They Are All Dead

I spent a week seeing how well military veterans are compensated for 4 years of staying-out-of-prison, if they know how to work the system. And for many members of the “voluntary Army” (Navy, Air Farce, and Marines) that is all their “service” amounted to at the time they “volunteered”: some judge told them “Go to jail or join the Army.” And they chose some branch of the military rather than jail. So much for the specialness of being “all you can be.” Currently, the US military employs more than two million “volunteers.” Obviously, some of those are actually volunteers and some of that number clearly holds the ideals of democracy and freedom very close to their hearts. And if Donald Trump and his owners and minions have their way, those few will either be executed as traitors or kicked out of the government for “disobedience.”

Whenever I hear the “thanks for your service” homily, I think of my Vietnam era friends who were sacrificed for the corporate interests that pulled the country into that war. I’m talking about the ones who fought and either died “in country” more than 50 years ago or lived disorderly lives, desperately trying to find some meaning for their survival when they were paroled from their term of “service.”

I also think of my father and his almost constant confusion about what he was doing, and why, as a very rural Kansas 23-year-old farm-boy pretending to be an Navy LST pilot in WWII. I think about the enlisted men who carried him across the Atlantic from Norfolk, Virginia to North Africa to Italy and to Normandy. When that series of catastrophes failed to kill him, but had decimated the majority of the men with whom he’d crossed the ocean, he was assigned to an assortment of aircraft carriers and battle ships, promising to return to the States, where instead he was swept into the Pacific war doing a variety of jobs for which he had no training or aptitude until that war ended. He never believed he was a “hero,” but I’ve read stories of those who fought in that Great War who definitely were heroes, by any standards; but who Donald Trump and his ilk believe were “suckers and losers.”

But today all of those heroes who fought for everything Americans pretend to represent (Truth, Justice, Freedom, and the American Way!) are dead or all but extinct. World War II ended in 1945, 79 years ago, and anyone who fought in that war is likely dead and the few centenarian vets left alive were more than likely US-bound support staff. The heroes are nearly all dead.

Since WWII, American military actions have been for fascist, imperialist-style purposes; protecting the interests of the rich and powerful and repressing democracy where ever it reared its head. I can not find a single moment in my lifetime (from 1948 up to now) when the US military was doing anything that “protected the freedoms” of the American citizen (other than the financial interests of the 0.1%). From Korea to Iraq and Afghanistan, our military has been guarding against and repressing the outbreak of democracy and human rights across the globe. And to keep military veterans from thinking about what they have done, their crimes against humanity, we thank them “for their service” and anoint those who are smart enough to think about what they’ve done with lavish privileges for the rest of their lives to keep them quiet.

And that works to the extreme, so that when a veteran from the Vietnam War, Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, or even “successful” invasions like Grenada and Panama, speaks out against the criminal behavior of our government their worst critics and, even, violent enemies are other vets. The “Volunteer Army” was likely the beginning of the end for both the idea of patriotism for our rarely-lived ideals and any hope that the United States might evolve into a democracy.

Eliminating the draft had nothing to do with creating a “more professional military,” it was driven primarily by the soldiers’ revolts during the Vietnam War. The corporate interests that are behind every military action, overt or covert, that the US government has taken since WWII require obedience, first, and excellence, rarely, to achieve their objectives. With enough firepower and corruption and the natural gullibility of at least half of every population, fascism gets what it wants with no sacrifice from those who reap the most benefits. So, what we should be remembering on Memorial Day is who was harmed, what innocents were murdered, and how much damage to human habitat has been done in the name of “patriotism.” In a rational world, anyone who willingly sent others into war would be an international criminal and an enemy of all humans. But we don’t live in that world.

Missin’ This?

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

 “You think I’ll miss all this?” He pointed out the window of his Fitzsimons General Hospital room. It wasn’t much of a window, but it wasn’t much of a room, either: white tiled, white ceiling tiles, even a white metal door and just enough space for his hospital bed, some medical equipment and two friends to sit in folding chairs near the bed. His window looked over a parking lot across miles of Denver rooftops to the west, but most days the view of the mountains was right there, filling the window through the Denver haze. We were, all three of us, young and from western Kansas and the mountains were a rare sight. Any kind of variation in the earth’s topology was rare, for us. I wasn’t sure the mountains were what he meant, though. For the purposes of this story our hospitalized friend’s name will be “David,” for several reasons.

It had been a rare spontaneous trip across the Kansas desert into the Colorado foothills and a blizzard just a few miles outside of Denver for Don and I. We had been in a band together, but the Vietnam War was winding that down for us. Don, the band’s drummer, and Ed, our lead singer, guitarist, and my songwriting conspirator were both going into the Army in a few months. I’d flunked the Navy physical exam, due to asthma, early that spring. So, I was “free” from military service, but that meant I had to grow up on my own without any of the social guardrails some of my friends would meet in the Army. There were a few gigs booked, but not for me, it would turn out. I was registered to start classes at a fly-by-night computer school in Texas in a few months.

The reason Don and I were in Denver was Don had heard that a kid who had been a neighbor of mine a few years earlier and who was a Catholic school classmate and friend of Don’s was back from Vietnam, struck in a hospital room in Denver, but who would soon be released from both the hospital and the Army with full disability veteran’s benefits. Neither Don or I understood the implications of the full disability designation, but we knew it must be something serious.

My memory of the seriousness of our friend’s illness is sketchy, more than 50 years later. Other than being extremely thin and pale, he looked pretty much as I remembered him. For a more perceptive kid, that should have been an obvious clue since I hadn’t seen him since we were both 13 years old. He was upbeat, smiled a lot, was anxious to “get back home,” and seemed glad to see us. We thought he had it made, a few months in the Army, a trip overseas, a plane ride back to Denver, and he was financially set for life. That’s what we, especially me, thought.

A few years later, Don and I would be in a band again. Me back from a hippy urban-survivalist adventure in Dallas and him back from a tour of Vietnam, a mental breakdown, and a general discharge from the Army for not being able to hold up his end of terrorizing a third world country as an in-country sniper and, later, a CID spy in Germany. Don would definitely not have it made with his general discharge. In getting reacquainted after three years of mutual absence from our “home” town, Don was back in school, in a community college electronics technician program and trying to be a good citizen. The stigma of his general discharge would follow him for the rest of his short life. While I occasionally took some heat as a “draft dodger,” that slowly went into the background as the nation quietly tried to forget about Vietnam and our unimpressive showing as “the most powerful nation in the world.” But Don’s general discharge stuck to him until he died. In one more act of kindness, Don convinced me to join him in the electronics program which kickstarted the rest of my life.

