Something to Cry About

I read in the Guardian yesterday that the US spends 422.5 billion dollars annually for defense, and I quickly totted up my family's per capita hit. Leaving out the ones who are grown and paying their own taxes, I estimated that we have ponied up about $7200 per year since 2000, or some $43,000. The bang I am not getting for my buck is the actual defense of me, my children, my partner, my dogs, and my house. Homeland Security, it has been shown over and over, is a joke, just a pork barrel that the red states dip into every time they need a viaduct from one blank section of prairie to another. So what am I paying for?

Well, obviously and regrettably, I am paying to attack people in Iraq; soon, I fear, I will be paying to attack people in Iran, as well. Since I live in California, the likelihood that I would need to defend myself from those I am paying to attack is microscopic, but I wouldn't mind, actually, paying to defend my mother in Florida, my daughter in New York, and my daughter in Iowa, but they aren't being defended, either. The citizens of Iran and Iraq are not actually a threat to any of them, and if a particular citizen of Iran or Iraq were planning to fly to any of the places that we live, it is highly statistically unlikely that that person would be bombed in Iran or Iraq before he or she could "get us over here". I suspect that I would be better defended if my money were going to actual defense against that person--things like port security, container ship inspections, effective airline security, effective border security, but it isn't.

One of the things that is astonishing about conservatives is that they seem not to understand the simplest facts of logistics, such as how expensive and fragile extended supply lines are. I imagine it this way: France sends 150,000 troops to subdue California. California has 36 million people, most of them armed with something--if not guns, then kitchen knives. France divides up its forces between LA, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, and Bakersfield, leaving, say a thousand troops to pacify the Monterey Peninsula, from south of Big Sur to north of Santa Cruz and east to the 101, about 4800 square miles of mountainous and inhospitable terrain. How exactly are they going to do it if we Californians refuse to cooperate? They will certainly make examples of some of us, destroy lots of our houses, wreck as much of our infrastructure as possible, and imprison some of us who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it's a long way from France to Monterey, it's hard to ship lots of supplies all that way, and so unless the French Army takes what we have, thereby alienating us, they are going to be hard put to subdue us, and the longer it takes them, the less likely it is that they will accomplish what they set out to do. Anyway, as soon as the French army leaves my neighborhood, I'm going to do what I want. Just about the only way that the French army is going to succeed here in Monterey is genocide--same in LA, same in San Fran, same in Sacramento.

The French Army is in big trouble because they have mistaken their fantasies for reality, but as they begin to win over the Hispanic population of California, they find themselves looking the other way when some ethnic cleansing takes place. The French Minister of Defense goes on the record saying that "Democracy is messy" a few days after some of my neighbors are ethnically cleansed by their gardeners. All around the world, after this incident, there is muttering about how maybe my neighbors deserved what happened to them (although isn't it too bad about the children?), but I can't help think that before the French army came along we seemed to be getting along well enough here in California. It's just that now, with the infrastructure largely destroyed by the French bombing and survival more difficult, it is inevitable that everything will be messy. Unfortunately, Jacques Chirac, when he planned this war on California, didn't bother to factor in the inevitable social breakdown that has been a documented part of every war since time began. I mean, unfortunately for us. Chirac doesn't care how California has been destroyed because he's distracted by his poll numbers, which are low, and in order to revive them, he is talking about attacking Mexico. This time, though, since the French Army is pinned down in California, he is just going to bomb the Mexican populace into submission. It's going to be a genocide. That seems to be his only strategic alternative, and the defense of France requires it.

Modern air war is always genocide. It has to be, because that's what bombs are for--they are for burning and blasting out civilians. That is the use they were put to the the Second World War, and that is the use they have been put to since, and no one has ever proven that genocide-through-bombing was effective in persuading civilian populations to switch loyalties from one side to another. In fact, Jorg Friedrich, historian of the Allied bombing of Germany maintains that thousands and thousands of bombs toward the end of the war only stiffened German civilian resistance. Conservatives live by the principle that force always works in the end--and it does, if genocide is the goal (I mean real genocide, where a majority of a given population are killed), but what have you got when the killing is over? An devastated landscape, the reputation for war crimes, and a big humanitarian mess. The psychology on the face of it is just wrong. They're trying to kill me so I will start honoring and obeying them? Only a conservative would expect something like that, and only from the other side. He himself would never expect to be bombed into submission. So let's quit playing word games.

But let's give the conservatives the benefit of the doubt and say that they know enough to know, even though they don't say so, that bombing and genocide are not actually any more persuasive to an indigenous population somewhere else in the world than they would be to folks at home. But if that is true, why are they so enamored of bombing, attacking, sending in the troops? What am I paying for?

Let's get back to the French/California War. Why did they come here, so far from France, in the first place? Oh, right. It was "French interests abroad" that they were trying to defend. You know, I was suspicious when they bought up the water rights in my neighborhood. I thought at the time "Why would the Loire Valley Water Authority buy the rights to the Carmel River?" And then when they put in the sausage facility and started sending groups of hunters out to harvest the wild pigs that infest our area, I was actually happy. But now I understand that for them the cost of doing business in California was just too high. We wanted them to pay pretty steep taxes and we began charging much stiffer permit fees for hunting licenses when we heard that those sausages were selling for about the same price as Kobe beef, while we were getting nothing at our end, the "buy low" end. The water owners and the sausage-makers back in France got incensed at how uppity we Californians were. They decided it was easier and far more cost effective (for them), to send in the French army to permanently secure the supply of water and sausage than it was to actually make a deal with us. But now the river is polluted and the sausage facility has been blown up by insurgents from Santa Cruz, so the French capitalists are thinking of investing in China (and I say French, but really, the money behind them is not only French--it's Saudi, American, British, Chinese, Brazilian. Capitalists are always proud of globalization. Money, as they say, doesn't care who owns it). What Capitalism requires, as I understand it, is the ruthless externalization of costs so that shareholders will keep investing. The job of the executives is always to reduce costs and maximize profits, so getting others to pay and keeping the profits for oneself is always the point and the goal. I am going to repeat that again, because so many average persons think that the corporation is their friend and capitalism is the lifeblood of democracy. The goal of capitalists is to make me, the average citizen, pay as much of the cost of doing business as possible, and to keep for themselves as many of the profits as possible. If 422.5 billion dollars is the cost of doing business around the world, better that I should pay it and call it "defense" rather than "attack", even if I am not being defended, than that Exxon Mobil should forego some of their profits.

I don't own stock in Exxon Mobil, so I ask myself what I am getting for my $43,000? I mean, besides genocide, war crimes, and a big mess in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East? Clearly, what I am getting is borrowed time--a few years before the debts come due, before the insurgents around the world get it together, before the next genocide ("just war") begins. Capitalism is in fact, gambling by another name. And in gambling, the house takes a cut and the racetrack receives a take-out, which means that the odds are never in favor of the sucker. Whatever else the conservatives don't know about logistics and human psychology and war, they do know this. In these latest gambles that globalized capitalists call "politics", I am the sucker. At this point, I'm only down $43,000. But the stakes are high and the odds are long, and I'm getting pretty nervous.