14th
!@#$%^& Naples
Naples is the only city that I’ve been to on this whole tour that made me feel like I was the new kid in the cafeteria, carrying my tray and looking around for a place to sit. It’s like as Americans, we just got everything wrong. We were wearing sneakers and casual clothes while all the locals were dressed to what they perceived to be the nines. We were walking around in the city center and the ridicule that followed us around was like an oppressive cloud. I heard “Tourist” in voices that were dripping with contempt about forty times. I tell you, it’s a hell of a thing to get grief from men wearing Teletubby colored windbreakers and pants that are so tight that you can read the wrinkles on their genitals. Spare me the attitude, Giancarlo. I’m not the one who looks like a metrosexual circus clown.
Not to be overdramatic, but I think popular fashion is nothing more than oppression. Every six months the suckers who care about such things stampede to the latest boutiques and purchase cheaply made clothes that will be considered a laughing stock in another six months. Sheep on treadmills who can’t wait to bankrupt themselves on the latest bit of wearable nonsense dreamed up by some mean spirited homosexual somewhere. Ten years ago it was men wearing pants so big that you could successfully conceal an erection the size of a fire hydrant, complete with wife beater, sideways baseball cap and gold chains. Now it’s everybody dressing like Edward Scissorhands would if he got out of the hair cutting business and started selling real estate. I’m moving to a nudist colony. I’ll still look ridiculous, but at least it won’t cost me anything.
Naples feels like West Baltimore, to be honest with you. And I’m not just saying that because of the ridicule that Andy, Paul, Jon, Eammon and I received. Imagine a place that is loaded with buildings and statues that are in the neighborhood of 500 years old covered with half assed Italian gangsta spray paint tags, and you pretty much have this joint dialed in. Imagine a beautiful archway overlooking a perfectly chiseled and tiled plaza that is covered with garbage and 50 booger eating rug rats kicking a soccer ball around. Boom. That’s Naples. I found myself looking at Mt. Vesuvius off in the distance and thinking “Come on, baby, Daddy needs a new pair of shoes!”
One thing that I thought was pretty funny was a radio station that had billboards all over town. Apparently it plays soft rock hits from the 80s, and the billboards had phonetic spellings of what they thought the lyrics to these songs sounded like. So,
“EI JESCAULED TU SEI EI LEFFED U
EI JES CAULED TU SEI HAUMECH EI CAIR”
is “I Just Called To Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder. In that same vein we also saw
“LEKEFERGEN TACHED FARDE VEIRI FERS TAHM
LEKEFERHERHERRGEN
WISHER HERD BEE NEKS TU MAHN”
Which is “Like a Virgin” by Madonna. And how could I not mention
“UHL NEIGH LAAHN
Uhl neigh
Uhl neigh
UHL NEIGH LAAHN
Uhl neigh”
Which is of course “All Night Long” by Lionel Richie.
Once we got back from the local tour and back on to the base I wandered into the enlisted men’s club for a nightcap and there were all the younguns, each of whom were capable of easily kicking my geezer ass from one end of creation to the other. They were all drunk as lords and having the time of their lives. What struck me about them was the utter confidence that all of them possessed to a remarkable degree. It was written all over their faces. Kids in their early twenties from all over the country just basically saying “Please. Mess with me. Make me the happiest man on earth.” As I was sitting there in the bar, nursing a Jim Beam and watching these kids out of the corner of my eye, I found myself thinking of the tendency of the average American to say “It’s none of my business,” or “I don’t want to get involved.” We do that a lot, you know. We hear the argument between the couple in the apartment downstairs get really heated and maybe start to get a little violent and we don’t call the cops. We see some reprobate breaking into a car and we don’t yell at him to stop. We notice a neighbor leaving a dog chained up outside in the freezing cold and don’t call animal control. We don’t want any unpleasantness to breach the walls of our cocoons. See, that sort of mentality does not apply to these kids. If some woman was getting mugged outside the enlisted men’s club here at the NSA base in Naples and yelled for help, she would probably be hurt pretty badly due to the crush of the crowd that would come out to kick the crap out of the mugger. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a dyed in the wool, bed wetting and borderline treasonous liberal. But I have to tell you, I get pretty psyched knowing that we have a bunch of hard asses that can, will, and are simply begging for the chance to visit extreme violence on anyone who looks at us sideways. We can gussy it up with ribbons and uniforms and parades and perfectly awful Toby Keith songs, and we can achieve a little bit of video game style separation with smart bombs and Predator drones, but what it really boils down to is us saying “Hey, these folks are making it perfectly clear that they are no longer needed on the planet,” and our soldiers saying “Consider those losers gone.”
