by geezer in Paris
Sun Jun 27th, 2010 at 01:17:43 AM EST
In the privacy of my musty attic, among the boxes of experiences filtered by each other and the piles of old insights turned stale or perhaps even (god forbid) wrong, I too cannot resist the urge to indulge myself in futurology. Risky business. This rather chaotic diary grew out of a comment to fairleft's important diary called "Obama cancels Withdrawal", etc
That said, I see most of the same trends and events he does, but there's a big difference in the starting point in my analysis, and so in the outcomes.
Here's what I think is the starting point that needs to be addressed first.
The draft was important, perhaps key to stimulating a lot of the resistance to Viet Nam, but not the real issue of the day. The real issue has been surgically removed from the public consciousness.
What was happening in 1967 was something far more subversive than any mere war resistance. It was a growing gut-level revulsion with consumerism, informed by a peek into the huge and growing attic filled with residue- often merely empty but sometimes bitter- outcomes of our parent's consumerist lives. Stuart Brand and the Whole earth Catalog, Coevolution Quarterly, the communitarian movement, were all elements, voices of this real issue, and the real threat.
It's one thing to question a war. But when you question comsumerism as a life model, you spit upon God's grave.
It was this anti-consumerist heresy that Nixon and his attorney General Mitchell, that day in his office when CoIntelPro was created, set out to eradicate, and there are a thousand other examples of this sort. No conspiracy needed, just a common response to an obvious enemy.
it was relatively easy to erase. It was, like all revolutionary notions, only one face of the public beast, and a painful spot anyway That's why the beast thrashed so violently when their kids poked the spot.
Americans are quite happy to have the God of the enlightenment buried, particularly those inconvenient moralistic parts about social justice, being your brother's keeper and all that nonsense. but we won't tolerate any heresy or desecration of the vast monuments we've built to honor the god of the "Work Ethic"-- every giant bank, evey junkyard, every landfill, every vast teeming barrio with one or two television antennas on each trashy shack. And now the crowning achievement of our consumerism, the Gulf of Mexico.
Since I no longer live there, my son is my link to the US. He's a lot smarter than I am, and though his insights are narrower, as befits someone just embarking on the process of stocking up his not-yet-musty attic, I listen to what he says.
I asked him a while ago about a picture we shared- an image that shows an Iraqi father squatting in the dirt, cradling the body of his dead eight year old daughter in his arms. A single tear marks her lovely cheek, as he closes her eyes for her. His haunted eyes look over her, directly at the camera. Not yet in anger. In desolation.
I asked him, "How can you overlook this? Without doing whatever you can to stop it? Can't you see where this is going? Your own sister is her age. This could be her."
His answer tells us a lot that we don't want to know.
He says he has a switch in his head, after ten thousand hours of video games (his hobby, his token of parental rebellion) that simply goes off when he sits down to the slaughter of hundreds for enjoyment. Speaking of his acquaintances, his peers, he said,
"Dad' it's not that they overlook it, it's that they just don't care. I don't feel a thing"
Is my son a psychopath? I, of course, don't think so, because he is horrified by his own switch. Or perhaps that aspect of psychopathology is now the main line of behavior among a subset defined as "Normal". What seems unavoidable is this:
We now have an inexhaustible supply of warriors, of brutal killers, murderers, who were, and are, easy to manipulate, easy to seduce. And they have their switch. We will never have another draft because we don't need it. The desperate need for a job will produce all the recruits we want, and that switch will enable anything. And they will come home, and reinfect their families, their peers with the need to justify, and the means.
We are now a nation in which a great deal of what remains of our real economy is dedicated to the support of the war machine, and, with an endless supply of enemies, we will dig deep. Think about the WWII wartime production boards, that command economy that cannot ever work for our enemies but worked so well for us. Think of the majority support for the Arizona profiling law, the great fence (wall), the shooting murder of the teenage boy in Juarez. That support can go on for a long, long time. As long as the bullets, and the supply of enemies holds out.
Any attempt to look at future possibilities must begin here, I think, with a cold, hard look at what we have built, at what that machine is good for, what it can do- and what it cannot.
It can make war. Of all kinds, including nuclear, without the impediment of conscience. We have all the enablers we need, all the Chicago-school panderers, and the neo-con psychopaths and neo-liberal pawns who consume and distribute their products.
"The Switch" represents an infantilized population who, once the switch is thrown, can delete uncomfortable, atavistic things like compassion. Or, if not delete, redirect them into Japanese Anime or Plastic ducks, or dogs or wounded pidgeons.
Can it restrain itself?
Think Black Shirts
Think Youth Corps
Think Stanley McCrystal's staff.
