Weapons Are Us
More Guns, Please, Never Mind the Reason
Almost fifteen years ago, I wrote an article for TomDispatch with the title, “Weapons ‘R’ Us.” It was a play, of course, on Toys ‘R’ Us, echoing the old saw about the difference between men and boys being the price of their toys. Nowadays, I guess “real men” play with F-35s, Ford-class aircraft carriers, Sentinel ICBMs, and the like, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each year. And if that’s not enough, Americans can always spend billions of dollars more on private weaponry like assault- and sniper rifles. Rather amazingly, there are more firearms than people in America, with the only amendment SCOTUS won’t dare abridge being the Second Amendment.
Back in 2012 I gave a Tomcast interview with Timothy MacBain about my own weapons “addiction”; it started the usual way with toy soldiers, GI Joes, and cap pistols and escalated from there. As a teenager, I built a lot of model military planes, tanks, warships, and the like. All gone now, though I kept and used a few when I was teaching a course on “technology and warfare.”
The military loves to speak of weapons as “investments,” but President Dwight D. Eisenhower was far more honest in calling them a form of theft from those who hunger, from those who need health care, from those who want a better education. Weapons, I think Ike would agree, have a very narrow band of winners, specifically those who profit from making and selling them. They are the real band of (gun-running) brothers, with a few sisters thrown in as well.
If wars were won purely by weapons, America would never lose, such is our commitment to winning through “superior firepower.” But they’re not, so losing has become an American habit.
Speaking of losing, I recently read a terrific article by Patrick Lawrence that argues it’s high time for America to embrace defeat and to learn from it. He’s right about that, but how to tell “winner” Trump that his war against Iran has been a big loser?
Thinking about that led me to make this comment in response to Lawrence’s article:
Yes, but this is America, where the worst insult is to be called a “loser,” and where to criticize even the stupidest war is to be labeled a “defeatist.”
Meanwhile, management gurus speak of “win-win” scenarios, because talk of losing must be avoided at all costs. Even compromise is suspect.
To modify an old expression, if not he who dies with most toys, wins, it seems we in America believe that he who dies with the most weapons, wins.
So, we’ll embrace our weapons--very tightly indeed--before we [ever] embrace defeat.
So, no matter how poorly America’s wars go, the demand for weapons continues to rocket upwards. That old “arsenal of democracy” of World War II fame has for the last sixty years or so mutated into merely an arsenal, ever-growing in cost if not in effectiveness.
Today’s big-ticket weapons like the F-35 are becoming so expensive, and often so unreliable, that America is almost disarming itself by accident. All the more reason, weapons proponents will say, for America to spend even more on weapons!
Abandon all logic, ye who wish to curb America’s “investment” in more weaponry.
“Patrick Lawrence... argues it’s high time for America to embrace defeat and to learn from it.”
How much time was spent, lives lost, billions wasted, so this country could have “peace with honor” from a dishonorable war in Vietnam, as opposed to “declaring victory, taking down the flag, folding up the tent, and going home” (not sure, was that George McGovern?)? Any lessons learned from that? Obviously not, another George, Bush I, saying, “By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all. The ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert."
No need to expound on idiot son Bush II.
I may have commented previously in this forum, if not then elsewhere, on “war” being a part of the American vernacular, mindset, perhaps DNA expressed so far back as colonial times against Native peoples. The connotation is one of consuming the public consciousness, commandeering the nation’s resources, to achieve victory over “the enemy,” however defined. War on Poverty. War on Cancer. War on Crime. War on Drugs. War on Terrorism. The all the military adventures termed “wars” so as to justify interventions that weren’t really wars, but illegal actions from Korea all the way to the present. In each case failed application of the metaphor, for various reasons, but perhaps with this common denominator – the enemy was never clearly understood. Didn’t need to be, a hint conforming to conventional wisdom (invariably not) was all that was needed, overwhelming firepower would take care of the rest, the truth of the matter then buried underneath all the rubble.
Again I cite Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York, in his “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world, my own government.”
My how things have changed over the past 59 years.
What we have here in America "Murica" is not a Gun problem, but a Mental Health problem. My 4 Gun safety Rules in my Old Sky-Cop days in SAC 73-77 1. Treat every weapon as if it were loaded 2. Never point a weapon at anything you do not intend to shoot 3. Keep finger straight and off the trigger until you are ready to fire 4. Keep weapon on safe until you intend to fire Happy 4th. & 250th. The Beach Boys are playing the Hollywood Bowl...."Don't Worry Baby" :/ :o)