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Elsewhere in the April-May, 2008, issue of Armageddon Buffet, Tyrone Nagai performs a cinematic autopsy in "Lola and Jean."

On the (now-blogged!) Road to Armageddon, read about Armageddon Buffet's tragic adventures in MySpace Land in Signs and Portents of Armageddon!

Wars, Famines and Pestilences looks at Ralph Nader's war with his inner Alpha female!

In Preparing for Armageddon, find out when you are scheduled to die.

Finally, in The Cassandra Report, see how reality imitates fiction!

Next issue: June 2008!!

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Armageddon Buffet is dedicated to encouraging artists and writers -- the canaries in our human-designed Hell -- to chronicle the End of Days with a bird's eye view.

  Editorial / What the %$#@ Happened? By now Scott McClellan's book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception has hit the stores, but the media and political sturm und drang arrived a week earlier. The book makes the case that the rationale for the Iraq War was a manufactured lie -- and the "useful idiots," like McClellan, Colin Powell, and the "liberal" media, shouldn't have believed the lies. The evidence for it being a lie is overwhelming: Iraq, and Hussein, were no threat to the U.S. -- until we made them one by invading their country, destroying their government, economy, roads, schools and oilfields, and killing thousands upon thousands of men, women and children. Enough to piss anybody off.

Editorial / How We Got Here Five years in Iraq. 4000 American dead, with more to come. 10,000 others permanently handicapped; an unknown number traumatized. 90,000 Iraqis dead -- taking an average of the high and low estimates, because no one is really counting.

And no end in sight.

As of this writing, a week-long battle has just ended between Iraqi government forces and the Mahdi militia of Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, leaving hundreds dead in Basra and the Sadr City enclave of Baghdad. Hauptkommandant Bush praised the initial assault by Iraqi regular forces as proof that the government in Baghdad was functioning as it should and asserting its authority. Unfortunately, the Shiite-led army could not hold the line against the Shiite militia; Iraqi police looked the other way as the militia held the streets, and American troops had to take over the fighting until al-Sadr called another ceasefire. So . . .who's in charge?

Editorial / It's the Stupid Economy At the end of January 2008, a month in which the American stock market lost 8.8% of its value, the economy has come to dominate the news and the presidential campaign. Once more we wake up from our American Dream to learn that another bubble has burst -- like the dot-com bubble that ended the previous decade -- and that as a nation we should have known better.

Editorial / It's Not How Wrong You Make It; It's How You Make It Wrong This December 6 will probably not go down in infamy, although it was the day Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor, took the stand for religious liberty. That is, for all people of faith. In defending his Mormonism, he observed that the only religion that should be reviled as un-American was "the religion of secularism" with its belief that faith should be "a private affair with no place in public life." Although he made some noises about the separation of church and state, he did not go so far as Kennedy in 1960, who in fact argued that religion was a private affair.

Editorial / Between Iraq and a Hard Place What we call the cradle of Western civilization -- from Mesopotamia to Israel to Greece -- gave us the basis of our agriculture, our alphabet, our religion, and our political system. It also passed along the story form we know as tragedy -- from the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh through the biblical stories of Samson and David to the tales of Achilles, Hercules, and Oedipus. In all of these a man with a special relationship with the divine overreaches, having stumbled into the belief that his own power or virtue signifies that he himself can do no wrong.

Editorial / And So Fourth Another Independence Day has passed. Supermarkets and drug stores have bins of discounted flags and patriotic red-white-and-blue napkins to wipe your mouth on. On the Fourth United Statians lit barbecues and fireworks, listened to patriotic pronouncements on TV, to Sousa marches, or to the ritual reading of the Declaration of Independence-all, the mantra goes, to "celebrate our freedom."

Editorial / Memorial Day If Andrea Yates was crazed (or guilty, under Texas law) for sending five children to a happier place, if Cho was disturbed for punishing 32 for their sins, if the young Muslims who kill themselves and others in Allah's name are "evil," what should we say of any individual, or nation of individuals, who claim a holy right to rain death upon their enemies -- not to mention the collateral damage? As Pascal said, speaking from the standpoint of the French Enlightenment, to really do evil, one needs religion.