Back in ‘67, the three-hundred-and-fifty mile drive from Dodge to Denver and the hospital had been an adventure. Just barely after we made it to I70 a few miles outside of Aurora, Don’s ‘57 Chevy died on the side of the freeway in a white sheet of a late spring blizzard. It wasn’t the first time this had happened to him, so he knew what to look for first; the fuel pump. We’d left Dodge on a seventy-degree early summer day, dressed accordingly for poor kids in 1966, and landed in the plains of Colorado, freezing temperatures, snow falling practically in clumps, traffic blasting by us while we soaked ourselves taking turns trying to get the fuel pump off of that godawful car. There was a filling station, still open, about a half mile back east of where our transportation had become a mediocre shelter from the storm and we hiked back for a telephone and heat. The station was going to close for the night at 11PM, but the guy running the place let us pile a bunch of pallets and other flammables at the end of the driveway, near a fifty-five gallon steel barrel, and Don called a relative in Denver for help. We were almost penniless, so it wasn’t like the station attendant was refusing us service, we couldn’t afford anything he could offer. We set the trashcan on fire both for warmth and as a signal fire for Don’s rescue vehicle. For what seems like several hours today, we took turns warming up and stoking the fire and hiking back to the car to keep at the fuel pump service.

I don’t remember how the vehicle rescue happened. From that flaming trash barrel to a night on a couch to sitting in that hospital room envying David’s financial situation, it’s all a blink and a blur. We made the fuel pump repair, in a warm dry garage, drove to the hospital, and negotiated the usual hospital maze in a series of flashback photos in my memory. But, now, I am back in that room, admiring the view, wondering about my future, David’s medical situation, and thinking about the drive back home and the odds of ending up frozen to death in another blizzard. And I said, “Miss what?”

David grinned at me, “All of this. Us, the hospital, the mountains, the blue sky, this crap in my body the docs say they can’t figure out and can’t kill, being alive. Do you think I’ll miss it?”

My mother died when I was nine-years-old. The next couple of years of having bullshit like “God works in mysterious ways” and “everything happens for a reason” securely pounded the atheist nail into my personality. 

Don was a lapsed Catholic, partially because when playing basketball for a Catholic college he injured his knee and the college voided his scholarship and booted him out, not because he was a poor student but because they recruited him to play basketball and he couldn’t. Later, after returning from Vietnam one of Don’s career phases was as an evangelical “minister” in a small Kansas town. Between being an evangelical minister and an Army sniper, Don had been a carpenter, a cabinet maker, and a drug dealer who spent some time in prison. At one time, he answered his phone with "Praise the Lord this is . . . " I don't know what Don believed, but I think he desperately wanted to imagine there was some kind of point to his journey.

Don’s response to David's question was, “Anytime you want you can relive any part of your life.” I think he was serious, too.

I tried to skate the question, but several times David asked, “What about you?” Meaning me.

“Nope. You won’t miss it or anything else. None of us will”

About six months later, David died at home from some kind of untreatable bacterial or chemical infestation he’d received in Vietnam. “Set for life” took on a new meaning for me. Ten years later, Don died of a drug overdose, alone in a shabby rental unit in a small central Kansas ghost town.

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

Memorial Day

For me, this is a weird “holiday.” “Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for mourning the U.S. military personnel who have died while serving in the United States armed forces.” Or so says Google and Wikipedia. “Serving” in the US armed forces in the last 70 years has been an odd perversion of that word.

My father-in-law “served” in the Air Force between 1946 and 1966, enough to put in his 20 years and at a time when he mostly flew in a B52 from one US base to another pretending to be a “Cold Warrior,” but mostly drinking, partying, and making the most money he would earn in his lifetime plus a retirement salary that just kept growing until he died. My father served in the US Navy from 1942 to 1946 and saw more of WWII than he was ever willing to talk about and didn’t talk about it at all until he was in his 80s. He was mostly a confused small town kid being ferried from one end of the world to another on the credential of his college degree and officer status. He was an LST officer during both the North African and Italian invasions and saw a boat load of Marines he’d crossed the Atlantic with gunned down in the first few yards of the Normandy landing. He was never one of those guys who wore his WWII uniform or a hat full of medals and patches. When he ran into one of the guys who had spent a year with him on an LST, at a part-time summer job in the early 60s, they had nothing to say to each other.

Friends, some really good friends, were forced to “serve” in the Vietnam War and three of them did not come back and one came back so damaged that he was never functional again. That may not sound like a lot of people to you, but I have never had more than a half-dozen people I would call friends in my life. Losing four of them in a few years to a pointless foreign invasion was significant to me. Oddly and somewhat embarrassingly, I tried to join the Navy, like my father, when I was 18 in 1966 and thanks to a recruiter’s screwup I ended up being classified “1-Y” due to asthma and my Navy recruiter’s intense desire to stay out of combat.

The last two years have changed my perspective on who is serving who and who we should be memorializing. Covid hit the 1,000,000 US citizens killed mark in May of this year. “In some states, medical staff account for as many as 20% of known coronavirus cases.” The “Great Resignation” is loaded with men and women who have decided to leave the US healthcare industry because of the risk, the disrespect, and the fact that qualified and experienced doctors and nurses are more than capable of handling any job a business student might try to tackle. There is a lot more money in bullshit administration jobs than in healthcare. As of February, the estimate was that 1 in 5 healthcare workers have quit and at least one survey found that 1 in 3 plan to quit before the end of 2022. Most of this is due to crappy, over-paid and totally ruthless mismanagement. Hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies are mostly owned by large corporations with multi-millionaire CEOs and the rest of the totally useless “Cs” and while they publicly whine that they’re somehow worth the money they suck out of healthcare they are not. As a physician said in the Atlantic article, “We need to say to the next generation of doctors and nurses, ‘We got this wrong, and despite that, you’re willing to invest your lives in this career? What an incredible gift. We can’t look at that and change nothing.’” Will we? Probably not.

If Memorial Day were to mean something other than the flag-waving “moment of prayer” bullshit honoring the fools and occasional patriots who gave their lives for corporate profit and political maneuvering, we need to refocus on the word “serve” and give credit to those who gave their lives for a higher purpose and war is not that purpose. There was a brief moment, before Nixon abandoned the draft and the Vietnam War, when there was a lot of talk about expanding the concept of serving the country to everything from healthcare and public education to VISTA to the Peace Corps. Instead of only providing public service benefits to those who carried out the imperialistic plans of oil companies and the other international corporations our military has served to slavishly, the country would also honor and reward service to the country. In the 80s, California’s Alan Cranston was on a roll, trying to convince the country that broadening the range of service we honored with healthcare and education benefits when he managed to get himself tangled up in the Keating Five fiasco and prostate cancer (hard to tell which was worse) and decided to retire from politics.

