...
By way of reminding you of the differences between Clancy and me: I have $630 left in my account paying for some kind of electrical fault on the Subaru. I have no idea what the problem was. All I know is you don't wanna be car-less in Fresno, not with summer coming. I'm more scared of the Fresno summer than von Paulus was of the Russian winter.
If you think Clancy's a real war nerd like me, how come he was willing to spend 200 million for an NFL franchise -- and in Minnesota at that? And if you still think he's for real, how do you explain the Orioles? The NFL is at least about people hitting each other, trying to snap each others' bones. Baseball is about cowardly jocks spitting and snoring. Anybody who'd buy a baseball team is out of the war-nerd club forever.
Think about what you could do if you had that kind of money. Money is what bin Laden used, and he made himself a one-man crusade. Everybody in America is scared of one skinny Saudi. Like the librarian said, "You may not agree with his program but you have to admire his determination." Or look at this Khattab guy who just got killed in Chechnya: Another rich Saudi who became a warlord by buying his way in.
"Warlord" -- God, that's the most beautiful word in the language. That's the job you want. With 200 million dollars you could buy your own army. Take some place like the southern Sudan, where there are a half-dozen ethnic and religious wars going at once. You know how far that kind of money would go in a place like that? You could not only buy your own army, you could buy your own slaves. Yeah: slaves. They have'em. They may not be the cutest girls in the world, but they're thin at least and they have a good attitude: trained to submit. Ritual scarification. You could have your pick from every village. They'd be honored. "At your service!" No age or consent problems either. Brand 'em so they don't go astray.
Or if you don't like the way those African girls look, you could go to Central Asia -- one of the 'Stans. Kyrgyzstan is nice and cheap I hear. Or Tadjikstan -- there's a lot of Slavic blood in the mix out there, and some of those girls look like starved models. Only not snotty like real models. On the contrary: delighted to be chosen for your pleasure.
With 200 million dollars out there on the steppes, you'd be Shah. Ride the steppes all day with an eagle on your wrist and your retinue in attendance, hunting small game and children: "Swoop, my beauteous eagle! Swoop on yon peasant brat!"
Come home at the end of a long day of hunting, dismount onto a kneeling servant, then chill out in your yurt -- clap your hands when you're ready to have them parade today's harvest of peasant girls from the local villages past you. Choose whichever you want. Hell, choose two, they're small.
In fact, with 200 million dollars, you could choose real models if you wanted. First you have to build up a private spy service; once you've got that you could kidnap any girl you wanted, from anywhere in the world. Take a field trip to Rome, sip your drink at a sidewalk cafe with a half-dozen Kyrgyz slavecatchers standing behind you, and wait till you see someone worth possessing walk by. Then lift one finger, point her out and say: "That one." A week later she's delivered to your Transylvania-style castle in Central Asia in a wooden crate. She might have a bit of an attitude in the beginning, but those things can be changed. People in the 'Stans know how to fix a bad attitude. A week in the dungeons and she'll crawl to you and beg to be of service.
It's not just a dream. There are guys doing it right now. Kim Jong Il, the Great Leader of North Korea, has talent-spotting teams all over Asia picking out the best girls, kidnapping them and presenting them to him, gift-wrapped and terrified, in Pyongyang. Supposedly he's a fan of South Korean movies. He uses them to preview the merchandise. Sits there at his private screenings and when he sees something he likes tells his agents, "I wish to interrogate her." That's all it takes. They grab her off the streets of Seoul and when the bag comes off her head she's in Pyongyang, scariest place in the world, with Kim, this jowly little nearsighted freak, feeling her up, panting and whispering, "Capitalist bitch, you will be now be reeducated by me!" You don't have to like his ideology but you have to admire his style.
When that sort of indoor life gets dull, you could invest a little of the 200 million in hardware and start a little war of your own. You can get anything you want out there: T-72's are going for scrap-metal prices. People think tanks are useless, but that's way oversimplifying things. Tanks worked beautifully for the Serbs till the NATO airforces got involved. If you're fighting irregulars in a treeless landscape like the 'Stans, tanks work just fine.
So you buy some MBTs, some artillery, go in and just wipe out one of the local clans. That'll get the locals' attention. They love a winner. Make your own flag. Your own uniforms. Convert the whole place to some cool religion, dump that Islam nonsense: declare the first Zoroastrian jihad, rolling back the inroads of Islam, that imported flea-ridden Arabian cult. Or, I don't know, you could revive the old Egyptian gods. No, Zoroastrianism would be better. It's more local, and pretty cool too from what I've read.
Worshipping fire, leaving your dead on rooftops to be eaten by vultures. Think of the speeches you could make: "We are the Army of Flames, the Sacred Fire of Tadjikistan, and in Zoroaster's name we vow to burn across the steppes until all is cleansed and ashen!"
God damn, think of the possibilities! The CIA would love you: an anti-Muslim jihad! They'd need C-5A's to hold all the cash they'd send you!
A war like that is just a big pyramid scheme: you take a village and distribute the loot and the women to your men. Then you round up all the surviving men and boys from that village and offer them a simple choice: join us and be reimbursed with the loot and women from the next village we take, or die right now. It's a very effective sales pitch. Repeat until the whole Steppe is yours.
That's how the African armies work. Nobody gets this, they call it "atrocities" and claim not to "understand how human beings can behave" the way they do in Sierra Leone and Sudan, but they're stupid -- stupid or just pretending, I'm not sure which. What's so difficult to undersand? It's the oldest and most sensible style of war. Compare it to, say, WW I: which kind of war would you rather be in? Gassed or blown apart in the trenches -- for what? What do you get out of it? Now compare that to war Central-Asian or African style: the village over the hill has some cute girls and some nice carpets, so you sack it, kill the men, enslave the girls, recruit the boys and move on. By the time you're on your third village you've got such a big rep that the girls are in no mood to object and the boys can't wait to be issued an AK and a license to rape and pillage the next village.
"Rape and pillage" -- now there's a career I could give my heart to.
To come out of that wonderful dream to this, to a duplex in Fresno, and the office and the job...it's torture.
That's why it makes me so fucking crazy to see Clancy, this supposed war-nerd who has all that money to play with, use it to try to buy a jinxed football team, fail, then settle for a piece of a shitty baseball team. Baseball! Even football is war for wimps. For cowards. For office workers. And that's all he is, Clancy: an office boy, a fat insurance agent who sucked up to Reagan and got lucky.
I may be the loser here, but at least I'm serious. If I had Clancy's money, I would burn and pillage from horizon to horizon. There would be columns of smoke from every direction. I'd become a warlord, not an NFL franchise owner sitting in a corporate box talking about pass defense and smoking cigars.
...