Military/Militarism

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
— John McCrae, In Flanders Fields,  May 1915

This is the season of death, when we celebrate the dying of the sun with an orgiastic burst of consumption and environmental destruction.  This is the season of rebirth when we spend time with loved ones and reach out to help others we don’t know.

What’s Going on at UAardvark? (Solidarity Press, 2013) is in some respects within the tradition of satire on a political and social issue that goes back to Aristophanes, the Roman writings of Juvenal and Petronius, through Gulliver’s Travels to Catch-22. But Lawrence Wittner’s stinging critique of what is happening to the “Corpaversity” plunges the novel into farce.

Segued into a 10-second afterthought, smothered by 60-second Christmas commercials, is the media acknowledgement of Thanksgiving, which nudges us into a realization of all we are thankful for.
But the usual litany, even with the omnipresent pictures of the less fortunate being fed by the more fortunate, doesn’t list well this year. Our thanks seem to be at best half-hearted or at least insensitive and shallow.

Who knew?

The world political economy is a mosaic of cross currents: Domestic decay and elite enrichment, new sources for greater profits and deepening political disenchantment, declining living standards for many and extravagant luxury for a few, military losses in some regions with imperial recovery in others. There are claims of a unipolar, a multi-polar and even a non-polar configuration of world power. Where, when, to what extent and under what contingencies do these claims have validity?

If music be the food of love, slay on!
 

November 22, 2013, is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The true story of JFK’s murder has never been officially admitted, although the conclusion that JFK was murdered by a plot involving the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been well established by years of research, such as that provided by James W.

Television night with Music and BEING. Apartment strewn with clothes, bottles, ash-trays over-flowing, cake and candy wrappers, coffee cups and cartons emptied of fast-food, junk-food, food-flavored processed food product.
Colorful slaughter on the big TV.  BEING and Music deep in the couch. Music sucked cigarettes, BEING his bong. They stared hard into the grim eye of The War.  I preferred not to.  See.
Cheesy crunchy chips, beef jerky, beer.  Enemy vehicles blown to bits. “Our” planes over The Enemy City.  Loud significant explosions.

Just what are we teaching young people, society at large,  in and out of school? Just what is it to be an American today, awash in consumer madness? The Last One with the Most Toys Wins bumper sticker,  or is it this little chant:  You’ll have to peel this i-thing Apple appendage from my cold dead mind, err, hand?