And now I must speak for men, and particularly for heterosexual men, and I say this in all honesty, but if your soul is not moved to joy by the roar of those engines, by the sheer shredding of the blue sky, then you are not a man. This does not make you a better or worse person, it just means you are not a real man.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

82 replies on “Re: I HATE YOU, BLUE ANGELS”

  2. It’s good you made that clarification for who you are speaking for. Because in most of your other posts it is evident that you take the all-knowing role of speaking for all of humanity. But that’s cool, in you, Seattle has it’s own god-like Morgan Freeman voice. Mano y mano.

  13. Charles,
    I actually met a Blue Angel at a Mariner game ages ago. He was with a bunch of other guys (Blue Angel pilots). They all, as I recall wore the same colored polo shirt. I think it was a yellow one? They were good guys.

    Yeah, the planes startle me (I’m at the office and my back is to the window) when they practice but not when they perform. I could go either way in terms of the noise annoyance. But, I remain… a man!:)

  14. @1 Dear God you’re a pretentious and holier-than-thou ass. Yes, Blue Angels flying over Seattle is exactly like women and children getting bombed. You actually just made me FOR bombing women and children, because then they wouldn’t have to read this post.

    High speeds, roaring engines, precision flying… What’s not to love? I never cared for it much, but the number of people with their panties in a bunch is really making the Blue Angels a lot more fun.

  21. Geez, do you guys get worked up like this when the Right defines “real Americans”? Why should most of us want to be a “real man” under this definition any more than we would want to be a “real American” as defined by Sarah Palin and her cult?

  22. Some of the bitching about the Blue Angels sounds like most other random bitching about short term inconveniences. I can put aside my anti-military-might sentiment for a week and admire these people’s talents. Bitching about the Angels practicing is like bitching about the kids band practicing on your block.
    So it’s not about weather or not you’re a “real heterosexual male”, which I am. It’s about random individuals ability to tolerate a minor inconvenience, and/or their lack of ability to put aside their personal feelings about the military might this desplay is symbolic of.

  26. My stepfather didn’t enjoy the Blue Angels, due to the PTSD he suffered after three tours of duty in Vietnam. Fourth of July wasn’t fun for him, either, with all the booming and exploding.

    I guess Vietnam vets suffering from PTSD aren’t real men.

    Go fuck yourself, Charles. You’re worthless.

  28. FWIW, this 100% homosexual man agrees with Mudede’s post entirely. Although I don’t really get how sexuality plays into it. Maybe those who don’t get it are suffering from a testosterone deficiency instead?

  30. Seriously, I’m so glad this got posted. The self-righteousness is just laugh out loud funny. I’m wondering who’s going to be the first to cry ‘won’t someone think of the children?!’ I mean, apart from the ones the Blur Angels bomb.

  32. i hate them. i think they are loud and useless and expensive and dangerous and stupid.

    but i wouldn’t pass up a chance to fly one. going fast is pretty fun.

  34. You might be interested to know that Fnarf was awarded his Pedantry Cross with Oak Leaf Clusters by the Duke of Kent in 1953.

  35. If you turn off your brain (which is an ability/handicap that is, let’s face it, mostly the province of men, and heterosexual men in particular), the Blue Angels kick fucking ass.

  38. @13 – I can do you one better. My brother was a Blue Angel. And, of course, when they’re IN the Blue Angels and they’re out in public, they are TRAINED to appear to be “nice guys.” And of course I can’t speak for all Blue Angels and ex-Blue Angels, but my brother is a racist, misogynist, homophobic ASSHOLE. One thing that IS true of nearly all BAs is that they have a sense of entitlement like you wouldn’t believe.

  44. This thread has the smell of “bitch” all over it. This thread has “bitch” tattooed on the back of its head. This thread makes a sound resembling the utterance of “bitch” when it walks down the street. I could go on.