For myself, Memorial Day is personal, not national. I try to remember the faces, the voices, the words, and they times with friends and family who are no longer among the living. At 74, my list is long and growing but there are term limits to how many I can lose before I’m lost. Sooner than later, I’ll be the one being remembered, if at all.

The “Too Many Men” Problem

War has always been an old man’s game, using young men as pawns, cannon fodder, and the tools of the “trade.” The January 6th seditionists were great demonstrations of what happens to a culture that breeds gross excesses of unskilled, uncreative, uneducated young men and provides them with nothing to do to either burn off their unproductive but dangerous energies or the necessary self-destructive opportunities nature intended for them. If we’re not going to give them swords and spears and pointless causes for them to flail away at each other in the service of their lords and masters, they need drugs and mindless activities with which to distract themselves. Thousands of years of human evolution and near-constant war between cities, states, and regional nations either caused or was were caused by these barely-functional young men and the need to expend them as quickly as possible. The true cause of war might be a surplus of  these barely-functional young men and the need to expend them as quickly as possible.

Forty years ago, a friend and I made a regular pilgrimage to San Clemente, CA (Doug always called it “San Clemency,” since Nixon was still boarded-up there at the time.) to scuba dive the San Clemente reef. Weather or ocean conditions were never a limiting factor for us. If we’d made the date for Sunday on the Monday before, regardless of 10’ surf, 2” visibility (seriously), cold, wind, or rain, we’d both be there on Sunday, suited-up, spearguns and game bags in hand, ready to swim the half-mile from the beach to the reef, and dive into the crashing water for fun and adventure. Over the years we repeated this exercise, we developed our own (probably not) definition of “macho”; which, essentially, translated to “stupid.”  When we chanted “this is really macho—as we flailed against the first 100’ of surf, sand, and wind until we got beyond the surf zone where we could comfortably paddle on our backs with our BCs partially inflated like undersized Zodiacs the rest of the swim to the reef—we were really telling ourselves that “this one might be the one that kills one or both of us.” Macho.

Doug was a PADI Dive Instructor and, eventually, I became a Dive Master (an instructor’s assistant) and as certified instructors we preached the PADI religion of “dive buddies” to our dive class students: as one PADI instructor quotes, “. . . the buddy system makes every dive safer and more fun.” And more complicated. Doug and I only paid slight notice to the whole buddy concept, especially at San Clemente. With visibility that rarely exceeded 3-4’ and was usually barely an arm’s reach, there was no point in pretending that once we went under water there was any chance that we’d be buddied-up. One of the last dive trips we did together, Doug asked, “What do you think is in store for two guys like us, who Nature intended to finish off in a war before we made it to 20 or 25 years old, who have ever appearance of living way past 40, at least?”

I totally understood what he meant. When I “celebrated” my 30th birthday, I was mostly stunned that I’d lived that long. Both in my career and in my recreation and even my everyday activities, there was no reasonable expectation from anyone who knew me that I’d live to 30, let alone 40+ years-old which I was at the time when this question was popped. Nature had clearly intended for both of us to, probably, lead a small group of young men against another group of young men in bloody, hand-to-hand combat, and to die “gloriously” on a battlefield strewn with other equally destined-and-designed-to-die young men. At 40, like lots of men, we both felt that thing often called a “mid-life crisis” but we were both aware enough to know that the crisis wasn’t about anything more than having outlived our use-by-dates. No expensive car,

Our national fixation and the weird and not particularly honest “respect” we give to people who spent time in the military is a pretty accurate example of the dichotomy between who our culture pretends these people are vs who we know they are. A recent pass through Minneapolis/St. Paul reminded me of the near-constant parade of homeless (mostly) men sporting “homeless, support your troops” signs.

The Obama Administration, several states, and a few cities combined to dramatically reduce the number of homeless vets between 2010 and 2019, but in 2019 21 out of every 10,000 veterans were homeless which is about 25% higher than non-vets. A 2012-2017 study found that military vets contributed to 13.5% of all US deaths by suicide but were only 7.9% of the US adult population. Male vets were almost twice as likely to commit suicide than female vets (with Army and Marine vets leading that “charge”). In March, 2020, the VA found that veteran unemployment was greater than 13%, opposed to a 3.5% unemployment rate for the general population at the time (Trump managed to degrade the rest of the US workforce to the vets’ unemployment level by August 2020.). Three of the top ten professions in the US that exhibit high divorce rates involve military jobs. All of that negative outcome is in spite of the desperate attempts by government and society to provide a “hand up” post-military service through generous veterans benefits, special employment consideration (especially in government employment), and the leniency society gives to those “who have served.” Being in the US military is either hazardous to the rest of your life or attracts people who are deficient in the first place. The fact that “nearly 1 in 5 of the [January 6] rioters charged so far have a history of serving in the military (only about 7% of Americans in general are military veterans)” is a pretty solid indication that being a military vet is no indication of either patriotism, loyalty to the oath service people take to the US Constitution, or intelligence or even sanity. The January 6th Hee Haw Riot was one of the most underachieving herds of human beings since . .  . every Trump rally ever.

Nixon ended the draft in July of 1973 in an attempt to end the Vietnam War protests. He was too late, of course, since Congress cut off funding for the war in late-1972, forcing the US to negotiate a “peace settlement” that allowed US troops to leave in January of 1973. The end of the draft instigated 50 years of a “poverty draft” where young people with no other economic hope feel forced to join the military in the desperate hope that they might receive some vocational training and an economic leg-up. Lake of education opportunities, college debt, and the general trends in the economy that will continue to offer fewer employment to the military’s current prime candidates: the military spends “$2.5 billion a year targeting high-achieving low-income youth with commercials, video games,personal visits and slick brochures.$2.5 billion a year targeting high-achieving low-income youth with commercials, video games,personal visits and slick brochures.”

