DrMoraPhD's Blogs

"...You measure peace with guns. Progress in mega-tons. Who's left when the war is won? Soldier of misfortune. Soldier of an angry call. Soldier on foreign soil. I'm not here to fight your war. I know what you're fighting for. Ah, boy, boy, this world is not your toy. This world is long on hunger. This world is short on joy." -- Soldier of Plenty by Jackson Browne

Its called "American Exceptionalism," the carefully inculcated notion that the United States, by virtue of its unique history, enlightened Constitution, phenomenal wealth and technological ingenuity, and even by Providential design, is immune from the restraints and consequences governing human affairs since the beginning of recorded time. Not surprisingly, in a country populated with historical illiterates, this notion has gained widespread public acceptance. Its the very air we breathe, in the land that Gore Vidal once named "the United States of Amnesia." But while we're busy scarfing down our beer and barbecue this holiday weekend, discordant notes float above the din of the hometown parades, the firecrackers, and the endless corporate-sponsored expressions of self-congratulations. Since 1990, by law, every department of the Federal Government is required to submit to an independent audit, to make sure that the American taxpayer is not being swindled. Guess what government department has never submitted to this legally mandated financial examination? If you said the Department of Defense, go to the head of the class. And it gets worse. The journalist William D. Hartung reports that in addition to blocking efforts at an accurate accounting, Pentagon officials have created huge, off-the books, slush funds. No one knows for sure how much money is involved, or for what purposes this money is being earmarked, but Hartung notes that annual "defense" spending is estimated to exceed one trillion dollars, an amount seven times larger than that of second place China, and even larger than the combined costs of the rest of the world's military spending. And yet, voices within the military-industrial complex scream for more funding. The United States military has been actively engaged almost continuously for the last third of a century, yet none of these actions have been authorized with a declaration of war by Congress, as the Constitution requires. A recent poll of people worldwide named the United States as the country they most feared, even by the citizens of our western European allies. This is the rot of militarism, and I will not celebrate it. Meanwhile, a survey of independent engineers reported last week that nearly 60,000 bridges in the United States are in a serious state of disrepair. The activist Erin Brockovich tells us that some 300 communities in America have unsafe drinking water. This week, Congress will likely authorize a bill to allow the FBI to expand warrantless searches of the private information of law-abiding citizens through the use of secret "National Security Letters." Recently, we learned that the NSA and the CIA were using their enhanced intelligence capabilities to spy on the computer systems of Congress itself, and NSA officials, when asked about this at a Congressional hearing, lied under oath. What do you call a government acting with no oversight, no accountability, and no respect for its own laws, a government that neglects the most basic needs of its own citizens, while secretly spending trillions spying on the whole world? Isn't it a dictatorship, or at the very least an incipient one? Why would any rational and moral human being want to serve it, and possibly die for it? Who's freedom is being fought for here?  To again quote the late Mr. Vidal, this is "surrendering to everything evil in the society."

"...If in some smothering dreams you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in, / And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, / His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; / If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, / My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory / The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori. -- Wilfred Owen 1918