Do The Hosts Feel Their Parasites?

Madame:


Madame, your ideas are excellent.  Both our schools and our foreign policy would be different and likely better if every graduate had to serve 2 years before starting college.  Service would not even need be in the military, so great is the nation’s need in so many areas.  But it would be a wise provision to say that any who advocated war would have to transfer their children or their children’s children to the military at the earliest opportunity.   And yes, public officials should have to send their children to public schools—of their constituents’ choosing.

Your pointing out Kennedy’s first State of the Union speech shows how coldly alarming it is that the language we hear now is more militarized than it was at the height of the Cold War.

How we shifted from production, investment, financial propriety, and communal good to the unaffordable consumption, to a sociopathic and oligarchic form of capitalism, is well stated by Hedges on page 151.   We got told that the old ways of  achieving prosperity by making things and providing real value were outdated.  The criminally sociopathic minds then cast their collective spell over a society woefully deficient in critical thinking and willingly ready to be diverted from partially hidden truths or ugly truths.  The outlaws of the new West said they could police themselves, even that it was BETTER FOR EVERYBODY IF THEY DID SO.  And we collectively nodded—if we paid any attention at all.

And when it collapsed due to their criminality, were they hanged liked 17^th century speculators?  Au contraire.  They received (and receive) “billions in taxpayer dollars and huge bonuses.” (152)

For its part, the Defense establishment, the military-industrial-think tank-politician complex, is self-perpetuating.  Like the rest of the corporate state, they make their investments in elections, then carefully manage their retinue of politicians, and have lobbyists write what they want into laws.  Contractors make exorbitant profits—often wrung from those least able to pay, the middle class taxpayer—and laugh all the way to the banks their friends own or control.  Like nearly everything else in this constantly churned society, they plan for product replacement, so that profits are ever born anew.  Whether it’s setting a short “expiration” date for supplies they have directly or indirectly mandated the government buy (and that any reasonable person would say upon examining wouldn’t expire for many years, perhaps decades), or the constant higher tech (and high cost) replacement of usually junked (or still usable but sold for a pittance) military equipment (planes, tanks, naval vessels, submarines, etc.), the complex drains our economic lifeblood like vampires to feed their insatiable appetites.   The Chinese and others laugh their way into the future while we exhaust our economic strength on these unproductive things that will see little to no relevant use.  We spend our resources preparing to fight it all: the previous major war between big powers (WW2), the war that never was (the Cold War), the wars of now (terrorism), and the wars of the future (a catch all to justify anything). 

“The defense industry is a virus.  It destroys healthy economies. We produce sophisticated fighter jets (Prof’s Note: even though there has been no serious air threat for many decades) while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule and our automotive industry (Prof’s Note: nearly) goes bankrupt.  We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and starve renewable technologies to fight global warming.  Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants yet struggle to find money for environmental studies.  The massive military spending, aided by this $3 trillion war, has a social cost.  Our bridges and levees collapse, our schools decay, our real manufacturing is done overseas by foreign workers, and our social safety net is taken away. And we are bombarded with the militarized language of power and strength that masks our brittle reality.”(153)

Oh, how we lost our way when we largely abandoned the militia model for a standing armed force.  Yes, dare I say it once too many times, like a people we resemble in so many stark ways.