by Commodore Beauregard
The B-52 is an excellent metaphor for the Baby Boomer Generation: a bloated, aging piece of shit that never contributed anything to anyone being kept alive by government money it doesn’t deserve, grasping feebly for a halcyon era that came to an end long ago.
Oh hey look it’s all the public schools we could have built this year.
In short, the B-52 is a hideous aluminum turd.
Not like the Convair B-36
Objectively the prettiest doomsday weapon ever devised.
The thing about doomsday conflicts is that the last thing the civilization you’re annihilating will ever see is your bomber flying overhead. You need to make it look good.
Look at that thing. It’s not just a doomsday weapon; it’s a giant middle finger to every single person living in the eventual glass crater beneath you. The B-36 is a statement, and that statement is: “Hey assholes, war is about money and we have all of it so get fucked.” And then you incinerate them. The B-36 is a put down the scale of which Tommy Hilfiger’s reptile brain couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
The B-36 is the ultimate icon of decimation, a beautiful, chrome testament to American decadence. I mean come on, six rear facing, 28-cylinder radial engines and a pair of jet engines? I can only imagine how that development meeting went.
“So the prototype is looking good, but we still don’t have quite enough thrust.”
“Fuck it. Just bolt a pair of jet engines too it.”
“Won’t that be hugely inefficient and expensive?”
”We’re the United States Airforce”
“Oh right.”
And then they all got drunk and fucked their mistresses. I bet Strategic Air Command circa the Kennedy administration made Madmen look like a Middle School dance.
More chrome than all the rims in Jersey put together.
The best thing about the B-36 was that it was relentless. Even when it wasn’t flying it was still killing people. Apparently slapping on those ancilliary jet engines cost so much fucking money the USAF couldn’t afford to build hangers large enough to house the things, so they just stored them outside. This was a problem for their aircrews considering most of them were stationed in Alaska, ready to fly over the Bering Straight in case shit got real and annihilate whatever the fuck passes for a strategically valuable target in Siberia.
The last great thing this country ever produced.
But the wings were controlled by complex wiring routed through vacuum tubes; vacuum tubes that blew out a lot. And the only way to fix them was to walk along the icy, frosted wings in freezing Alaskan winds and replace them by hand. Not surprisingly, a lot of people died doing this. If it were 70’s horror movie there’d be a slow, ominous zoom in on the B-36 while the speakers put out a slow, ominous pulsing. I wish someone would make a horror movie shot entirely in the crawlspaces that ran through the B-36’s enormous wings.
Seriously. I’d watch the fuck out of that movie.
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