Perspectives

I've been traveling for the past week, and I've missed what the crazies are saying about the General Stanley McChrystal debacle. By crazies, I mean Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity et al. I imagine the spin being put on McChrystral's insubordination by such minds, "The general was just calling a spade a shovel. He was simply speaking truth to power." The kind of rhetoric that stirs the blood of true American patriots. Aging white boys (and their unimaginative and equally dull-minded spouses) who vacillate between the vacuous simplicity of the Republican Party and the insipidness of Palin Tea Partyism.

What I desire is a military leader who might just once say to a president, "What? Are you nuts? We have no business putting American servicemen in peril for such a questionable mission!" And then resigns in protest when America invades yet another nation.

It'll never happen. Obama is another American president in a long line of weak men who talk peace but wage war. Since the 1848 Mexican-American War, our nation has been in one unjustified military conflict after another. Since WWII (the only morally defensible conflict of the 20th century from a U.S. involvement perspective), America's military establishment (the military hierarchy and colluding industries or should that be the other way around?) has rolled the nation into a perpetual state of fear and warfare.

I was sitting in a New Hampshire B&B recently, talking over breakfast to a German couple. I asked them if they considered Russia's Putin "a thug"? They both laughed and in as much as said to me, "Look who's calling the kettle black." They referenced America's mindless invasion of Iraq. Point taken. I tried to elaborate on the various degrees of "thuggery" and that President Bush was more the proselytizing fool than thug, but sensibly gave up.

America has become "a thug state." We're attacked (9-11). And we then invade and occupy a nation that had nothing to do with it. How stupid are we as a people? We allow our elections to be manipulated into debates over goofy social values, over issues best left to the individual (birth control, gay marriage, etc.) when we should be debating why America is constantly at war, why we've spent trillions of dollars on two wars that have left us less secure and financially broke.

We will not survive as a democracy if we do not change course. We do not need nor can we afford the military establishment that has grown cancer-like over the body and soul of America. Such promise Walt Whitman saw in America. He would weep at what our nation has become. We are a country of fools, easy marks for those who profit in/from fear and war.

General McChrystal is a non-issue, folks. A general's lack of restraint and respect is the least of America's problems. He's a spectacle. That takes our eye off the fact that America is forever at war. And our boys die only so some may profit. And have for decades.