Places like Puerto Rico and the deep South are  the Army’s and Marine’s prime recruiting territory. Puerto Rico ‘s unemployment rate is greater than 40%, and Army recruiting offices ensnare more than 4 times the number of Puerto Rican recruits than the average US-based recruiting offices. Thanks to a particularly sleezy section of the Bush “No Child Left Behind” education bill, public schools have to grant military recruiters the same access to children as do post-secondary schools and employers. Of course, the military recruiters don’t spend anywhere near as much time at private schools or high income suburban K-12 schools as they do in impoverished rural and urban schools. Kids who know they have options are less likely to give up 4 years of their life wasting away in the military. For example, “In 2015, a pair of Education Week reporters making use of the Freedom of Information Act reviewed the Army’s presence in Connecticut high schools and found major discrepancies in how the branch targeted middle-class and poor kids. Throughout the entire 2011–2012 school year, Army recruiters visited a higher-income high school—in which only 5 percent of students qualified for free or reduced lunch—just four times. By contrast, at another high school, where nearly half of the students qualified, Army recruiters stopped by more than 40 times before the spring semester’s final bell.” According to a RAND report, 40-65% of JROTC programs are clustered in the generally impoverished Southeast. JROTC programs are significantly more likely to exist in schools where the majority of students are eligible for free lunch programs. Schools with JROTC programs are twice as likely to have a large black student population than those with a more typically represented black population.

Nothing about military recruiting tactics would indicate that our military is staffed with the nation’s “best and brightest.” What we do have, however, is a military that is incredibly non-representative of the general population—racially, educationally, intellectually, and politically—and a well-armed and dangerously trained sector of and from the federal and state governments that are clearly easily duped into believing fantastic and unsubstantiated conspiracy gibberish and are very likely going to be the fall of the United States of America’s government and empire.

The United States Is A Ponzi Scheme

Ponzi Scheme: a usually-illegal operation in which participants pay to join and profit mainly from payments made by subsequent participants. 

Humans have evolved to believe in one fallacy over all of the others: “If it seems too good to be true, it must be the truest thing of all.” As a species, once we humans have achieved some level of comfort we appear to become convinced that we have done something to deserve that comfort for the rest of our lives. That’s not just a problem in the USA, but everywhere there are people with “1st world problems.” Here in the USA we have taken that quality to extremes. 

Republicans harp at “entitlements” without bothering to look up the word to see what it actually means. They, of course, object to the working class entitlements like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, welfare, and anything that isn’t an immediate transfer of funds into the paws of our 1% and, even, the Russian 1%. They do not object to the corporate welfare and idle rich entitlements. Obviously, if you are rich you deserve to be so. God said so; Jesus, not so much. I, however, object to all entitlements that are unfunded. 

Take Social Security, for example. Washington D.C.’s Urban Institute, a non-partisan research institute found that “a two-earner couple receiving an average wage — $44,600 per spouse in 2012 dollars — and turning 65 in 2010 would have paid $722,000 into Social Security and Medicare and can be expected to take out $966,000 in benefits. So, this couple will be paid about one-third more in benefits than they paid in taxes.” That’s not an “unrealistic return on investment” over a half-century of work and interest accruement. 

My parents’ generation, the so-called “Greatest Generation,” really kicked Social Security in the teeth by voting themselves solvent after a lifetime of insane military spending and general economic foolishness. The Urban Institute found, “If a similar couple had retired in 1980, they would have gotten back almost three times what they put in. And if they had retired in 1960, they would have gotten back more than eight times what they paid in. The bigger discrepancies common decades ago can be traced in part to the fact that some of these individuals’ working lives came before Social Security taxes were collected beginning in 1937.” The reason we’re expecting Social Security to become insolvent any minute now is because the Greatest and Silent Generations paid themselves overtime salaries on part-time work. Of course, the other reason is that Republican Presidents since Nixon have raided the so-called Social Security “lock box” for every military boondoggle imaginable and if they couldn’t outright steal that money, they simply spent money that didn’t exist and attached the bills to the Social Security IOUs. Trump is doing that with his wall boondoggle. Best case, “Come 2034, so say the system’s trustees in their 2015 report, the trust fund will be exhausted and, absent a law change, they will be able to disburse only 75% of promised benefits.” Worst case, the whole US economic house of cards will collapse on itself and Social Security insolvency will be the least of our concerns. It has happened, often, in the country’s speckled history and is more likely to happen again than not. 

The two biggest money-sinks outside of actual earned, useful, and necessary “entitlements” are our grossly racist and unjust prison system and the military. People are making money out of the slave labor harvested in the prison system, but those people aren’t “the people.” The more than 2 million people in US prisons are generating a profit, but not for the public or government forced to live with the world’s most incarcerated public on the planet. The corporations harvesting slave labor, charging exorbitant prices for “services,” and providing labor to the for-profit and government administered prisons are one of the largest lobbies in a nation of monster lobbies. Just the prison phone services make $1.2 billion per year and they doing such a terrible job that PharmaBro Martin Shkreli is still running his old drug company from prison and Tweeting as if he were an actual human being not doing time for felonies far worse than many people doing far more time than this “white collar criminal.” The collection of corporate-welfare queens in the prison system run from commissary companies racking up $1.6 billion to the $3 billion for-profit bail system to the privately-held for-profit prisons that are not adequately monitored and whose income isn’t even known because they don’t have to disclose that information to the people, taxpayers, who are paying the tab. 

The War on Drugs is another corporate-welfare entitlement that involves local, state, and federal “law enforcement,” the for-profit prison system, a collection of para-military sub-contractors, drug enforcement equipment and weapons providers, and a variety of con artists who make buckets of money convincing the public that prohibition will actually work “this time.” As long as there are billions of dollars to be made selling illegal drugs, someone is going to be getting that money. The solution is to cut the legs out from under that profit motive by legalizing drugs, emphasizing education and providing safe and economical use for the small percentage of addicted users, and whatever is left to be described as “illegal” penalize at the source. 

Finally, the biggest cause of the nation’s insolvency is the vast and uncontrolled war spending. Like the drug business, war materials are a source of easy money with practically no quality requirements or practical purpose. The military-industrial complex has had exactly the kind of ride as the dope peddlers: low cost and outrageous profit margins. Worse, the Pentagon has no interest in making the slightest effort at controlling costs or making sure the public gets something for its money. The country has flushed somewhere between $5T and $15T down the post-9/11 war rabbit hole. The Pentagon, through incompetence, corruption, and laziness “misplaced” more than a few trillion dollars (total amount unknown); somewhere between $3 and $9T. Our current national debt is about $22T and the country hasn’t made a serious attempt at repaying any of that debt since Nixon started cutting taxes in 1971, but we really kicked the debt into overtime during Reagan’s fiscally irresponsible regime. Reagan paid lip service to shoring up the Social Security fund with his 1983 “reform act” (never believe any Republican tax modification is a “reform”), but he followed that up with massive deficit spending and liberal use of federal funds for a variety of money-wasting military projects. 

