What were the most unwittingly prophetic statements?
On the Simpsons episode where Itchy and Scratchy gets bought out by it’s original creator Bart and Lisa watch a dumb cartoon and the following exchange happens:
Lisa: This is one of those crappy Gen Xer throwbacks.
Bart: We need an another Vietnam to thin their ranks out.
This episode was produced in the 1990s well before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where many Gen Xers have been killed in battle.
Perhaps you should do some research before making such an ill-founded statement.
Perhaps you’d care to review the casualty rates? America lost 58K total in Vietnam and has so far lost only just over 4K in Iraq, and 700 in Afghanistan.
And the leading cause of death in Americans? Military action barely registers. America’s roads kill over 43,000 people per year.
Cite.
I agree. The 4700 lives our soldiers gave were negligible. After all, if we combine auto accidents, falls, and drownings, we get 66,500 deaths per year from just sitting around at home. That’s 14 times the number of troops we can send before we catch up and incur “many” casualties! And if we add other relevant statistics like “old age” into the mix, we could safely send half our population to conquer the rest of the world and grant eternal peace and liberty for all.
I’d normally be the last person to weigh in, in support of Curtis LeMay, and I don’t really think this is the point of the thread, but failing to see any comparison between the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Vietnam, is at best wishful thinking. Casualty rates are not as high and there are obvious differences; however parallels such as support for corrupt government officials, guerrilla tactics, cross border evasion, civilian casualties fueling resentment and unpopularity at home, are obvious similarities. Pretending they don’t exist and haven’t been widely voiced in the media is simply wrong.
Predicting that there will be a war within 20 years isn’t a major accomplishment.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled OP …
The most unwittingly prophetic statement is the all-too-common “Hey y’all watch this!!” shouted by a drunk redneck just before he inadvertantly commits suicide with a beer bong & a firecracker or an ATV & a clothesline or …
Everyone but him has seen the movie or read the website (http://www.darwinawards.com/) and knows what’s gonna happen next. All except him (it’s very rarely a her).
Obviously the Iraq and Afghanistan have fortunately not turned out like Vietnam. However still it was rather ironic in my opinion.
I’m not seeing it.
The casualties don’t even kinda sorta compare. Any death in war is a tragedy but ~5,000 people is not “thinning the ranks” of a generation the way ~60,000 people did.
The casualties of these wars have been mostly Gen Yers, not Gen Xers.
I don’t think you know what irony means.
Daedalus told Icarus that man would be able to fly.
“You want a what? A blowjob? You’ll get a blowjob when that kid next door walks on the moon!”
If only that were true, this topic would seem tailor made for it.
A domestic attack proved very effective. Unwitting? That’s another question.
Surely some PR guy somewhere said something to the effect of
The Titanic will go down (heh) in history !
Just watched an old (circa 2003) episode of “What Not to Wear.” Clinton and Stacey were making fun of the guest’s safari-ish outfit, comparing him to the crocodile hunter, and then Stacey asked “Does Animal Planet need a new host?”
I jokingly suggested Bush should invade Iraq a few weeks after 9/11, but I can’t find the thread.
You weren’t a member here a few weeks after 9/11.
Wasn’t it Bruce Ismay who said “Not even God himself could sink this ship”? 
At some point during the run-up to the Iraq war, I was discussing it IRL with some people, and one of them make a comment to the effect of “well, it’s very important that the Iraqi people view this as a conflict only with Saddam’s government, not with Islam. Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into ‘Operation Let’s Urinate On The Koran’”. That seemed worth a big laugh at the time. What an outrageous idea!
[withdrawn]
What age range constitutes Gen X?
This site says
Generation X
Dates Born: 1965-1979 (Dates range even earlier to 1963 and later to 1981)
Age Range: 27-41 (corrected for 2009: 30-44)
Population: 17 million
Note those ages are now three years out of date, I corrected the age range in parentheses.
I see older reservists in the list of the killed, but I also see a lot of shiny-faced kids. I’m not sure what percentage of the casualties are Generation X under the definition I linked to above. But let’s say half, which seems generous, since war typically consumes young people.
The Washington Post gives today’s total as 5,130. That’s fatalities only, of course – the number of the wounded seems slipperier to calculate, their suffering unquantifiable.
So half of that is 2,565.
That’s 0.01509 percent (between one and two hundredths of one percent) of Generation X.
A measurable number, and a disaster by any standard short of that for guns, automobiles, drinking, and smoking. But maybe not “thinning the ranks” per se.
This post hasn’t made me feel any better.
Good point. That may be why I can’t find the thread.