“When Simon and I got to the beach next to the Santa Monica Pier, we
found this temporary Iraq War Memorial, which is put up every Sunday by
volunteers. They post the photos and names of every US soldier killed in
Iraq, and encourage people to write one of the names on a piece of
paper, and use rubber bands to attach it to one of the crosses. They
also provide flowers for you to add to the cross. It was a powerful thing.”

Click on one of the links under “Tags” to see the rest.

You can read about other Arlington West memorials at Veterans for Peace.

Saturday was windy but gorgeous in San Francisco.

I’ve posted some pictures I took around the Golden Gate Bridge to Flickr: Golden Gate Bridge 2004-09-18.

Reagan doesn’t really add anything we haven’t heard already, but he presents his case well: the Bush team makes big lies and small lies, even when they don’t have to. Why trust them, if they don’t trust us?

That’s easy. The United States had accumulated a nice store of the
dry kindling of business desire and citizen apathy, which was ignited
by the 9/11 terrorists.

And because We Won.

We won the War of Independence. The War of 1812. The Civil War. The
Spanish-American War. The Great War. World War II. The Cold War.
The Gulf War.

We Won, with military and industrial might.

Let’s recount our desire and apathy. We have:

A Presidential phalanx that is willing and able to tell the US
citizenry whatever they want to hear.

A Presidential phalanx that is willing and able to do whatever the
hell it wants.

An uncritical media, owned by the military-industrial complex or
morally bankrupt hegemons.

An uncritical Congress, intent on covering and fattening its own ass,
instead of providing governance.

An uncritical military leadership, blindly following executive orders
because it means appropriations.

A gullible citizenry, trained to love entertainment, not truth.

Now, let’s go back and sketch the beginning of the arc of American triumph.

Let’s start in a dark time for the world, the first part of World War
II. Evil abounds, and it’s not clear good will win. But with luck,
ingenuity, hard work, and a lot of pluck, the good guys do win. Yay!

Move forward to 1944, with US victory well in hand.

Charlie Wilson, president of General Electric, so one of the captains
of US industry, and also a key part of the War Production Board,
explains:

The US “should henceforth mount our national policy upon the solid
fact of an industrial capacity for war, and a research capacity for
war.”

And of course, says Wilson,

the “peaceful temperament of the American people is well known. We
can possess the mightiest and deadliest armament in the world without
becoming aggressors in our hearts because we do not have that
intoxicating lust for blood and power which periodically transforms
the German military caste.” ¹

Seven years later, and Charlie Wilson, now Defense Mobilization
Director, is telling the American Newspaper Publishers Association:

The “free world is in mortal danger…. If the people were not
conviced of that, it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast
sums now being spent to avert that danger.

“With the support of public opinion, as marshaled by the press, we are
off to a good start. But the mobilization job cannot be completed
unless such support is continuous. If the enemy had attacked in New
York instead of Korea, there would be no problem. The trouble is that
people’s imaginations are sharpened only by the immediacy of danger
and too often only by brutal disaster. It is our job — yours and mine
– to keep our people conviced that the only way to keep disaster away
from our shores is to build America’s might.” ²

(Ironically, of course, fifty years later a different kind of enemy
would attack New York, in spite of the United States’
large-scale military might.)

Flash forward to the late ’50s and early ’60s, and an engaging actor
named Ronald Reagan is playing the part of the friendly
personification of the military-industrial complex on the new-fangled
“television” appliance, hosting General Electric Theater: “When you
live better electrically, you lead a richer, fuller, more satisfying
life. And it’s something all of us in this modern age can have.”

You can probably follow the rest of the arc from there.

We Won, with military and industrial might. Big business is good
defense. Good defense is good business.

And the media tell the citizenry that, and the rich get richer, and
everybody’s happy. Capitalism works, especially media-savvy crony
capitalism, especially when it’s got its war on.

We Won. Get yer war on. Yay.

References

1. “WPB Aide Urges U.S. To Keep War Set-up,” New York Times, January
20, 1944, page 1.

2. “Text of Wilson’s Defense Plea to the People Through the Press of
the Nation,” New York Times, April 27, 1951, page 14.

Note: there are a couple of
Charlie Wilsons — “Electric Charlie” is the one quoted herein.

Related Reading

In
the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold
War Grand Strategy

The
Politics of Fear: Or, the Pretexts and Stratagems of a Permanent War
on Terror. Part 1

Universities and
the Military

Addicted to
War: Why the U.S. Can’t Kick Militarism (also at http://www.addictedtowar.com/)

Patriotism
and the martial state: perhaps nation-states war by nature

Click small image to display large image in new window. Photo caption: “USS Enterprise (CVN 65), left, and USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75), right, steam through the waters of the Atlantic Ocean in formation with other US Navy ships and multi-national warships as part of Majestic Eagle 2004. Enterprise and Truman are also part of the seven carriers involved in Summer Pulse 2004, the simultaneous deployment of seven carrier strike groups (CSGs), demonstrating the ability of the Navy to provide credible combat across the globe, in five theaters with other U.S., allied, and coalition military forces. Summer Pulse is the Navy’s first deployment under its new Fleet Response Plan (FRP). U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate Airman Joshua E. Helgeson.”

