On #SuperBowl Sunday & Every Day, Occupying The Narrative Keeps Warmongers In Power Over U.S.

It is depressingly predictable how the public conversation in the U.S. becomes mired in the cesspool that is electoral politics every four years. Really, the cycle never ends nowadays, but it ramps up considerably in the months leading to an election that will make very little difference how we are governed. 

Corporate government puts on this show for you the same way corporate media puts on Super Bowl Sunday: to keep you firmly rooted in the belief that dichotomy dominates über alles, that said dichotomy is not false, and that you must develop a fervent adherence to one side or the other in order to function as a citizen.

One of the minor elements of this depressing phenomenon is that you will be roundly scourged if you do not signal that you adhere to the side deemed correct by your fellow citizens. Thus, if you are female, you must support the female candidate. Or, if you have socialist tendencies, you must support the candidate who spouts socialist rhetoric (but who is meanwhile voting in the Senate on behalf of the Boeing Corporation). 

And, you are expected to spend lots and lots of keystrokes vilifying the opposition. For instance, you must pay immediate and copious attention when a former candidate who was a terrifyingly bad joke endorses the current candidate who is a terrifyingly bad joke. You are expected to spend lots of your mental time thinking about this and calling both of them insulting names. You must do this in order to fit in with the crowd.

Occupying the public narrative with this kind of inconsequential nonsense drowns out real concerns, real issues and real suffering inflicted by corporate government.

Corporate media is good at drowning out even the minimal sounds of dissent issuing from the body politic these days. There is little room for actual discussion amid the roar of the gladiator games.

Activist Bruce Gagnon recently had this paragraph censored from his op ed reporting back on his trip to join the resistance to expansion of U.S. military presence in both Okinawa and South Korea's Jeju Island:

The Pentagon today has more than 800 military bases scattered around the world. It's well known that due to the rapes, drinking and violence toward the host people, U.S. troops are not wanted in most of these places. 

Gagnon's local paper, The Times Record, regularly runs laudatory articles about General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works where the nuclear-equipped destroyers and other warships that will dock at Jeju Island are built. The paper's editor was afraid to anger people (or most likely, advertisers) by appearing to dishonor "the troops" with Gagnon's entirely true statement. The paper does not appear to care about or even notice the suffering of women and girls raped and otherwise assaulted in the vicinity of U.S. military bases. And it doesn't want you to notice their suffering either.

Corporate media wants you to notice a candidate's bad hair. It wants you to ignore voting records and concentrate on empty promises. The fact that liberal and progressive voters are enamored of a Zionist candidate who has voted to bomb civilians in oil-rich countries leads some to wonder if they are ignorant of the facts or just not very bright. 

A cogent essay on the effect of the occupation of public narrative by David Masciota  in Slate ran with a provocative, name-calling headline and photos of the three leading candidates to have D after their names. I suspect an editor played a key role in nudging Masciota's observations back toward the Punch & Judy Show direction. But it's actually a great essay, reading in part:

Given that morality and legality seem to have no influence over American foreign policy, the end of empire will likely emerge out of fiscal anxiety and insolvency. It might be fun to blow up the world, but eventually, we just won’t have the money for it. If liberals are satisfied with that eventual outcome, and if they have the patience to sit through years of unnecessary death and destruction while the cash register slowly empties, they can continue to ignore America’s military presence around the world, and they can continue to act as if bomb craters and dead bodies amount to just one more issue for consideration alongside tax rates, standardized testing, and gay marriage.

This week Senate Speaker McConnell introduced an Authorization for the Use of Military Force against ISIS. The new authorization would leave the 2001 AUMF in place (as the 14 year occupation of Afghanistan shows no signs of ending), would not limit ground troops, and would not not limit the length of time or the geographic area for military action. Sound like World War III in the making? Hardly anyone noticed.

How much evidence do taxpayers need that the "war on terror" is never-ending and, in fact, designed to be that way? How many more bombs will they fund to kill innocent civilians in 2016 and beyond? Congressional switchboard to weigh in on the proposed AUMF with those alleged to represent you: (202) 224-3121.

But wait -- which team do you think will win the Super Bowl?

