The U.S.A.'s military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. The country is beginning its seventh year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. Few in Congress seem willing or able to articulate a rejection of the warfare state.
The Bush-Cheney administration is the most dangerous of our lifetimes, and ousting Republicans from the White House is imperative. Yet such truths are apt to smooth the way for evasions. We hear that "the people must take back the government," but how can "the people" take back what they never really had? When rhetoric calls for "returning to a foreign policy based on human rights and democracy," we're encouraged to be nostalgic for good old days that never existed. The warfare state didn't suddenly arrive in 2001, and it won't disappear when the current lunatic in the Oval Office moves on.
In recent decades, our self-proclaimed protectors in the Oval Office have been able—and willing—to destroy all of humanity. We've accommodated ourselves to this insanity, including those of us who fret that the impact of our peace-loving wisdom is circumscribed because our voices don't carry much farther than the choir. We may carry around an inflated sense of our own resistance to a system that is poised to incinerate the planet.
Maybe it's too unpleasant to acknowledge that we've been living in a warfare state for so long. And maybe it's even more unpleasant to acknowledge that the warfare state is not just "out there." It's also internalized, at least to the extent that we pass up countless opportunities to resist it.
Like millions of other young Americans, I grew into awakening as the Vietnam War escalated. Slogans like "the personal is political" really spoke to us. But over the decades we generally learned, or relearned, to compartmentalize, as if personal and national histories weren't interwoven in our pasts, presents and futures.
One day in 1969, a biologist named George Wald, who had won a Nobel Prize, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the biggest military contractor in academia, and gave a speech. "Our government has become preoccupied with death," he said, "with the business of killing and being killed."
Today, in similar ways, our government is preoccupied. The grisly commerce of killing, whether through carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan or through the deadly shredding of social safety nets at home, thrives on aggressive war and on the perverse realpolitik of "national security." At least tacitly, we accept so much that threatens to destroy anything and everything.
We live in concentric spheres, and "politics" suffuses households as well as what Martin Luther King Jr. called "The World House." Under that heading, he wrote in 1967: "When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom."
The warfare state doesn't come and go. It can't be defeated on Election Day. Like it or not, it's at the core of the United States, and it has infiltrated our very being.
What we accept, however reluctantly, seeps inward. In the long run, passivity can easily ratify even what we may condemn. And meanwhile, in the words of Thomas Merton, "It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared."
The triumph of the warfare state degrades and suppresses us all. Even before the weapons perform as guaranteed.
Norman Solomon is the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
