations & eternal lobbying of none other than the NRA (The National Rifle Association) to a very, very sorry state of affairs in my not-so-humble opinion! . . . You don't even want to know what I actually, really think, because it would be to0oooo conflictual for reading, let alone for some sage and quiescent mind like that of David Brooks or even Paul Krugman to countenance. . . . But I'll tell you all This: I refuse to sit on my ass any longer, making stupid & insipdid comments here at OPEN SALON; no, I'm gonna take my case right out onto the street, where it belongs, where "the action" actually exists, where people annihilate each other at the drop of a hat in this blesséd country, thanks to the flood of weapons carried in the trunks of cars and suit-cases of law-flaunting capitalists who don't give a fuck about human life and just want to make a buck.

     Now, you ramp up that idea by a factor of a thousand, or a million, and you have the most horrendous problem imaginable.  Arms dealers, to foreign countries, the highest bidder takes the cake. And of course its all perfectly legal in this country (i.e. The United States of America) since free trade must be protected at all costs—even to the extent that our own enemies wind up with these very same weapons, because, guess what people, there are indeed middle-men out there (read countries) who will sell their recently acquired arms to other, less deserving countries, also at the drop of a hat. As Edward R. Murrow once said a number of times, "Good Night, and good luck."