Wedded To War: Working For The Man, Every Night And Day

Codepink organizers held a news conference in Oakland, California this week responding to Obama's request for yet another Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), this time against "the terrorist organization that has referred to itself as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and various other names (in this resolution referred to as "ISIL")." 

The myriad reasons why another AUMF is not a good idea have been ably detailed by Codepink's Janet Weil.

An excerpt:

Obama: “As Commander-in-Chief, my highest priority is the security of the American people.” 

CP: The most important causes of Americans’ untimely deaths are heart disease and cancer, followed by suicide and road accidents. Death by terrorist attacks doesn’t even make the top 50. Our security would be improved by better healthcare, including mental health care and suicide prevention; reduced income inequality; and safer roads -- all underfunded because about 60% of the discretionary federal budget goes to the military.

Of course, Obama is lying. As Commander-in-Chief his highest priority is serving the interests of the corporations who profit from the death dealing that comprises the bulk of U.S. manufacturing capability in the 21st century. The corporations that put him in office, that is, and will put his successor in office -- the successor who will have a handy AUMF in his or her back pocket immediately upon assuming the role of celebrity spokesperson for the military-industrial complex.

What about we ordinary mortals here on the ground -- why would we want a new AUMF to be issued by Congress?

Let me illustrate with an anecdote from one of the poorest rural school districts in the poor, rural state of Maine.

A teacher who formerly worked with functionally illiterate adults was approached by a former student in the grocery store. The student said that he remembered her because years before she had helped him be able to read just about anything, and this ability had changed his life. He was grateful to her and wanted her to know that he had gone from being barely employable to being a huge success -- a head welder at Bath Iron Works!

BIW is the pinnacle of employment opportunity for working class men in Maine. An historic shipyard with deep ties to the Navy, it is now owned by the General Dynamics corporation and turns out the battleships called destroyers with alarming frequency. (What or whom they will destroy never seems to concern my reps in Congress, who always show up to pledge allegiance at each new "christening" and launch.) Pentagon contracts need to keep rolling in to create jobs at Maine's largest single employer -- or so we are told.

BIW is about two hours by car from the community where the welder lives with his family. I would imagine that his kids put up with his long absences yet brag about his job at BIW, as I have heard many students do over the years. There are precious few jobs that pay a living wage in Maine: working in a paper mill or shoe factory or textile mill used to compete, but there aren't many of those left. Young people with ambition generally leave the state; many join the military.

This is what a war economy does to its people.

It's not a new problem. Imperial Japan starved its population to feed its war machine, as people in Tokyo explained to me when I lived there in the 1980's. Nazi Germany imprisoned and exterminated millions of Jews and used their resources to occupy Europe. Turkish oligarchs created their new nation from the ashes of the war-exhausted Ottoman Empire by stealing from Armenians destroyed in that genocide...and so on.

Meryl Streep as Mother Courage  Source: Observer.com

The German playwright Bertholt Brecht created a great play about the problem. Writing in Europe during the rise of 20th century fascism, he set the action of Mother Courage and Her Children amid an historic war that seemed endless. 

Mother Courage feeds herself and her children by following the army with a canteen wagon, doing business with the war machine with one hand while using her other to keep her children safe. Ultimately, she fails. Son #1, vain and proud, is easy prey for the army recruiter. Son #2, a clever boy, is pressed into service as an army payroll clerk -- and then thrown under the bus when the corruption of his boss comes to light. The only daughter is traumatized by the sexual violence that ever accompanies war and rendered mute. But, she sacrifices her own life to sound a bell that warns civilians of an impending sneak attack. At the end of the play, the grieving mother continues alone, still selling meals to fuel the war that has consumed her family.

Because how else do you make a living when a war economy is all you've got? Ok, instead of welding or selling sausages at BIW you could work for the corporations that make the propaganda or help corporations evade taxes or force genetically modified food on subject nations or sell fracked "natural" gas or tar sands oil. You'll need to work for The Man one way or another in order to pay off the thousands of dollars of student loans that allowed you to get a college education.

Join the Spring Mobilization for Peace with a street theater performance of a version of Mother Courage aka Canteen Annie on Saturday, March 21 outside the gates of BIW in Bath, Maine. RSVP here or on facebook.