I wake up every single day and thank both Catholic and Protestant Jesuses for sparing me any kind of subterranean combat. The closest we came was having to check the occasional basement or root cellar, and those were creepy enough even though they were actually very easy to handle.
I can't wait to see what kind of nonsense Toddy-boy has told our bold and intrepid interviewer this time! I'm sure he will reveal nothing at all that is deeply telling about the current American psyche or the massive fuckfest the US Government in its various forms has made of almost everything.
The American Junta is stacking up contradictions at a breakneck pace, even by the standards of authoritarian and fascist polities. I don't know which part is giving them the most grief, but they're definitely struggling. I do enjoy the way they're trying to rebuild pre-Z American Capitalism under their current circumstances though. Like, there's plenty of reasons to scorn all the investment bankers and PR gurus and all that stuff but, my guys, you gutted your entire managerial and financial class and told them "Actually those jobs are bullshit, retrain to be a mechanic/farmer/etc." and spent the better part of a decade either directly or indirectly killing anyone who bitched too much about that. The Junta has done a fantastic job in both making those careers socially unattractive and hollowing out their institutional knowledge bases. Don't get me wrong, I don't miss Wall Street types any more than the rest of the world, but you kinda need them for your entire project here.
Edit: Actually you know what, I think the wildest part of their whole deal is the way they've approached their whole underlying belief in the importance of Will. They're sort of trying to ape our old friend Kondo Tatsumi's whole Victory Through Warrior Spirit shtick but America has a rather different legacy of machismo, but not only did their various disasters during the Reclamation fail to get them to consider different tactics (pace OP's argument that they were happy to lose a lot of these people), which is comprehensible because reactionaries are real bad about that, but what baffles is they it didn't even get them to consider different ways to shore up that Glorious American Warrior Spirit. It was exactly the same largely ineffective propaganda from start to finish, "It's vital for the Human Spirit that we do this" *Plays Roy Elliot sizzle reel*. It's like they expected some kind of incredibly charismatic leader to fire everyone up and keep them fired up but they forgot to actually locate such a leader and get them into a position to do it, and they also didn't have a Goebbels behind the scenes. It's honestly shocking the Junta didn't just shatter itself into a hundred pieces, I guess to some extent they were right that Americans were really goddamn horny for taking back America.
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OOC: When I was much younger and more foolish I read and very much liked WWZ, but even then I thought Brooks' fetishization of "old = good" was weird. I mean sure you can argue that a simpler, proven design is a better choice for a gun when you need ten million guns, but then he went all the way to "Actually the apex of warfare, tactically speaking, was Napoleonic." As I've aged I've seen far more of the book's flaws, but I really appreciate this thread because it's both enjoyable and thoughtful, and reveals a lot of his assumptions and biases.
