Another young person from my part of the world was killed in Afghanistan this past week – a Marine who grew up a stone’s throw away from where my sisters lived in one of the many small towns that dot the landscape of central New York. He’s the second local K.I.A. in the space of about a month or so, and it’s disgusting. What the hell are these kids dying for? How could we justify (if any justification were required before allowing it to happen) sending them into this hopeless situation, sacrificing life and limb for a cause most people in America wouldn’t give up a meal at Wendy’s to advance? Pundits and politicians never tire of telling us that we’re a nation at war, but it’s not so – we’re a nation whose all-volunteer military is at war, while the rest of us busy ourselves with other matters. This is the trap that empires are liable to fall into. The foreign legion will protect our overseas possessions, while the homeland is bled dry by the cost of underwriting the global projection of military power. Not worth that young person’s life… nor anyone else’s.

Not, may I add, worth the lives of those who inhabit the lands we invade, either. From the perspective of a well-insulated stateside public, they die nameless, sometimes killed by remote control from a command center in the heart of America where faceless technicians murder strangers with the wag of a joystick then drive home for dinner with the family. If there ever was a truer illustration of the moral bankruptcy of empire, I’ve yet to hear about it. War should never be risk free and tidy, particularly for the aggressor. It becomes too attractive an option, as we have seen in recent years particularly. I suppose by allowing us to see the returning coffins of military dead, subject to the consent of the family, the Obama Administration is at least providing some rudimentary means by which Americans may become better acquainted with the notion that we have wars going on, and that those wars are a major problem worthy of their attention.

As I write these lines – not long after beginning this column – news has come through of five more U.S. soldiers killed in Mosul, Iraq. This comes on the heels of a multi-billion dollar supplemental appropriations request from the Administration to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This feels like a perpetual motion policy machine to me. Bush is gone and Obama has climbed into the cockpit, promising to be a better, more thoughtful driver than his predecessor… but it is still this massive killing machine designed to do only one thing. The only thing powerful enough to stop it is, well, us. Only we have to be aware of the fact that it needs stopping. And right now we’re busy with other stuff. As Obama said, you gotta be able to do more than one thing at a time. Let’s take his advice.

Well… what are we waiting for?

luv u,

jp

A few miles from where I live, there’s going to be a demonstration of sorts sometime soon. Our local NPR station did a somewhat incoherent interview with the organizer, an elderly sounding gentleman who said he was bringing together people who represent a broad range of political tendencies, left to right, to protest taxes against the backdrop of Fort Stanwix in Rome, a tourist-oriented recreation of the Revolutionary War era outpost. His contention was that, like the colonists during the revolution, he was encouraging people to take a stand against taxation. Actually, I think the founding fathers took issue with the notion of taxation without representation, but nevermind. This is a very 21st Century type of revolution – a bunch of people gathered at a local tourist trap to complain about something that will be with us as long as we have an organized society. It’s kind of like protesting gravity. Jump as high as you like – eventually, you’ll have to come down.

I wonder if this is what Grover Norquist dreamed of when he was a College Republican (like his pal Jack Abramoff) – that we would adopt an ethos of almost childish self-centeredness. Nobody likes paying taxes, goes the cliche. Nobody likes paying for anything, right? (Wouldn’t it be awesome if everything were free, man?) And do I have to eat my oatmeal, mom? Seriously, in the last 30 years, taxes, like “tough on crime” legislation, gun control (or lack of same), and national defense, has been the stuff of legendary demagoguery. It remains true today, with a somewhat hollower ring. Republicans, for instance, are really only about tax cuts now, while intoning recently-developed concern about rampant deficit spending. These are the same folks who enthusiastically signed on to pirating the treasury during the first Bush term, voting for two major tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that contributed to growing deficits even during what they themselves refer to as relatively prosperous years – tax cuts designed to create far greater costs in the out years (i.e. right now) and which left us in a far weaker position to face down the current economic crisis. That’s the party of fiscal responsibility.

The truth is, they’re not against running deficits – their own alternative budget provides for a $1.7 trillion shortfall. They’ve just against the notion of that borrowed money going to benefit ordinary people in any tangible way. So I have to wonder what that guy who’s picketing Fort Stanwix hopes to achieve, except perhaps a completely dysfunctional government that still runs massive deficits.

Shoot ’em up redux. Just down the road, in Binghamton, some lunatic shot up an immigrant services center on Friday, killing as many as 15. Where’d he get the gun? Who cares, right? These mass killings keep happening, and no one even attempts to address the flood of deadly weapons anymore. We’re being held hostage by 2nd Amendment absolutists who rail at any limits as an attempt to take away their firearms. Bullshit. Consider this, friends – the word “gun” never appears in the 2nd Amendment, just arms. If we consider it beyond any limitation, people will claim the right to buy rocket launchers and nuclear bombs before we’re done. Time for some common sense, before someone else dies for nothing.

luv u,

jp