By Joseph Brannan
Plagiarism Pluragiarism Purgejiralism Pure Journalism Citation Poetry
Joseph Brannan
“my grandfather’s war”
“good war”
“So it goes”
“they’d call you a fag and really deep down you know you went because you wanted to be a man”
“might have been the last habitat for gentleness and kindness that we’d ever know”
“didn’t want to pretend I’d done anything except survive”
“the curves in all our bells were cracked”
“aftershock was eminently readable in the discourse of post-traumatic reaction, at individual, community, and national levels”
“existed in an odd stage of incompletion, at once a war, a civil war, and a post-war occupation”
“joint resolution”
“there was little anger; most fervency was manufactured”
“The United States is so powerful […] What is Iraq to the United States? Who is it going to fight? We’re not Russia or China”
“It’s up to the Americans what this becomes…The truth will soon become apparent”
“If we’re to be freed from the regime, we’re the ones responsible for freeing ourselves”
“came as liberators, not as conquerors”
“the influence of sentimental nationalist iconography on ultra-patriotic post-9/11 versions of American nationhood”
“radicalization…was fed by the changing notion of authority made possible when nearly every institution that had ruled the country for a generation was overthrown, crumbled, or was questioned”
“has become an aestheticizing force that offers tacit support to the status quo
perhaps […] designed to encourage a tangential, almost unthinking, gesture towards the Iraq invasion”
“a war of vengeance in the rhetoric of liberation, a war ultimately premised on either fabricated or manipulated intelligence”
“While we patrolled the streets, we’d throw candy to their children with whom we’d fight in the fall a few more years from now”
“All pain is the same. Only the details are different.”
All hope is exquisitely unique. Only the source is the same.