Crude weapons

Crude weapons.

Barbarism, right? You're thinking rungus, nyahunyos, bows-and-arrows and the all-important, always-prevalent simi - I like simi; it is so deliciously malevolent - aka panga aka, according to the New York Times and its white cousins, the machete. Not Machete the Danny Trejo character, but machete, the weapon of choice for marauding gangs hellbent on disembowelment and beheading anyone in their path.

When it these weapons are being deployed with, again to borrow from the Grey Lady, atavistic determination in any African nation, they are "crude". But when we are watching American Ninja III with Michael Dudikoff and his Japanese katana, which is really a very long and very sharp simi, we do not think that the pale face disemboweling and decapitating his enemies is wielding a "crude" weapon, do we?

We have been programmed to Pavlovian-like responses when the phrase "crude weapon" is deployed. It is always deployed in service to an African somewhere in Africa engaged in an act that has been engaged in in the rest of the world for God knows how long.

A weapon, so far as I can tell, is supposed to injure or kill. Yeah, yeah, yeah...some asshole is going to remind me that weapons can be used in self-defense and shit like that. But really, any weapon is a tool for the injury or death of another. The one dying doesn't give two fucks that it is or isn't crude. The one killing doesn't either; if it gets the job done faster and more efficiently, so much the better.

It's never occurred to them that the crudest weapon of them all is the human mind, especially the one that expends precious national treasure to find ever more creative ways to kill ones fellowman. Look at the evolution of the human mind and it is mirrored in barbarous creativity in the evolution of the means of killing each other. From flinty rocks to spears to poisons to explosives to firearms to radiological weapons to genetic weapons, the mind of man does not evolve to find solutions for man's selfishness, greed and congenitally violent tendencies.

What do you mean "crude weapons?"