Obviously, the insane pensions paid out to military lifers—especially the officer classes—are just more of the same sorts of boondoggles taxpayers should not be tolerating. A grade-10 general makes $19,762.50 per month and will receive as much as 100% of that salary after 40 years of “service.” Considering the miserable job the military has done both protecting the country and being responsible with taxpayers’ money, I think they ought to be indentured servants after a few decades of leeching off of the public tit. When we say “thank you for your service” to these characters, we should be rubbing our sore assholes and walking bow-legged at the same time. Likewise, the variety of “injuries” ex-military people use to justify disability claims is amazing. Having taught at a college that actively recruited veterans with “disability college funding,” I’ve seen some pretty comical characters burning taxpayer money while avoiding working for a living. Worse, I’ve heard some of the strangest claims from veterans of my generation and, based on that, I can only hope Trump does succeed in privatizing the VA so that it can quickly bankrupt and be abolished. 

If we—meaning my generation the “Boomers”—don’t help solve these problems, our kids will solve them at our expense. Between the X-Gens and the Millennials, we are finally outvoted, demographically if not practically. In 2019, Millennials will outnumber Boomers. They could elect representatives whose only platform is balancing the budget by any means possible, including putting Social Security on pause until it is solvent. I cannot think of a good argument against that, in fact. My generation has been financially irresponsible . . . forever, since early adulthood. Today, half of the country’s bankruptcies are over-50. “Seniors are going into retirement still carrying debt, including mortgages, credit card debt and student loan debt. They are depleting their savings and retirement accounts just to make ends meet.” 

One of my many complaints about news reporting leading up to the Great Recession was all of babble about “more people than ever own homes,” when what they should have said was “more people than ever are in debt for home purchases”; two distinctly different things. Almost everyone I know in my generation has some to a lot of house debt and one of the most basic rules I know of is “you can’t retire until you own your own home.” “Own” your own home, not live in a property that is owned by a bank. If you not only don’t own your home, but you don’t own your car, recreational vehicles and/or boats, haven’t paid off your credit cards or, even, college debt, you not only are not ready to retire you have also demonstrated an inability to manage money like an adult. Our kids should take that information for what it is and stop listening to Boomers as if they were full-developed, educated adults. As the third generation of Ponzi Scheme suckers Boomers are not totally to blame for the economic mess the country is in, but we are likely to be the ones to take the fall for it. Based on the evidence, we won’t deserve much sympathy.

Digging a Deeper Hole

A little more than two years ago, I wrote about the kind of people who voted for Donald Trump and their motivations: “I’m tired of everyone else doing better than me,” racism, homophobia, superstition/religion, anti-intellectualism, anti-science-phobia, and general purpose intolerance for everthing and everyone not like them. They were successful. For eight years of Obama, the far right cocooned themselves in an echo chamber of Fox News, Breitbart and Alex Jones fake news insanity, and every racist, right wing hate website and blog they could focus their beady little eyes on. Their world was apocalyptical, with successful, educated non-white people coming at them from every direction (“They took ur jobs!), their lack of education and tolerance driving them deeper into Red State dependence, and their “information sources” reinforcing their paranoia and racism at every opportunity. For eight years, these pitiful, uneducated and uninformed old white people (and a depressing number of young white people) were terrorized by all sorts of disasters that didn’t exist and wouldn’t exist until they elected the nation’s first modern fascist President. Now that Donald Trump and the Republicans are in power, every one of the terrible things Trump’s voters were afraid of are happening for real.

Things are so bad that the average citizen is actually hoping the FBI gets the job done. This is the same FBI that wastes “counterterrorism resources to monitor and infiltrate domestic political organizations that criticize business interests and government policies, despite a lack of evidence that the groups are engaging in or supporting violent action.” A Freedom of Information inquiry by the ACLU found “Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) show the FBI expanding the definition of ‘domestic terrorism’ to include citizens and groups that participate in lawful protests or civil disobedience.” That FBI. Those guys are now the “good guys?” If you needed any sort of weights and measures system to determine how far the nation has fallen down the swampy Trump rabbit hole, this might the the only thing you need to look at.

The Trump voters got what they wanted, however. We are now all equally miserable. They still don’t have a wall, they still can’t get more than a minimum wage job with no real benefits, their Social Security is less secure than it has been since the 1930s, national security is a non-existent joke, Trump has rebooted the nuclear arms race, the United States has low international status and our national credibility is at an all-time low, our economy is poised to crash into at least another Great Recession or worse, and the right wing is headed for, and looking forward to, a showdown that could turn into a 2nd US Civil War. It’s hard to imagine being on the edge of more catestrophies. Thanks Trump voters.

Making 'Merica Great "Again"

Aside from the Trumpetes’ foolish jabber about turning back the clock on technology, trade, energy and natural resources, employment and management skills, and reality, I think an examination of what it would take to return our economy from a deficit to a surplus system is an interesting idea. Of course, Republicans deserve massive credit for driving the economy deep into deficit spending: Reagan and Bush II were both huge deficit spending believers. In spite of their big talk about the terror of deficit spending, Republicans absolutely rebelled when Obama told them he expected future spending bills to be on a “pay as you go basis.” The Party of Stupid is also the party of “borrow and spend” and nothing is going to change that in any foreseeable future.

 

However, if we did suddenly become responsible and decide to put on our big boy pants and do the dirty work of turning around the economy, what would we do? This is my list, in order of importance:

