Knew Not New

Madame M:

Madame, it seems you have answered your own question about affordability.  If we were like, well, EVERYBODY else in the world who didn’t spend so much on ”Defense,” we would be like all of the other major industrialized countries that have and afford universal health care, and that average less spending per capita.  Of course, those countries don’t have to contend with, and certainly not to the same extent, a sickly, obese, car-chained and sedentary population.  And all that works so wrong against HEALTH.  Similar explanation exists about society’s investment in higher education (although that one is not as “universal” as is often assumed—competition for a spot is usually the order of the day).  Once again, many “sides” to the argument have valid points, and yet their arguments become weak when they believe they have all the answers and all their answers address everything.

Of course, our willing embrace of illusion and evasion of accountability have now presented us with many real measures of unaffordability to go along with our disastrously misplaced resource allocations.

People don’t read much of either of those works you mentioned previously, and when they do it is pretty selective.  While the Constitution is much shorter, much more recent, written with one general thought thread, and is much less self-contradictory, it too can be twisted to suit purposes—or evade them.  With our collective attention deficit disorder and endless diversionary stimulation, confusion is more common than un.

Ever see the documentary film “Why We Fight”? It begins with Eisenhower’s famous farewell address, which everyone promptly ignored at the height of the Cold War.  Indeed, Kennedy had partially won because of first a “bomber gap” and then a “missile gap.” “Weakness is provocative; strength deters.”

It has a lot of telling quotes in it from famous/infamous Americans: “Get the American people behind the war.”  (So that public opinion can be manipulated)  Outright falsehoods spoken by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz.  And this one by George Bush, 2003: “Iraq and Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including Al Qaeda.”  A few years later he would say that wasn’t true, but never apologize or even admit he said the other. And nothing happened to him.   One can see where power lies.

The Office of Special Plans, headed by ideologue Richard Perle, “produced” intel for what VP Cheney wanted prior to the Iraq War.

How embedding journalists usually taints and causes the media to favor the military’s view.

How the rise of defense/security think tanks added another leg to the traditional triad of military, industry, and politicians.

It also includes some quotes and short interviews with some lesser known people, all of whom, in one way or another, comment, as Eisenhower did, on the disastrous rise of misplaced power, with no accountability to the American people (who, to their discredit, demanded little to none).

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia.  Not that hard to get a country to go to war.

Chalmers Johnson: Blowback is what comes back to haunt us from covert operations the public doesn’t even know about (and certainly not right away).  “Why do those people hate us?” is what the ignorant American public is heard to say.

The National Security State of endless arming and defense and security posturing has turned democracy sideways.  The people—the owners of natural rights and who the Framers deposited ultimate power in—are often excluded. There is, in the self-serving intelligence, defense, and security complex, the belief that the public doesn’t need to know.  Truth is obscured.

Why do we fight (in whatever conflict or conflicts we’re involved in)?, Americans are asked by the documentary team. “Fight for freedom” is what most people say.  Such vagueness, so easily manipulated.

What if, instead, we really fight to enforce a One-Superpower world, to maintain the new Rome (like that is a successful model to follow).

What if, instead, we fight to sustain injustice and selfishness?

What if, instead, we fight to sustain profits for the few?

What if those people who profit then lie to not just us, but the military that does the fighting? The MIC (Military-Industrial Complex) sold “undreamt of precision” to the military, when it wasn’t true.  The weapons missed.  Plenty.  Even when intell was good, which it often wasn’t.

Where are the counterweights to these mighty millstones dragging the tired American swimmer to the bottom?  Absent, Hedges tells us.  What traditionally has been “the Left,” or “Progressives,” or “True American Liberals,” is now a Democratic Party largely merely an occasionally reluctant henchman of the corporate state (of which the MIC is but one large facet).   That party “has abandoned the working class, which has no ability to organize and little political clout, especially with labor unions a spent force.  [Prof’s Note: Ironic given the conservative talk show blathering].  The universities are mills for corporate employees. The media churn out info-tainment and pollute the airwaves with fatuous pundits. The Left, he [Wolin] said, no longer has the capacity to be a counterweight to the corporate state, and if an extreme right regains momentum there will probably be very little organized or effective resistance.” (150)  Perhaps we see a little of that now: Protests are half-ignored or marginalized/ridiculed by a corporate media in service to their masters.

Wolin cuts to the dead heart of the matter: The true Anti-Right is an amorphous blob, with no coherent organization, and certainly no powerful one. “A few voices here, a magazine there, and that’s about it.  It goes nowhere.” (150)

Are there positive things:? Yes, a number of them.  But we would fall into the positive thinking trap Hedges lines out if we supposed that merely looking at the positive and ignoring the negative is going to save us from the probability pattern. It won’t—not as individuals, not as society, not as civilization.