It's So Cool

Andrea Seabrook talks to "Colonel John Forsythe, call sign 'Ripper'" about the retirement of the US stealth bomber, F-17A, called "the Nighthawk." Seabrook gets really excited about this bomber. Here's a taste of this love fest:

Seabrook: "It's the plane that I always call the Batman symbol."
Ripper: "It does look like the Batman symbol."

Seabrook: "This plane the Nighthawk has had a big role in many US conflicts over the past thirty years: both Iraq wars, Serbia, the Panama invasion just to name a few, how is it used in combat?"
Ripper: "...allows us to go right to downtown Baghdad, downtown Belgrade, any target set within a country we can get to..."

Seabrook: "Do you think there's anything you'll miss though, about the Nighthawk?"
Ripper: "One thing about the Nighthawk, particularly because of its physical appearance, It's really etched in the national psyche."
Seabrook: "Yeah, it's so cool."
Ripper: "It is."

I agree, there is just something so cool about bombing cities whether in Panama, the first Gulf War, or Serbia; it's like seeing the Bat Light bouncing off the clouds.

It's a Guy Thing

This morning Guy Raz gives us a peak into his soft-porn obsession with military aircraft. He begins by bragging "so in the past few weeks alone, I've ridden in an Army Black Hawk helicopter in Kuwait...hovered over Paris in a twin-rotor [sic] Marine CH-53 helicopter...flown around the world on the E-4B which is basically the most secretive and classified 747 in the world...been over Afghanistan in a Chinook helicopter...but nothing I've seen, no aircraft can quite compare to the F-22...there is nothing quite like it on earth; it looks like something out of the future....

The F-22 has caught his fancy: "...the plane is called The Raptor and there are only about 70 of them in existence, most of them at Langley...there are only 100 F-22 pilots in the world. The Air Force likes to call the plane America's insurance policy...sometimes I dream of going up in an F-22, but alas, I never will, there's only room for the pilot."

America's insurance policy! That's rich.

Given the utter non-coverage of the current escalating death-from-the-air being waged in Iraq, and the slaughter that the USAF has unleashed in places a widespread as Panama, Cambodia, Iraq (in 1991), and Afghanistan there is something positively necrophilic about Raz's panting aircraft fantasy.

Raz opens his report by describing the little windowless room that NPR has deep inside the Pentagon. He says, "It's NPR's Pentagon office and working in that windowless room under the hum of fluorescent lighting can be soul destroying..." I hate to break it to him, but it's going to be hard to destroy something that he's already sold.