1. Money and politics has to go. Not only does Citizens United need to be overturned, but we need a Constitutional Amendment banning private money (corporate and individual) from our political campaigns. That law needs teeth, as in “you get caught, you hang.” We won’t seriously look at any real solutions until our government is not bought and sold on a daily basis.
2. The tax system has to be fixed. We’ve been at “war” since 2003 and the only way to pay for wars is to progressively tax income until the war debt is gone. I can see how eliminating the corporate tax could be incentive for business in the US, but that has to be coupled with doubling-down on unearned income taxation, inheritance taxes, and upper-income tax rates. Continuing to encourage rock stars and athletes, banksters and money laundering, and Trump-like con artists with tax incentives to do unproductive money-shuffling has cost the country at least two generations of scientists, engineers, and people who could be doing actual work. Incentives are everything and our current tax system provides incentives for exactly the wrong things; including activities that endanger national security.
3. The world is on the metric system and the longer we put off moving to modern weights and measurements the less competitive American companies and workers become. Face it, nobody but us cares about the length of the King’s fuckin’ foot. If you think that is an exaggeration, the only non-metric countries in the world are: Burma, Liberia, and the USA. Talk about being late to the party! Thomas Jefferson was the first President to recommend the metric system and we still can’t figure it out. Not being comfortable with the world’s weights and measurements puts a serious crimp in the abilities of American workers, technicians, and engineers. It makes many of our manufactured products useless to the rest of the world. Constantly doing mental or paper/computer conversions slows us down, creates errors, and makes Americans look backward and foolish to the rest of the world.
4. The current slow death of religion has to speed up. Currently, about 18% of people 60 and younger attend church and fewer than 50% believe in God. That's an improvement over the past 50 years of superstition, but not enough and not nearly quick enough. Every thing from science, energy production, employability, democracy, to national security is being damaged by our national proclivity toward superstition and fantasy. To keep up, we’ll have to grow up.
5. The war machine and military-industrial complex have to go. Not only do we have to quit pretending we're the world's policeman, we have to admit we suck at the job. We can't tell national security from corporate interests and until we can we need to put our weapons back on the shelf. The US loves war, but we can't afford it. As a peace-keeper, we’re not that talented.
6. Our public education system needs to be overhauled. First, private education needs to die. When the wealthy can abandon public education and do everything in their power to contaminate the discussion about how to educate the whole country to benefit their class, the whole country gets screwed. Finland provides us with a terrific example and, since our own experiment has been a disaster, we need to look to someone who has built a wheel that actually turns and supports weight. As Jeff Beck said, “Amateurs borrow, professionals steal.” We need to rip the pages out of Finland’s education reform book and paste them into our own system.
7. We have to go back into space. The brief moment when 'Merica was great by almost everyone's standards was when we were in the Space Race and were focused on a big accomplishment. The scientific and industrial spin-offs from NASA were incredible. We owe much of what we know today about climate change to NASA's research. As crippled as our industrial and scientific power is today, without the space race we'd be 3rd world. This is a no-brainer.
8. Every “for profit” industry in the country needs to be re-evaluated to see if it is working better than when those activities were performed by non-profits and government. Personally, I think deregulation and privatization has been a disaster, but I have not made a scientific study of every area where it has been applied. I have been upfront and close to education, health care, energy, and infrastructure and I am unimpressed with the performance of the private sector.
9. Our legal system needs to get over its power tripping and empire building and develop a sense of proportion. Police need to go after big crime and quit screwing around with the easy and safe stuff. Victimless crimes do not belong at the top of the priority list. The War on Drugs was a fraud and it’s long past time to admit it. The big money and long-term damage to society is in white collar crime and that’s where the main enforcement and prosecution focus needs to be: cybercrime, financial fraud, corporate environmental and consumer abuse, and the government contracting corruption and bribery that risks national security. Our prison system needs to be refocused on rehabilitation rather than punishment and revenge. We can not be the country that leads in citizens incarcerated and hope to be anything resembling “great.” National, state, and local police departments are over-staffed with unskilled goons who are great at beating up protestors, jailing small-time criminals, and protecting corporate criminals, but they are helpless when it comes to tracking down the lowest-level hacker who has ripped off a few thousand retirees bank accounts. Our law enforcement system needs to be updated and technological to get the right job done. Use the Pareto principle to identify the most effective places to spend time and money and quit knee-jerk reacting to squeaky wheels.

That’s my list. What have you got?

#161 Terrorists and Biker Gangs (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

Biker gangs have been with us since the beginning of history. This was first pointed out to me by my wife when I described the "Comancheros" who used to terrorize the American plains before and after the Civil War, before "civilization" replaced random acts of terror with organized terror (aka "government"). In this context, Viking marauders were boat-gangsters. The Mongol hordes were really big horse-riding gangs. Roaming packs of male chimpanzees are horseless, bike-less proto-gangsters. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were nations of biker-gangsters, finally, wearing helmets and uniforms. It's about time a biker gang thought about safety and strapped on helmets.

The basic concept of gangs could be taken from the Three Musketeers, "One for all, all for one."  Of course, when the going gets really tough and individual qualities are required, the members add "and everyone for himself" until the smoke clears. Without loud and clear orders to follow and simple rules to remember, biker gangsters revert to the most human primitive values. 

Years ago, I stumbled into a discussion with a guy who'd spent most of his life in biker gangs.  He talked about "honor" and "loyalty" as if those character traits didn't exist outside of gangs.  I had to comment on the fact that I had a hard time rectifying the habit biker gangs have of ganging up on an outsider who presented some minor challenge to one of their members with the quality of "honor." 

His reply was that disrespecting one member of the gang was disrespect to all.  Any challenge to a single member was a challenge to the whole group, even when the challenge was issued completely out of context to the group.  Honestly, I though that was the nuttiest answer possible.  I am incapable of seeing a gang beating as anything other than group cowardice and incredibly despicable.  But I'm never going to be recruited to be a gang member, partially because I don't think like gang members.  I'm all for "all for one and one for all," but at some point individuals have to accept the responsibility of their own actions.  Gang members are not individuals. They surrender their individuality when they merge their weak personalities into the slightly stronger group-mind.

How does a 12-on-1 gang beating fit into the concept of "honor?" The logical extension of this response is the old 10-for-1 reprisal rule that the Nazi's applied to resistance movements.  Today, the USA and Israel have extended that logic to several thousand for one in Iraq and Lebanon. To me, it still violates my Kansas cowboy sense of justice and fairness and I don't get it. Let's face it, when most of us saw L.A.'s cops beating the crap out of Rodney King we thought "somebody ought to help that guy," no matter what King did to get into that predicament.  At least, I hope most of us thought that. 

Paul William Roberts describes an American Special Forces soldier in A War Against Truth, "He was as alien as the yogis I'd seen up in isolated Himalayan caves - people who have had no interaction with other humans for years, who have forgotten how.  The soldier was both shy and lethal.  He had lost most human qualities. If he married, it would not last: she'd realize eventually that he had no feelings towards her - that he had no feelings at all. The 'company' would never let him go, either.  It might make his leash quite long, but it would always want to know what he was doing, because it had trained him and knew what he was capable of doing. If he turned to crime, no police force on earth would be any match for him. This was The Terminator for real." This is a pretty accurate description of the prototypical biker gang member; with the exception of the Special Forces' exceptional training. Some bikers are ex-Special Forces and the like, however, and we can thank our military for loosing them on the public.