    It’s all this “bitch” that makes the Iliad a much less read document than the Odyssey, despite it being a much superior document in terms of plot and storytelling and ultimate meaning and whathaveyou. The latter doesn’t really have much resembling a plot, merely a series of episodes without any good reason moving from one to the other. By contrast, from the very beginning of the Iliad, with the universe as elucidated, the ultimate consequences, the full hand of fate, must come crashing down exactly as it does by the end.

    In the old days they had a very effective solution for dealing with wealth inequality. You get a bunch of guys, usually well armed, and go to wherever the wealth is; once there, you kill whoever gets in the way of you hauling off their stuff. But you guys, you very well-educated lefties would have nothing to do with a “Brennon on the Moor” style of political negotiation; someone might lose an eye! It’s that very same terror and disgust for violence that makes you such easily ruled peons–though typically very well off and privileged peons.

    Perhaps violence is the only sane response to an insane universe. But we spend very little time analyzing in depth the great killers of our history; we spend far more time turning them into monsters fit for a cautionary tale to scare children. And so the more it will appear senseless and indiscriminate; and so it will more easily happen.

  45. As a real man, I would like to concur with Charles (for once). Real men tend to like impressive machines. And as far as impressive machines go, it’s hard to beat a fighter jet.

    So if you move beyond the pretentious and simplistic notion that these machine’s are intrinsically evil, that somehow, if given the chance, these machines would fly into the sky unpiloted and start bombing women and children, you should be able to appreciate the speed and power of these engineering achievements. Machines are (so far) incapable of evil. People, however, certainly are capable of evil, and we occasionally require such machines to put an end to that evil.

    It’s a damn good and impressive thing that these machines exist, so it’s nice to get a little sky parade out of the them once a year.

  46. Troll or no troll, this is hardly the stupidest thing we’ve ever heard from Charles. The idea that Charles speaks for “real men” is one of the stupidest things though.

    Every year the Blue Angels remind me of when I was right out of boot camp and 9/11 happened and I was 18 years old building machine gun nests under fighter cover on my base and told we were under attack. But no, I wasn’t worried for myself or my family or all my friends back home or everyone I’d ever known in this country because I knew I could simply take it all out on some innocent women and children.

  50. While I was out on a dig in Montana, a pilot in a B-1B (presumably on a training flight) would fly over the area where we were prospecting a couple times a day. One time we were on a high ridge and we waved to him as he was approaching, and he banked a little to avoid flying DIRECTLY over us so as not to deafen us all.
    Those things are damn loud and fucking amazing. I didn’t hear all you pseudo-pacifist hipsters bitching and moaning about how we shouldn’t appreciate kick-ass combat vehicles for their awesome factor when we saw an APC run over a car in Lithuania the other day. What is it about warplanes in particular that sets you off?

  51. your talk of “real man” flies in the face of everything, you clown. Substitute “real American” etc.

    I still believe that you have series dirt on Keck or Savage that has meet you employed there years after your terrible, horrible, no goodness was well established.

  53. I’m a woman.

    How disappointing.

    If the annual this-is-the-shit-we-use-to-kill-other-human-beings-parade doesn’t move you then you’re not a man? Thanks, I really needed one more thing to feel depressed about.

    I really wish Mudede would talk about Socialism and Foucault some more or maybe post a picture of a pretty woman and drool all over it. That would be much more uplifting. I’m not being sarcastic. I’d actually enjoy that. Yeah, I know, who the fuck am I to demand something uplifting? Don’t have a good answer for that.

  54. @48: I like guns, but there’s a difference between liking guns and thinking it’s a good idea for everyone to own whatever guns they want. It’s pretty cool to see Ma Deuce in action, and it would be awesome to fire one sometime, but I’d never want to own one for myself, and there’s no way in hell that civilians should own them except as museum pieces.

  55. @54, they are fun as hell to fire, even more so with tracer rounds at night. They are not fun to haul around though. with a tripod the setup is around 175lbs if I remember correctly. For sheer destuctive power, the a-10 minigun is the best, I got to see a live fire demo from the obsevation tower and it is bad ass!

  56. Aw, Charles. Did you see someone with a bigger penis than you? Is that why you had to hurry and point out some equally meaningless measure of manhood?