Editorial / The Republic of California As we watch the regime of Bush II slouching toward the landfill of history, it merits remembering that only two years ago, as term two began, the media buzzed with awe for the "genius" of consiglieri Karl Rove and dropped to its knees before the power of the Christian Right and the "values voter." Meanwhile, serious talk of emigration ensued as many a Californian and New Yorker eyed the kindlier, gentler America of the North -- i.e., Canada. And once again there was talk of secession.

Editorial / What Does It Mean: "Support Our Troops"? Something similarly mythic and unreflective transpires when Americans -- across the political spectrum, it must be noted -- repeat another ubiquitous saw: "Support Our Troops." First popularized in the Reagan era as a response to the contemptuous treatment, real or imagined, of Vietnam-era troops by war opponents, it has theoretically come to mean separating one's attitude to war from those who fight it. Antiwar politicians and street protestors alike affirm their support for the troops, and in fact use it as an argument for their cause: they support the troops by seeking to bring them out of harm's way and back to their families. Prowarriors, on the other hand, argue that one can only support the troops by withholding all criticism, not only of the war itself but of the Commander-in-Chief, on the grounds that such opposition "undermines morale." For these militants, "Support Our Troops" means only one thing: "Support Our War."

Editorial / Yule Wars, Episode Three: Attack of the Clowns This is the time to ask the BIG QUESTION, the one both sides of this particular controversy have failed to ask: What the hell do fir trees and electric lights have to do with the myth of Jesus? I mean, really?

Editorial / Reality Bites Back So much for the evil genius of Karl Rove. This year the majority of voters feared the continuance of Republican misrule more than they feared the usual suspects: terrorists, immigrants, humanists. The base -- the 31% who still think Bush was chosen by God -- mostly showed up to punch cards, pull levers, and touch screens in His name. But they got swamped in a Katrina of their party's own making. In most places the vote wasn't close enough to steal: The Bushites made enemies faster than they could disenfranchise them.

Editorial / One Party Country After all, if one thing has become increasingly clear in this political flu season, it is that even the best laid plans of mice, rats, and well-funded rightwing think tanks can go astray. While the Republicans have proved adept at taking power, they cannot govern, and the voters are restless.

Anonymous / The Joy of Thinking... for Yourself Those who assume (often unconsciously) that it is impossible to achieve their life's desires -- and, thus, that it is futile to fight for themselves -- usually end up fighting for an ideal or cause instead. They may appear to engage in self-directed activity, but in reality they have accepted alienation from their desires as a way of life. All subjugations of personal desires to the dictates of a cause or ideology are reactionary no matter how "revolutionary" the actions arising from such subjugations may appear.

Editorial / The Pathology of the Right The fundamentalist, like the Right Wing Authoritarian, craves an Almighty Father telling him what to think and do, a Big Daddy who greets any response but unquestioned obedience with the Big Belt; either that, or he wants to be the Alpha Male himself. Either way, he hungers for the hegemony of absolute authority. What all this analysis comes down to is that the RWA is a case of arrested development, someone facing the complexities of adulthood with the fairy tale perspective and ego-centered apparatus of the kindergartner. Whatever he believes or wants to do is right. Anyone who disagrees is bad and should be hurt.

Editorial / The Curse of Reagan Since he began his tramp to the White House, W. has touted himself, and been touted by his loyalists, as the true heir of Ronald Reagan. Although only too happy to use his daddy's name, political and corporate connections, and big money pool, George the Lesser otherwise distanced himself from George the Elder, whom the Right holds responsible for bungling the Reagan Revolution and yielding the White House to a Democratic successor. The son was the Real Thing -- Classic Coke for Republican activists who called themselves "conservative." By his own words, Bush's only true father is God. Begotten in Immaculate Misconception, born again at the end of the 80s, he sprung sinless from the head of Reagan, taking the remainder of Der Gipper's addled wits with him.

