Unlike before, unlike in prehistoric times, unlike during the good old days when the public’s appetite for large wars of occupation made for lively, crisp, contoured news reporting filled with edifying dramas of mass slaughters and satisfying banquets of blood and guts and sinew-strewn sidewalks. Those were the better days, the past times, the public knew a good large war when it got one, the public demanded large wars preferably of the kind which could be counted on to kill, wound, maim, ruin, displace, dislodge, condemn, crush and otherwise offensively rush to overrun someone else’s public and its otherwise starved for attention, truth be told, somewhat dull life in need of large injections of free misery, served sliced, sans ice, more rife, less priced, what’s that, that’s the roar of the gathering voice of the declining public appetite, who are these people who say such things, the public appetite for large wars, for large wars of occupation, declining public appetite for large wars, declining public large war occupation with increasingly larger public appetite for petit discrete minute wars, you hear it all the time, we need some more smaller wars, what we need is, it is just the tiny ticket, things will improve, wars will be smaller and much more satisfying, increasing public appetite for small wars of quasi-occupation, perhaps virtual occupation of insignificant size bundles of modalities, wars of all sizes, wars, little tapas wars, little miniature wars, pint-sized wars, little buddy wars, cute wars, skinny wars, pocket-sized wars, smart wars, starter wars, correctly sized airline travel-sized wars, tasting wars, war samplers and war jars just the right-sized war for a public whose whims are made up by a thug disguised as Palladium or a mass murderer whose job’s to justify whatever war a warrior wants cause a warrior’s purpose wants war or maybe not, maybe warriors talk just like artists, blaming it all on the muse of war or on weapons which when we have them we have to use them or so says the playwright who says an axe or a shotgun or maybe it was a bow and arrow or a missile of some kind, or a pretty little bomb, bomb, camouflaged in a dainty little napkin introduced in Act I must go off, or is it will go off, by the end of the story. Story’s end.