http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/22/3325/

Published on Wednesday, August 22, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
by Norman Solomon

The USA’s military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. This fall, the country will begin its seventh year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. And few in Congress seem willing or able to articulate a rejection of the warfare state.

While the Bush-Cheney administration is the most dangerous of our lifetimes — and ousting Republicans from the White House is imperative — such truths are apt to smooth the way for progressive evasions. We hear that “the people must take back the government,” but how can “the people” take back what they never really had? And when rhetoric calls for “returning to a foreign policy based on human rights and democracy,” we’re encouraged to be nostalgic for good old days that never existed.

The warfare state didn’t suddenly arrive in 2001, and it won’t disappear when the current lunatic in the Oval Office moves on.

Born 50 years before George W. Bush became president, I have always lived in a warfare state. Each man in the Oval Office has presided over an arsenal of weapons designed to destroy human life en masse. In recent decades, our self-proclaimed protectors have been able — and willing — to destroy all of humanity.

We’ve accommodated ourselves to this insanity. And I do mean “we” — including those of us who fret aloud that the impact of our peace-loving wisdom is circumscribed because our voices don’t carry much farther than the choir. We may carry around an inflated sense of our own resistance to a system that is poised to incinerate and irradiate the planet.

Maybe it’s too unpleasant to acknowledge that we’ve been living in a warfare state for so long. And maybe it’s even more unpleasant to acknowledge that the warfare state is not just “out there.” It’s also internalized; at least to the extent that we pass up countless opportunities to resist it.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/22/3325/

Welcome to The Machine! Wake up America!:kick:

(But it's true that it appeals to some primitive streak in us.)

Solomon quotes:

“Our government has become preoccupied with death,” he said, “with the business of killing and being killed.”

But what is on British tv right now? Heroes - all about killing and being killed. (Yes, ostensibly it - and many other shows - is about something else: but that's what the action reduces down to. A vehicle for purveying as much blood and death as can be stuffed into an hour. A show about superhuman mutations didn't have to be about amoral and virtually unstoppable serial killers like Jessica and Syler. That choice, to dwell on violence, just made it popular, like so many other tv successes: ratings rule.) So much popular drama is about death, because that primitive streak dominates far too much of our lives. The political parties don't foist this on us, but they know better than to attempt to confront it, and can use it anyway.