Thomas Logan / Ain't None of You MuthaFuckas Ever Gonna Take My Humanity Leaving the cinema while every slackjaw muthafucker backslappingly cheers his sublunary humanity as though Shakespearean prose issued from their chaw-chewin' beer-guzzling maws, I am left with a certain raw, putrid taste floating around my jaw reminiscent of age fifteen when I was jumped by five gangsta-types and spent the next two days pulling shredded-wheat mouthflesh from out my braces. These invasion movies always leave me in a stupor: Who are we exactly, and why not cash this in? Hell, resistance is futile, and, after all, the possessed do promise that it's much better on the other side. If we're dead set against alien invaders and their alien definitions of life, what are we for?

Editorial / Democracy = People Power Among those most surprised by this spring's marches, not surprisingly, were those who objected to them. The most vitriolic responses came from the pants-wetting Right. Radio Nazi Michael Savage referred to the marchers and their immigrant base as "vermin." One Faux News reporter wondered aloud why the INS wasn't on site with helicopters and nets, rounding the masses up for deportation. Columnists and letter writers fulminated on editorial pages. In places like San Diego County where secondary school students left class to participate in demonstrations, seething citizens demanded that they be expelled. Calmer voices asserted that the demonstrators should instead have expressed their opinions through politically approved conduits, like voting or writing letters to congresspeople -- even though most of the demonstrators did not have a vote or a representative, either because they were under eighteen or not citizens.

Harold Jaffe / The Writer in Wartime You live in Des Moines, Iowa, and are a published novelist with a modest reputation based on your narratives about white middle-class domestic crises. You also serve in a National Guard military police unit, and your company is called up and sent to Iraq to function as MP's in Abu Ghraib Prison, west of Baghdad. There, you observe and strongly disapprove of the unlawful abuse and torture of the inmates, many of them innocent Iraqi teenagers snatched from the streets. Do you continue to write narrative still lifes or do you bracket your customary subject in order to bear witness, to broadcast as widely as possible the unlawful, immoral treatment in Abu Ghraib?

Editorial / Restoration Republican Style While ours has never been a perfect democracy -- it began, after all, as a slave state and is now presided over by the man who came in second -- it was stumbling in the right direction in the 1960s and 70s, the final decades of the Democratic hegemony. And then came the era of Ronald Wilson Reagan, the Demiurge, whose number is 666. This editorialist has long theorized that after the triple trauma of Watergate, the ignominious end of the Vietnam War, and the economic seizure of the Arab oil embargo, America lapsed into post-traumatic stress disorder and clinical depression.

Editorial / Death American Style Americans were not always like this. In the wake of World War II -- yea, even in the reactionary Fifties -- support for the death penalty was in decline. Since the Republican era commenced, however, morality has given way to religiosity, with a concomitant evangelical passion for judgment and retribution. Only in the wee minds of the chauvinistic mob does this nation remain a paragon of virtue.

Editorial / Our Babylonian Captivity Ironically, so engulfed is our population in the murky waters of Lethe that the majority have forgotten what made the Vietnam experience so drawn out and excruciating. Americans believed as early as 1968 that that war was a mistake and probably unwinnable -- and at a cost of 5000 dead troops per year rather than the 1000 we expend now. But given repeated chances to endorse withdrawal through electoral choice, the majority opted for another seven years of war. As a warrior people, Americans hate quitting. They would rather go down bleeding.

Editorial / Republican Crime Family Values The summer of 2005 will be remembered in presidential history as the moment the worm turned on this particular resident of Pennsylvania Avenue. In the aftermath of the Katrina disaster, we find all the promises made tardily and hastily in front of the news cameras evaporating like the last remnants of the flood. After hurricane Rita we watched our Lord of Misrule squat at a relief site with a tool in his hand, only to demonstrate that he might hammer in the morning but in the evening he'd be back in Washington, lobbying for tax cuts that will make rebuilding the Gulf Coast impossible.

Editorial / Waking Up from Reagan's Dream Will Miers be the final piece in the generation-old Republican plan to overturn Roe v. Wade? Both sides have been raising campaign contributions on the abortion issue for thirty years, since the runup to Reagan's election, sometimes as if that were the only issue that really mattered. In fact, it would be interesting to see how the general public would react to a reversal of abortion rights. While most Americans claim religious affiliation, even if only to a non-denominational God who approves of everything they do, just as large a number insist they do not want the government making their moral decisions for them.

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