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It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee
On the day Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith opened on 3,661 screens across the Empire, taking in a record-breaking $50 million, I read a report from the Associated Press with the title Scientists Warn on Space Weaponization.
The far, far away future is now.
An outline of plans from the Pentagon prompted the Union of Concerned Scientists to be concerned indeed about the United States militarys intention to seed space with weapons of mass destruction to prevent war, of course. The scientists said the United Nations should consider drafting a treaty that would prohibit interfering with unarmed satellites, taking away any justification for putting weapons in space to protect them.
The United Nations! As if the poor crippled Federation I mean the United Nations had the muscle to get the Pentagon to do anything-not that they should, but really. Concerned scientists have never had much influence over the affairs of states bent on military expansion. Ordinary folks even if they protest in the streets by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions, have had even less luck. War! begins the crawling text that recedes into the distance of space at the start of the new Star Wars. The Empire is at war. The Empire is always at war. A perpetual state of war is the status quo, now and always.
Blockbuster movies like the six Star Wars films are the dreams of our culture. When they speak of armed conflict, as so many of them do these days epic battles not only here on Earth, but also in the heavens we probably need to pay attention. When we interpret Star Wars as a collective dream, the implications here on the planet should be clear: our own Empire, the United States, is unnaturally attached to, maybe even addicted to war. Addiction: a physiological and psychological condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or involved in something.
Here are some bullet points from a new study by the Price Waterhouse Cooper corporate-finance group:
In 2003, the United States military budget reached $417.4 billion.
That number equaled almost half (46 percent) of the combined military expenditures of the rest of the world.
In a years time, the USAs military expenditures will reach the amount of the combined expenditures of the rest of the world.
The American military-industrial complex is poised to monopolize the global armaments industry.
The United States military system is a vast bellicose realm of 1,700 bases 725 (officially) outside the territorial USA and another 969 (officially) inside the country. How many secret bases are operating is anybodys guess.
Feeling any safer? Likely not you are, as Yoda would say. The point is, these extravagant outlays of money (levied from you and me, American citizens, remember) are being made in the name of defense and homeland security, but the overkill factor, pardon the expression, is so exaggerated that it makes us suspicious. What is going on here? Behind these swollen statistics, you can almost hear a vulnerable little voice saying, Help me!
Is our culture addicted to warfare? We think about it all day, we dream about it all night. We spend all our precious resources to support our compulsive habit. To fill our time, while we are on the prowl for the next Big Weapon, we manufacture arms to sell to other countries even potential enemies and produce tools and methods of torture.
If we were not convinced that the United States is caught in the throes of a major addiction, consider the response generated by the report, recently, that to make itself even more efficient, the Pentagon wants to close down a fraction of its bases. In response, U.S. senators insisted that they cannot close any military bases in their states because bases provide jobs and generate income for local economies ($42 billion a year, for instance, for California). Economic survival appears to depend on a perpetual state of arms manufacture and warfare. We cannot do without war. And if we cannot do without it, we are addicted to it. Our culture is on a war-drunk.
I had thought that the events of September 11, 2001, would have provided the much-needed intervention for us to cease our self-destructive, addictive activities. An intervention is a clinical term for a surprise meeting of family and friends during which addicts are confronted with their behavior and then whisked off, bags already packed and waiting, to a tough-love treatment center.
But, the 9/11 wake-up call only fueled our war lust. Instead of responding to that momentous days invitation to take a fearless moral inventory of ourselves and admit our powerlessness over warfare, we turned it into an opportunity to satisfy our ravenous craving once again: we went to war. Afghanistan got us off the wagon; Iraq gave us an excuse to go on another bender. In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower, president and general, gave a farewell address to the country, raising his voice at these words: We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Misplaced power will kill us. But power in its right place may be able to save us. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, says the second of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. For a war-drunk culture, the only remedy has to be sanity in sobriety. And the only way to achieve that, as for any other addict, is to stop the destructive behavior immediately and forever one day at a time and begin making amends to those who have been harmed.
I would like to be optimistic about our cultures potential for recovery from its war addiction, but just looking at the long long, far, far way we would have to go from where we are gives me pause. We may need more interventions, delivered more forcefully and compellingly, before we bottom out. Meanwhile, we continue recklessly to stuff our minds with war a war on crime, a war on cancer, a war on drugs, a war on terrorism, gas-wars, TV ratings wars. Waiting in the wings, the new Tom Cruise blockbuster: War of the Worlds.
In Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker, the young man with so much promise, is irresistibly drawn to the Dark Force and in the end gives himself over to it completely. His fatal attraction may be a prediction of where our once promising, now war-drunk culture is heading. We can go into denial about our addition to war, but that may only delay our inevitable descent into the darkness where we become the Evil Empire we had thought we were battling. If we are dreaming about it, we are considering it.
