Two Taps for the Empire: The Fog of War
I. The Optimal Delivery Rate
They call it the Double Tap, that cold, clean phrase. A glossary term for the high-stakes days. In the field of kinetics, it maximizes power, Two rapid shots to the center mass, Hammer, Hammer. It began as self-defense, Colonel Cooper’s doctrine. Now it’s a strategy of state, pristine and obscene.
On the coast of the frontera azul, they call it “Eliminating the threat of narco-terrorists,” Justifying the sequential strike with legal ambiguities. One missile to sink the panga. A timed pause, five minutes, maybe twenty. The segundo golpe aimed for the hands reaching out, Targeting the wounded, the medics, the witness. Societal Decapitation, they name the cruelty. Not an accident, mi gente. It is the intent. This calculated delay, this weaponized expectation of rescue.
II. Summoned to the Hillside Estate
So, I dreamt of the other tap, the gringo god of speed, Eddie Van Halen, RIP, on his hillside feed. The man who used his finger as a capo, who turned his six strings into a cascading piano. The King of Shred, the architect of Eruption. The man who taught rock how to run, how to break.
He summoned me, a tired Chicano, to his ghost mansion, and asked for consejo. Ay, Eddie, I thought, What a pinche joke. This virtuoso, this innovator of velocity, already a phantom, now begging for meaning.
He mastered the two-handed technique, Making the old parlor trick a sophisticated compositional tool. He maximized the note delivery rate, Just like the drone maximizes the body count. He asked me, the survivor, the inheritor of trauma, “How do I make life meaningful?”
III. Slowing Down the Bars
I looked at the ghost of his six-string scream, At the ghost of his youth angst that demanded such speed. I told him, man, the tapping, the rasgueo, You gotta slow the bars down.
All that velocity? It was a necessary flaw. In the vejez, there’s no need to outrun the law. The rapid-fire sequences, the constant demand for complexity, it was all just noise masking the empty totality. Slow down the controlled pair. Slow down the hammered pair. You already played piano on the electric air. No more need to tocar that speed, brother. No more need for the technical precision that kills.
He was pensive. Pendejo. He was taking my spectral advice. I, a walking map of the borderlands and generational hauntings, Telling the dead white rock star to chill out on the fretboard. The sarcasm was so thick it smelled like gasoline and blood.
IV. The Realization of the Fretboard Dust
Then the anxiety built, a cold weight in the chest. The mansion, the guitars, the dream itself, a grotesque test. I felt the tension between the artistic tap and the war tap. The Intent is what fractures the concept.
Eddie’s intent was creative. The drone’s intent was systemic cruelty. The legal eagles in the White House argue intent is justified. But International Law sees the mens rea clear as day: a war crime. The bodies rushed to help are protected individuals.
I finally remembered the fundamental algebra: This was a dream. And at the end of the day, Eddie was dead. And so, too, were the boat people, Double-tapped by the drones that patrol the Gulf of Mexico, reduced to fragmented memory, consumed by the state.
