An Irresistible Force With an Insane Rationale (Polemic) by Edwin L. Young, PhD

An Irresistible Force
With an Insane Rationale
by Edwin L. Young, PhD

Imagine you are the CEO of a large corporation that is researching, developing, and manufacturing the major, deadly, weapons for the Pentagon, Dept. of Defense, and the various branches of the military. Imagine how many supportive corporations are providing parts; materials; theoretical and applied physics, chemistry, biology, demography, geology, the various branches of engineering research, and theoretical mathematics; and information systems necessary for the manufacture of those weapons. Now imagine that the Dept. of Defense is allocated one-half trillion dollars annually to conduct these vast operations. Now imagine that your are the head of one of the eighty Homeland Security Agencies. Now imagine that you are the head of the CIA with offices flung around the globe. Next, you are head of the NSA, then the FBI. All of these agencies sustain vast networks of supportive corporations. Many of the supportive corporations are widely known for producing non-defense-related products such as automobiles, cosmetics, internet devices and systems, television, medical devices, food production, oil discovery and production, clothing, construction related products, oceanography and underwater machines, animal training companies, and on and on. Furthermore, imagine that you are on the faculty of a university and you are dependent on Federal, namely Dept. of Defense Grants (however, most large private foundations disburse largess for similar purposes on the Q. T.) for your research which is required for you to get tenure. Next, imagine that you are in the film industry and have vested interests in subtly, or not so subtly, promoting the agenda of the Defense Department.

Now imagine that you, as head of every corporation, educational, or other endeavor, come together in one large convention. The coordinator of the convention rises, addresses the crowd (you as many heads) and says that all contracts and grants are immediately suspended as the United Nations has orchestrated a universal treaty to end all wars and destroy all weapons and means of producing weapons. The coordinator asks the conveners to applaud as peace has now come to the entire world.
There is deadly silence in the auditorium.

You see, you, as many heads, are faced with immediate loss of present and future income.

Now do you see why war and the threat of war is so necessary? Now do you see why reversing the deadly path of civilization would be so unlikely?

The progeny of Little Boy (Hiroshima) and Fat Man (Nagasaki) proliferate to the profit of the Corprocrats.

Consider all the commotion about this kid with the dy-no-mite underwear. The hype over the Jordanian double agent suicide bomber in Afghanistan? The Yemeni arrests and the Pakistani capture of a few Al Qaeda guys? Or the numerous similar inconsequential, pseudo terrorist acts emblazoned in the news lately. Or, on the other side of the ledger, how about the drone killing innocents in Afghanistan and turning around and killing the rescue workers? These and many other ‘Breaking News’ incidents keep TV audiences monitor-glued so they don’t miss the next episode of ‘Mini Shock and Awe’. TV commentators are the true drones, droning on and on over the minutiae of the insignificant. All the while, the President is bemoaning fiascoes of intelligence failures.

Here is a parable. The renowned but harmless roadrunner circles the deadly rattlesnake, darts in, makes its strikes close, but misses. The arrogant rattler venomously retaliates. The roadrunner is much faster and wily so the rattler misses. On and on and round and round the road runner goes until the rattler tires and swoosh, bang, the road runner’s spiky beak jabs and kills the fainting, fulsomely full-of-self, would-be fulminous rattlesnake.

Al-Qaeda is the road runner, striking in vain at insignificantly tiny targets around the world, claiming responsibility, and then retreats with a loud and gleeful ‘ho hum’. The US is the rattler, marshalling its enormous, deadly forces in counter-attack. The road runner dashes, dances, and cackles over the pittance it has expended and the media coverage it has garnered while their witless, humungous, enemy futilely over-extends and over-spends in retaliation.

With such a tightly spun intelligence web around the world, why is this super-intelligent superpower so ineffectual? Why does it bemoan its failures and bray so loudly over the air waves? Well, remember what we imagined in the beginning paragraphs? To perpetuate this trillion dollar military-industrial complex scam there must be an enemy; there must be a credible rationale.
Oh, yes, now you see. The vain pecks of the road runner provide a perfect, relatively harmless foil for the US’s rattlesnake-like pseudo defense budget rationale. No matter the cost!

The elephant will never get rid of the gnat. Perhaps it is not so odd that the rightwing politicians (elephants) secretly celebrate and let fly free the lowly gnat. The unwary populace will never suspect that trillions are being wasted and they will never object to filling the elephant’s coffers and arsenals as long as the annoying gnats are ostentatiously flitting about.

Let the rattler keep clumsily missing the skinny paisano (roadrunner) of the scraggly desert as long as it provides the militant corporate lobbyists and their war-mongering right-winger politicians credibility for history’s most insane, most bogus, bank-breaking, world destroying rationale.



Author bio:

Edwin is a 76 year old, retired, psychotherapist/institution reformer. His greatest satisfaction came from reforming many juvenile correctional institutions, a maximum security prison, a West Texas mental hospital, and the huge Job Corps in San Marcos, Texas. All in all there were thirteen institutions that he successfully reformed. In the last year of his PhD program, Edwin was one of the two PhD graduate students to be awarded the annual University Research Institute grant. His dissertation committee said his was the longest, best, and most complex in the history of the department. Since retiring, Edwin spends his time writing. His site is: The Natural Systems Institute.