Skywriting Dicks: Pentagon Climate Crimes Are No Joke

U.S. warplanes have been menacing the people of Afghanistan for more than 16 years now.

As a thought experiment, I decided to imagine that I lived under the threat of bombs raining down on my family from U.S. airplanes. Say, in Somalia.

I could live in any one of dozens of countries for this to be my reality. Not Canada, though, which borders Washington State and was treated to this expensive, polluting display of sophomoric scrawl by a U.S. Navy warplane earlier this week:

The most monumental thing to happen in omak. A penis in the sky pic.twitter.com/SM8k1tNYaj

— Anahi Torres (@anahi_torres_) November 16, 2017

In my thought experiment I tried to imagine how a grandmother in Somalia or Afghanistan might view this picture of boys just having fun.

In the era of #metoo and the sexual predator in chief, what is my own context for viewing this costly image?

Corporate media works hard to avoid meaningful context, simply reprinting the bland lies of the Pentagon's pr department. Most ran the news with a headline referencing "obscene" images. But what is the real obscenity hiding in plain sight here?

Media outlet SF Gate's coverage of the prank included footage of the Blue Angels stunt team practicing over San Francisco in advance of their upcoming show there.

The Blue Angels are a carbon belching nightmare. 

(At our expense. As we learned from the Panama and now the Paradise Papers, rich people don't pay taxes. As a public school teacher, my tax rate is around 30%.)

Here in Maine, they literally burn napalm as part of the "entertainment". Those watching do so no doubt in the context of having watched thousands of fires kindled in cinema for their viewing enjoying. (Hollywood has a pretty gruesome carbon footprint, too.)

The thing is, you may be able to evade taxation, but the cost of climate chaos falls upon rich and poor alike.

Climate justice organizers know that low income communities suffer more from the toxicity of late stage capitalism. 

"Pentagon Planet" by Anthony Freda

But we're all here on the same planet, buffeted by hurricanes and scorched by forest fires.

Whether skywriting or scoping out their next civilian bombing targets, the U.S. military is filling the atomosphere with more greenhouse gas than any organization in the world.

But if you search for information about the Pentagon and air pollution, what Google will let you find are articles about planning for the impact of climate change on coastal military bases. Or about the U.S. Navy greening itself, which is a bigger joke than a dick in the sky, for sure.

Our corporate masters can manage information and cheat inquiring minds of the truth, but ultimately they can't fool Mother Nature.