One of the prime faults in biker gang logic is the misinterpretation of fear as respect. Nobody respects bikers, but most everyone from cops to man-on-the-street citizens fear them. Any group inspiring fear creates an equal amount of hate.  Hate and fear create a need for security.  The need for security creates an opposite reaction to the source of the fear and hate.  And arms races are born of thus.

Internationally, we're seeing these qualities displayed by at least two nations: Israel and the United States.  Both nations have decided that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to them because . . . those rules are inconvenient. Both nations react to specific acts of violence with random, extended violence disproportionate to the initial event and without any concern for striking the actual perpetrators.  Like drunken biker gangs, Israel and the US blast everything in the general direction of their enemies, creating larger and more sophisticated enemies.  They intentionally pick on small, unarmed or barely armed nations and attempt to "shock and awe" them into submission.  They are careless about the "collateral damage" they cause to both those they attack and the nation (gang) they "represent." 

This is not just Little George's gang, Clinton's gang, Old George's Gang, and Reagan's gang (who have mostly moved on to Little George's gang) all felt the same way.  Remember Madeleine Albright's response to the possibility of 300,000 children dying to effect "regime change in Iraq?" "I think it is worth the price."  That's what she said.  Billy Clinton's Secretary of State was willing to sacrifice 300,000 children to replace Saddam with an unknown (but more compliant) political system. So, we did. 

Things have changed in Iraq, mostly much for the worse.  A few hundred thousand Iraqis have been sacrificed since 1991. We patrol, but don't control, the oil wells that were the real reason for this sacrifice. And we've created an image for ourselves that is equal to the shining aura of the Hell's Angels. We've become a nation of crack-importing, meth-manufacturing, gang-banging bikers who instill fear in every sane nation in the world. 

Any national leader who cares about his country's security is either cranking up the national defense mechanisms, building weapons of self-defense and mass destruction, or is sucking up to Little George in hopes that obedience is all he and his loons want.  In the case of Great Britain, that's probably all that is necessary.  They have used up their natural resources, so there is nothing worth stealing on that pitiful island. The rest of North Africa, however, is scared to death.  South America is bracing for another round of assassinations and invasions. George Pataki, New York's nutty governor and the potential 2008 Republican Presidential candidate, ramped up the hyperbola about to be concentrated against Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez in his National Press speech, "Energy Freedom: Putting an End to Foreign Oil's Dangerous Grip on America's Future." "Energy freedom" was a side-issue in Pataki's speech, mostly he used the forum to rant against the elected leader of a country that has failed to allow American corporations unrestricted access to that country's national resources. 

Shame on them. Everybody grab a weapon.  We're gonna go beat the crap out of those disrespectful civilians.

August 2006

#139 Sexism/Racism Logic (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

I've probably written on this subject before.  Look it up.  I don't care if I'm repeating myself.  In present times, there is never enough being said about discrimination and the flawed logic that is applied by the folks who discriminate and believe in a social class system so religiously that they would sacrifice 200+ years of social and economic progress to maintain it. 

This is a subject that is dear and near to my heart.  Both of my children are women and they've experienced more discrimination than they could ever deserve.  Many of my friends are non-white and their experiences tear at my heart and make me ashamed of my country and culture. 

Here's the deal.  If you believe, for example, that white folks are superior to black folks, for example, it's simple to prove or disprove.  If a race is superior, all healthy (non-mentally retarded) examples of that race will be superior to all healthy examples of the inferior race.  Meaning, that every white man will be superior in intellect to every black man.  Any deviation from that rule will disprove the entire argument.  If I can find one black person who is more intelligent, more capable, and more educated than a single white person, the entire racial-superiority argument is defeated.  I think even the dumbest Aryan Nation, KKK cracker will be stuck admitting that there are millions of black men and women who could outwit them and everyone in their family in every test of mental capacity except, possibly, who has memorized the most possum recipes. 

The same test, slightly modified, would apply to sexism.  For example, the statement "women are biologically unfit to be fighter pilots" could easily be put to the test.  Since this is a highly skilled, we hope, technical and physical occupation, the "everyman" test is less applicable.  So, I'll modify it.  Now, what we'll say is if every qualified man is superior to every qualified woman, it's fair to say that women are unfit to be fighter pilots.  To test the premise, you'd need a war.  In peacetime, all kinds of crap ends up in the military.  Criminals, high school dropouts, spoiled little rich kids who want to be "officers," and freaks who can't afford their own weapons filter into the military when a country doesn't need the military.

Once the war gets underway, the "professionals" get killed, run away, or are court-martialed for their usual perverse behavior and are replaced by citizen-soldiers.  That's when the demand for talent overrides the impulse to either be politically correct or to be personally biased.  Or, at least, that's when those impulses should be overridden.   

During that period, women and men, provided with the same training, can establish superiority or equality.  Until then, either position is unsupported by evidence.  Until then, it doesn't matter.  During peacetime, the military is an unnecessary luxury that can experiment in any dumbass behavior that it finds distracting. 

And so it goes. 

I suspect that the most qualified woman will be considerably more qualified than the least qualified man, in just about any technical field and, possibly, any physical activity we can imagine.  I am absolutely convinced that the most intelligent, capable, rational, and inventive black/yellow/red/brown person will possess infinitely more of those traits than the least intelligent, capable, rational, and inventive white man.  Regardless of education or cultural advantages, that proves (to me) that racial stereotypes are useless in evaluating either a race or individual members of that race.  Your mileage may vary, but your evidence is all that interests me.

August 2005

Fighting for Position

Apparently, I do not understand the purpose of “social networks.” I admit I’m a holdover from previous generations who learned to tolerate diverse opinions; even if those opinions were not respectable. Today, we’re either on one side or the other.

I got into a Facebook discussion about the purpose of our military over the last 50 years with a kid who seems to believe that having served in our military gives him a “higher power” platform for his opinions.

After disagreeing with his devout opinion1 that any military service gives the service member some sort of religious standing, he wrote: “Ah, I see you very well now, Thomas. You're a one-note choir without anything to add to _this_ topic unless it involves knee-jerk opposition to your military and everything it does, stands for, or is capable of. You disregard even the possibility of something valuable or noble in soldiers, whom you see as lesser citizens -- even lesser humans -- than yourself. You blithely generalize that hundreds of thousands of your fellow American citizens would be ‘perfectly happy’ to shoot you up on any order, because apparently you can see into their heads and hearts better than can their peers.

