Today is Pearl Harbor Day, dear, young, likely historically ignorant reader.  And this morning, with the right kind of awareness, you can still smell the cordite and betrayal, even eighty-four years later.  Imagine the Pacific sun rising over Oahu, sailors still half-drunk on Saturday night liberty, and then the sky itself vomiting steel and fire courtesy of those treacherous, rotten, shit-sucking Imperial Japanese bastards who thought they’d invented the concept of a sucker punch.  Spoiler: they hadn’t.

Pearl Harbor was a cosmic joke gone lethal, a nation’s collective hangover suddenly cured by the shriek of dive bombers and the sight of battleships belching smoke like dying dinosaurs.  America, caught pants-down, coffee not yet brewed, suddenly found itself staring into doom.  And that doom was painted with the Rising Sun.

Cue the doctrine that would later be branded FAFO – though back then it was more primal, less acronymic, more like the raw animal snarl of a country that had just been cock-punched across the Pacific.  You mess with the sleeping giant, you wake up in a nightmare.  And the nightmare came in the form of two massive fuck-off mushroom clouds, each one a vengeful sermon preached from the pulpit of modernity.  Hiroshima.  Nagasaki.  Cities turned into ashtray metaphors, the ultimate “don’t try this at home” PSA.

It wasn’t pretty.  It might not have been noble.  It wasn’t the sanitized heroism of war movies where the trumpet swells and the flag waves in slow motion.  It was brutal, humiliating, and final.  Japan went from swaggering imperialist bully to shivering, sniveling, kneeling supplicant in less time than it takes to say “unconditional surrender.”  The lesson was scorched into the earth itself: America doesn’t just retaliate; America retaliates with biblical fury, with the kind of overkill that makes future enemies pause, sweat, and complete reconsider their life choices.

Pearl Harbor Day isn’t just about remembering the dead – though we must, always – it’s about remembering the moment America decided to stop playing nice.  The day we got sucker-punched and responded by inventing the most terrifying mic drop in human history.

So raise a glass today, not in celebration but in defiance.  To the sailors entombed in steel coffins at the bottom of the harbor.  To the civilians who never saw the bombers coming.  And yes, to the awe-inspiring fire that ended the war.  Pearl Harbor was the opening act.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the encore.

But here’s the part that curdles my bourbon, the rotgut truth that keeps me pacing the floorboards at 3 a.m.: the America that once answered treachery with firestorms and unconditional surrender papers now looks like it’s been neutered by its own self-appointed moral hall monitors, the ones who think hashtags are strategy and empathy for narco-terrorists is diplomacy.  We’ve gone from steel-jawed brawlers to therapy-session sissies, from a nation that could vaporize two cities before breakfast to one that can’t even decide if its borders are real.

Because let’s be honest: the left has been busy sanding down the teeth of the beat, turning the war machine into some sort of pitiful daycare center where Teletubbies go to fuck…where illegal immigrants, cartel apologists, and anti-American imports get tucked in with warm milk while the citizens who’d actually bleed in the next war are told to shut up and check their privilege.  It’s a grotesque inversion of priorities, a carnival of cowardice dressed up as compassion, and it makes me wonder it the next Pearl Harbor will be met not with mushroom clouds but with strongly worded press releases and congressional hearings that drag on until the enemy has already planted their flag on our soil.

The spiraling nightmare is this: we’ve traded resolve for rhetoric, fury for focus, and the raw animal snarl of a wounded giant for the mewling of bureaucrats who thing “restraint” is a virtue when the sky is on fire.  Imagine the next sucker punch – missiles streaking, ships burning, civilians screaming – and instead of the old America rising from the smoke with clenched fists, we get committees, hashtags, and a chorus of “this is not who we are.”

But history doesn’t give a shit who we are.  History only cares who wins.  And if we’ve lost the will to win – if we’ve let the pussification of America become our defining trait – then the next Pearl Harbor won’t be remembered as the day we woke up.  It’ll be remembered as the day we rolled over, pulled the blanket up, and let someone else write the ending.

So here’s the mic drop, the blistering sermon carved into the bones of this day: Pearl Harbor was the warning, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the answer, and the only question left is whether we still have the guts to answer again.  If not, then the obituary of America will read like a parody: a nation that once nuked its enemies into submission but later surrendered to its own cowardice.

N.P.: “Funeral March” – 2WEI