Robert E. Lee
On the day Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith opened on 3,661 screens across the Empire, taking in a record-breaking $50 million, I read a report from the Associated Press with the title Scientists Warn on Space Weaponization.
The far, far away future is now.
An outline of plans from the Pentagon prompted the Union of Concerned Scientists to be concerned indeed about the United States militarys intention to seed space with weapons of mass destruction to prevent war, of course. The scientists said the United Nations should consider drafting a treaty that would prohibit interfering with unarmed satellites, taking away any justification for putting weapons in space to protect them.
The United Nations! As if the poor crippled Federation I mean the United Nations had the muscle to get the Pentagon to do anything-not that they should, but really. Concerned scientists have never had much influence over the affairs of states bent on military expansion. Ordinary folks even if they protest in the streets by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions, have had even less luck. War! begins the crawling text that recedes into the distance of space at the start of the new Star Wars. The Empire is at war. The Empire is always at war. A perpetual state of war is the status quo, now and always.
Blockbuster movies like the six Star Wars films are the dreams of our culture. When they speak of armed conflict, as so many of them do these days epic battles not only here on Earth, but also in the heavens we probably need to pay attention. When we interpret Star Wars as a collective dream, the implications here on the planet should be clear: our own Empire, the United States, is unnaturally attached to, maybe even addicted to war. Addiction: a physiological and psychological condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or involved in something.
Here are some bullet points from a new study by the Price Waterhouse Cooper corporate-finance group:
In 2003, the United States military budget reached $417.4 billion.
That number equaled almost half (46 percent) of the combined military expenditures of the rest of the world.
In a years time, the USAs military expenditures will reach the amount of the combined expenditures of the rest of the world.
The American military-industrial complex is poised to monopolize the global armaments industry.
The United States military system is a vast bellicose realm of 1,700 bases 725 (officially) outside the territorial USA and another 969 (officially) inside the country. How many secret bases are operating is anybodys guess.
Feeling any safer? Likely not you are, as Yoda would say. The point is, these extravagant outlays of money (levied from you and me, American citizens, remember) are being made in the name of defense and homeland security, but the overkill factor, pardon the expression, is so exaggerated that it makes us suspicious. What is going on here? Behind these swollen statistics, you can almost hear a vulnerable little voice saying, Help me!
Is our culture addicted to warfare? We think about it all day, we dream about it all night. We spend all our precious resources to support our compulsive habit. To fill our time, while we are on the prowl for the next Big Weapon, we manufacture arms to sell to other countries even potential enemies and produce tools and methods of torture.
If we were not convinced that the United States is caught in the throes of a major addiction, consider the response generated by the report, recently, that to make itself even more efficient, the Pentagon wants to close down a fraction of its bases. In response, U.S. senators insisted that they cannot close any military bases in their states because bases provide jobs and generate income for local economies ($42 billion a year, for instance, for California). Economic survival appears to depend on a perpetual state of arms manufacture and warfare. We cannot do without war. And if we cannot do without it, we are addicted to it. Our culture is on a war-drunk.
I had thought that the events of September 11, 2001, would have provided the much-needed intervention for us to cease our self-destructive, addictive activities. An intervention is a clinical term for a surprise meeting of family and friends during which addicts are confronted with their behavior and then whisked off, bags already packed and waiting, to a tough-love treatment center.
But, the 9/11 wake-up call only fueled our war lust. Instead of responding to that momentous days invitation to take a fearless moral inventory of ourselves and admit our powerlessness over warfare, we turned it into an opportunity to satisfy our ravenous craving once again: we went to war. Afghanistan got us off the wagon; Iraq gave us an excuse to go on another bender. In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower, president and general, gave a farewell address to the country, raising his voice at these words: We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Misplaced power will kill us. But power in its right place may be able to save us. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, says the second of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. For a war-drunk culture, the only remedy has to be sanity in sobriety. And the only way to achieve that, as for any other addict, is to stop the destructive behavior immediately and forever one day at a time and begin making amends to those who have been harmed.
I would like to be optimistic about our cultures potential for recovery from its war addiction, but just looking at the long long, far, far way we would have to go from where we are gives me pause. We may need more interventions, delivered more forcefully and compellingly, before we bottom out. Meanwhile, we continue recklessly to stuff our minds with war a war on crime, a war on cancer, a war on drugs, a war on terrorism, gas-wars, TV ratings wars. Waiting in the wings, the new Tom Cruise blockbuster: War of the Worlds.
In Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker, the young man with so much promise, is irresistibly drawn to the Dark Force and in the end gives himself over to it completely. His fatal attraction may be a prediction of where our once promising, now war-drunk culture is heading. We can go into denial about our addition to war, but that may only delay our inevitable descent into the darkness where we become the Evil Empire we had thought we were battling. If we are dreaming about it, we are considering it.