  “If you say it loud enough and long enough, to enough people, that may make it true -- for you. Some of us have a broader experience of fellow soldiers, and expect them to comport themselves faithfully and professionally because that is more than their job. It is their sworn oath, undertaken on your behalf and mine.

“You've shown yourself a condescending bigot, sir, and have confused your personal contempt with understanding.”

I’ve heard this definition of “bigot” before, but failed to understand the intended meaning (something considerably different than the traditional Webster’s definition). I’ve heard it from biker gangbangers, when I disrespected their “right” or moral authority to terrorize the general public. I’ve heard it from modern country musicians after I questioned their rural authenticity, when the only thing they know about the country is that audiences in the country are insufficient to support the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed.

With Jack’s response, all of a sudden, I got it. What “bigot” means is that I am unwilling to submit to their threat of banishment or worse if I don’t, at least, pretend to be afraid of them. It gives them a position from which any sort of violence, from cyber to physical, can be justified. It’s obvious where members of our military would learn this response.

The good thing about these probably-short-lived social networks is that disparate people and opinions have the opportunity to break across social, physical, economic, and spiritual barriers. The sad fact is that we Americans have lost most of the capacity to see across those lines because of our personal history (what you would call "bigotry"). While the technology our country has concentrated on developing has been massively destructive to the world, our democracy, and our nation's future, it's nothing new. Failed empires have pounded on their chests exciting young men to useless, amoral, destructive wars, invasions, and to overreact to oversized (relative to real) threats as long as humans have recorded history (and likely beyond).

It is no surprise that men and women who have given a portion of their lives and sanity to this pretense of national "defense." Our discussion has reminded me of friends returning from Vietnam who desperately wanted those who didn't engage in those atrocities to "honor" their sacrifice. I can't express how sad I was for them and for the many wasted lives resulting from the damage they  suffered, physically and mentally. Some good friends returned from that war so angry and incapacitated that they never recovered. This insistence on "honoring" the warrior even if the war was evil seems to be a new thing. My father's generation spent a lot of energy trying to forget what they were forced to do in WWII. Korean War vets were the first guys I knew who had a sense of desperation about getting credit for having done something questionable or awful.

Vietnam and Iraq vets have a lot in common in that they both have massive sins to live down and want to be told they did something less awful than their senses witnessed. I get that, but can’t help them with their illusions of morality. They fell for the oldest trick in human history and want to be comforted for their error. There is a reason the military wants young men for this task and it is not because they are “the best and the brightest.”

  As for my belief that more than enough of our current members of the military would be “‘perfectly happy’ to shoot [me] up on any order,” I think history has already demonstrated that to be likely. This is very much the old Churchill question about prostitution. Based on the response of too many members and ex-members of the military to any sort of dissent from within (including the article from which this discussion originated), I think Newspeak is the only language the military can handle. My phrase was “most military members" will be perfectly happy to fire on American citizens if they are so ordered.” We could debate their happiness, but I have no doubt that at least 50% of the current mercenary military would fire on order. From what I’ve seen, military happiness is a rare condition, so they’d be as happy as usual, at worst.

A discussion that includes the possibility that our oversized military has often been used to defend interests other than that of the average citizen is off limits and “unpatriotic.” However, there is a good reason why police departments give priority to military vets and it is not a politically correct reason; it is because they will follow orders regardless of morality, legality, or any other rational argument. I suspect in my lifetime, we will find that the “volunteer army” will be volunteering for some pretty nasty domestic duty.

1 The words that inspired Mr. Lewis to such irritation were, “. . . the original post used several examples of men (like John Kerry) who openly opposed the militaristic bend of the nation of the time as cowards and called soldiers who disguised their identities as cowards. Clearly, the ‘thought’ is that if you're in uniform, you should conform. If the JCS comes to congressional hearings and television interviews in uniform to promote their wars, it seems disingenuous to disallow their opponents the same ‘credibility’ platform. ‘Most military members’ will be perfectly happy to fire on American citizens if they are so ordered, so using that generality doesn't make me feel much safer in my opposition to the military.” [NOTE: For the math-disabled, “most” means more than 50%.]

Why Say It Then?

". . . it is important to recognize that profession of noble intent is predictable, and therefore carries no information, even in the technical sense of the term." [Noam Chomsky, Hedgemony or Survival]. Chomsky was making a technical and detailed explanation of the old saying, or "actions speak louder than words."

If claiming patriotism, nationalism, the moral high ground is exactly and predictably the "last refuge of a coward" or a criminal or a con artist, why does anyone listen? "Why" is the right question. The fact is the majority of the thundering herd (or the "beast" as Alexander Hamilton called us) are primed and ready to stampede off of the nearest cliff like lemmings chasing a change in weather and overpopulation. Why are humans so inclined? Why doesn't our education system provide some immunity to our idiot natural inclinations?

I'm sorry to say that it appears to be because we, as a species, are freaking morons. Someone with a far better grasp of the history of human societies said, in the middle of this past decade, that America is on the cusp of the point of no return. If we continue to waste our wealth and talent on the military, the military-industrial complex, phony finance schemes, our inclination to provide military assistance to any international corporation's demand for other nations' natural resources, and the rest of the perverse fascism that is in the long list of failed world powers playbooks, we're going to become the next fallen empire.

Obviously, the real downside to our failure is that we are likely to be inclined to take the rest of the world with us in our demise. It's a terrible truth, but the current random proliferation of nuclear weapons in the 3rd world may be a good thing, since nuclear retaliation is the only thing that appears to stand between an attempt by the corporations (represented by our government and its military) to take over the world's resources and to destroy all forms of democracy. If those psychopathic CEOs and CFOs weren't worried about a terrorist lugging a suitcase nuke into their palaces, they would order the forcible takeover of every asset on the planet.

Of course, that's a double-edged sword.

As we found in 2003, any hope that we can defeat the rest of the world's crazies by employing our own crazies in that battle is probably a defend-able definition of insanity. Arming all of the Bin Ladens, Kim Il Sungs, Moammar Gadhafis, and Dick Cheneys of the world is not a formula for world security. Sooner or later, one of these idiots is going to say "to hell with all of you" and start launching bombs for the fun of it. And they will do so claiming "defense of the motherland, fatherland, little brotherland" or whatever. As we're all going up in nuclear smoke, the last words we'll hear will be G.W. Bush babbling, "I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."1


1 G.W. Bush, being his usual irrational self.