I’m not sure, but the following might also be a description of the beauty shot above:

MS/ME04 has already been full of displays of multi-national unity. In the early morning hours of July 12, 18 of the 30 ships participating in MS/ME04 pulled into a close formation, representing allied forces from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom for a battle group photo. “The ships were in a formation 300 yards apart and coordinated together flawlessly,” said Nygaard. “Not only was it impressive but it also showed how we will operate together.”

You can read more about the exercises on the Summer Pulse ‘04 home page. (Note however that the archives on www.news.navy.mil are offline until next week: “Naval Media Center’s Information Systems Department is moving. Naval Media Center will be offline from 1600 EDT Thu, 15 Jul 2004 to 0900 EDT Mon, 19 Jul 2004.”)

NAACP Chairman Compares Republicans to Terrorists

Thomas Frank offers a similar thesis, with more subtlety, in his new book, "What’s The Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won The Heart Of America". Frank describes the extant Republican party as a group of wolves in sheeps’ clothing, who are actively feeding on sheep, as the sheep cheer them on.

Here’s the teaser for What’s The Matter With Kansas?:

What’s the matter with America? What explains the dysfunction at the dark heart of our politics?

Over the last thirty-five years the Republicans have transformed themselves from an aristocratic minority into the nation’s dominant political party, a brawling, beer-drinking buddy of the working man. The strategy by which they have won this triumph is instantly familiar and yet so bizarre it’s sometimes hard to believe it’s actually happened: Think of Richard Nixon extolling the virtues of the “silent majority,” or Ronald Reagan shaking his head at those crazy college professors, or George W. Bush sticking up for the “regular Americans,” or the army of pundits who have written so eloquently in recent months about the humble folk of the “red states.”

And then think of the political changes that this sappy stuff has helped to sell: Privatization. Deregulation. Monopolies in every industry from banking to radio to meatpacking. The destruction of the welfare state. The beatdown of the labor movement. The transformation of the Midwest into the rust belt. And, shimmering in the heavens above all this, the rise of a new plutocracy, a class of overlords so taken with their own magnificence that they are moved to compare themselves to the Almighty.

What we are observing, then, is a populist movement that has done irreversible harm to the material interests of the common people it professes to love so tenderly-a form of class animosity that rages against a shadowy “elite” while enthroning a new aristocracy of bankers, brokers, and corporate thieves.

In the burned-over districts of conservatism the right-wing class war grown so powerful that it has taken over the environmental niche once held by the left. It is the dissenting movement out there, the voice of the hard-done-by, and in places like Kansas it draws headlines with its high-profile campaigns against evolution and abortion.

This is what’s the matter with Kansas, and with America. From the air-conditioned heights of a suburban office complex this may look like a new age of reason, with the Websites singing each to each, with a mall down the way that every week has miraculously anticipated our subtly shifting tastes, with a global economy whose rich rewards just keep flowing, with a promotion and a bonus every year, and with a long parade of rust-free Infinitis purring down the streets of beautifully manicured planned communities. But on closer inspection the country we have inhabited for the last three decades seems more like a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymous Bosch: of sturdy patriots reciting the Pledge while they resolutely strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of hardened blue-collar workers in midwestern burgs cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life, will transform their region into a “rust belt,” will strike people like them blows from which they will never recover.

My view is there will be problems and bad people as long as the earth exists, and since we’re moving into a completely interdependent global environment, we’re better off building a world we’d like to live in when we’re not the only military superpower. That is, we need to build a world of shared responsibility, shared benefits, and shared commitment to our common humanity.

• by contemplating the legal application of torture in order to better obtain military intelligence;
• by creating an environment in which prisoners were so tortured;
• doubly, when they refuse to assume responsibility for doing so.

A few of the many articles on this topic from recent news:

Interview by David Brancaccio
Ron Daniels, Center for Constitutional Rights, 2004-06-11
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript324_full.html

And if we can have the President of the United States feeling that he and this nation can be above the rule of law, then the question is, what are we fighting for in the world?

I mean, how do we talk about prosecuting and fighting for democracy and holding ourselves up as a beacon of human rights when we in fact are violating the very tenets of our own law and our precepts as a nation?

A little legal redefinition and torture becomes a necessary abuse to save the US
Opinion by Robert Manne, Sydney Morning Herald, 2004-06-13

In plain language, what the Pentagon report authors argued was that, in time of war, the president could order those under his command to torture America’s enemies. As commander-in-chief he was above domestic and international law. This new, secret doctrine amounted to a astonishing quasi-medieval claim to an unlimited presidential executive power.

Torture: It’s un-American
Editorial, Wilmington Star, 2004-06-11
http://www.wilmingtonstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040611/EDITORIAL/406110301
http://tinyurl.com/2f3ta

Evidence keeps piling up, in sworn statements, official reports and legal memos, that the Bush administration’s management of the Iraqi occupation has been incompetent, immoral, illegal and self-defeating.

Most of all, it has sickened Americans, and our friends around the world, who believe in the principles of decency for which we have always stood.

(…)

Sen. Joseph Biden reminded Mr. Ashcroft, “There’s a reason why we sign these treaties: to protect my son in the military. That’s why we have these treaties, so when Americans are captured, they are not tortured.”

That’s not the only reason, but it the one that matters most to Americans whose loved ones and friends have been sent to the deserts of the world to protect American interests and American values. Those Americans have been betrayed by their leaders.

We all have.