  57. Speaking authoritatively as an un-real man, I concur with Charles on this. No! Wait! I’m a sur-real man! That’s it! Definitely.Orange. See?

    (Do Stranger writers have to achieve some sort of comment quota to keep their Slogging rights in tact?)

    @49 FTW.

  58. Considering that the leader of the blue Angels quit a few months ago because they fly dangerously low and close I’m going to continue to bitch about the noise, safety hazard, and complete fucking waste of money.

    It also seems like Charles posted a troll thread to gain more comments on his posts since most of us skip them.

  59. Bitching about the Angels practicing is like bitching about the kids band practicing on your block.

    Kids practicing music on your block don’t cost hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars and can’t possibly result in the deaths of innocent by standers.

    Try again.

  64. Fuck the women, fuck the children, crush a beer, fly the stars and bars and god bless ‘Merica!!!!! Seafair is what Seattle is all about and for those of you who bitch should get you 206 card revoked or move back to whatever shit burg you came from. I love the hill but this happens every year and just shows how gay the hill really is.

  65. @1: Just to be clear, the innocent women and children likely hear little to nothing unusual before they are vaporized. Most air-to-surface rounds and missiles are supersonic and arrive well before the sound of the airplane or mussel-blast. If you hear anything, it’s a good thing, because it means you’re still alive.

    Just sayin’

  67. Holy fuck. Charles posted something I actually agree with. Fuck watching the Blue Angels I’m stepping outside to see all the flying pigs.

  69. great, now I’ve got that DVDA song running through my head…

    NOW YOU’RE A MAN
    A MAN MAN MAN!
    NOW YOU’RE A MAN
    A MANLY MANLY MAN

  70. FUCK YEAH!!! CHARLES IS MERLIN! FNARF IS VIPER! WIS IS ICEMAN! BACONCAT IS GOOSE! I’M MOTHERFUCKIN’ TOM CRUISE, AND BJC IS MY BEARD, I MEAN GIRLFRIEND!!!! LET’S PLAY TOP GUN BABY, SOMEBODY CALL BAY AND GET HIM IN ON THIS!!!!

  71. I didn’t know the Blue Angels were a gay/straight thing… hmm… but looking on my fb, it looks like my lesbian friends hate the BA’s. But they are mostly artists and are supposed to hate anything mainstream, so it’s hard to tell if it’s because they are gay or artists. So far, the boys really haven’t chimed in…
    Now I’m going to be a real man and vote for the tunnel. ‘Cause you know how us Real Men like to stick themselves into tunnels….

  73. Charles, can there be some kind of clue to indicate when you are being ironic? I honestly can’t tell, and neither, it appears, can anyone else. And, yeah, authorial intent does matter. Meaning isn’t out there all by itself, autonomously existing in the form of words; it is in your head, and your readers’ heads.

  74. i especially like MY tax dollar for those blessed rumbling minutes since there is really nothing else to do with the money. . .

  79. “If the annual this-is-the-shit-we-use-to-kill-other-human-beings-parade doesn’t move you then you’re not a man? Thanks, I really needed one more thing to feel depressed about. “

    Shit like that plane keeps you from getting ass-raped by five foriegn guys right before they sell you at the slave market the set up downtown after the invasion. And yes, that is what would happen in a world without American miliary power supported by tax money from men working to pay the bills, sweetie.

    It ain’t your Take Back the Night Rallies keeping us safe and free. It is stern men wielding formidable weapons that we pay for. Sorry, but that Ghandi and MLK shit only works when the other side has some sense of humanity to appeal to. Ghengis Khan would just lop heads, not wait for the Nobel Committee to take sides.

  81. @3, 33, and 43: Well done. I concur. This is hilarious. I must assume Charles has caught his limit by now.

    The original post reminded me of a book I read in undergrad surveying the steady progression of phallic and phalloid American weapons since the founding of the Republic. Everything from the Bushnell submarine to the “Minuteman.” Pretty sure Carl Sagan was punning when he called it a “penetrating” analysis in his review.

    http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/Books/…

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