[NYTr] Close Encounters with America's Warfare State

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

AlterNet - Oct 1, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64091/

Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State

By Norman Solomon

Contempt for the empirical that can't be readily jiggered or spun is
evident at the top of the executive branch in Washington. The country is
mired in a discourse that echoes the Scopes trial dramatized in "Inherit
the Wind." Mere rationality would mean lining up on the side of
"science" against the modern yahoos and political panderers waving the
flag of social conservatism. (At the same time that scientific
Darwinism is under renewed assault, a de facto alliance between
religious fundamentalists and profit-devout corporatists has moved the
country further into social Darwinism that aims to disassemble the
welfare state.) Entrenched opposition to stem-cell research is part of
a grim pattern that includes complacency about severe pollution and
global warming -- disastrous trends already dragging one species after
another to the brink of extinction and beyond.

Disdain for "science" is cause for political concern. Yet few Americans
and no major political forces are "antiscience" across the board. The
ongoing prerogative is to pick and choose. Those concerned about the
ravages left by scientific civilization -- the combustion engine,
chemicals, fossil-fuel plants, and so much more -- frequently look to
science for evidence and solutions.

Those least concerned about the Earth's ecology are apt to be the
greatest enthusiasts for science in the service of unfettered commerce
or the Pentagon, which always seeks the most effectively "advanced"
scientific know-how. Even the most avowedly faithful are not inclined
to leave the implementation of His plan to unscientific chance.

So, depending on the circumstances, right-wing fundamentalists could
support the use of the latest science for top-of-the-line surveillance,
for command and control, and for overall warfare -- or could dismiss
unwelcome scientific evidence of environmental harm as ideologically
driven conclusions that should not be allowed to interfere with divinely
inspired policies. Those kinds of maneuvers, George Orwell wrote in
"1984," help the believers "to forget any fact that has become
inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back
from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of
objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which
one denies."

In the first years of the twenty-first century, the liberal script
hailed science as an urgent antidote to Bush-like irrationality. That
was logical. But it was also ironic and ultimately unpersuasive. Pure
allegiance to science exists least of all in the political domain;
scientific findings are usually filtered by power, self-interest, and
ideology.

For instance, the technical and ecological advantages of mass transit
have long been clear; yet foremost engineering minds are deployed to
the task of building better SUVs. And there has never been any question
that nuclear weapons are bad for the Earth and the future of humanity,
but no one ever condemns the continuing development of nuclear weapons
as a bipartisan assault on science. On the contrary, the nonstop R & D
efforts for thermonuclear weapons are all about science.

When scientists found rapid climate change to be both extremely ominous
and attributable to the proliferation of certain technologies, the media
and political power centers responded to the data by doing as they
wished. The GOP's assault on science was cause for huge alarm when
applied to the matter of global warming, but the unchallenged
across-the-aisle embrace of science in the weaponry field had never
been benign. When it came to designing and manufacturing the latest
doomsday devices, only the most rigorous scientists need apply. And no
room would be left for "intelligent design" as per the will of God.

The neutrality of science was self-evident and illusionary. Science was
impartial because its discoveries were verifiable and accurate -- but
science was also, through funding and government direction, largely held
captive. Its massively destructive capabilities were often seen as
stupendous assets. In the case of ultramodern American armaments, the
worse they got the better they got. Whatever could be said about "the
market," it was skewed by the buyers; the Pentagon's routine spending
made the nation's budget for alternative fuels or eco-friendly
technologies look like a pittance.

We're social beings, as evolution seems to substantiate. Blessings and
curses revolve largely around the loving and the warlike, the nurturing
and the predatory. We're self-protective for survival, yet we also have
"conscience" -- what Darwin described as the characteristic that most
distinguishes human beings from other animals. Given the strength of our
instincts for individual and small-group survival, we seem to be stingy
with more far-reaching conscience.

Our capacities to take humane action are as distinctive of our species
as conscience, and no more truly reliable. As people, we are
consequences and we also cause them: by what we choose to do and not
do. The beneficiaries of economic and military savagery are far from
the combat zones. In annual reports, the Pentagon's prime contractors
give an overview of the vast financial rewards for shrewdly making a
killing. To surrender the political battlefield to such forces is to
self-marginalize and leave more space for those who thrive on plunder.

The inseparable bond of life and death should be healthy antipathy.

We've had no way of really knowing how near annihilation might be. But
our lives have flashed with scarcely believable human-made lightning --
the evidence of things truly obscene, of officialdom gone mad -- photos
and footage of mushroom clouds, and routinely set-aside descriptions
starting with Hiroshima. Waiting on the nuclear thunder.

Five decades after Sputnik, such apocalyptic dangers are still present,
but from Americans in my generation the most articulated fears have to
do with running out of money before breath. The USA is certainly no
place to be old, sick, and low on funds. Huge medical bills and hazards
of second-class care loom ahead. For people whose childhoods fell
between victory over Japan and evacuation from Saigon, the twenty-first
century has brought the time-honored and perfectly understandable quest
to avoid dying before necessary -- and to avoid living final years or
seeing loved ones living final years in misery. Under such
circumstances, self obsession may seem unavoidable.

There must be better options. But they're apt to be obscured, most of
all, by our own over-scheduled passivity; by who we figure we are, who
we've allowed ourselves to become. The very word "options" is likely to
have a consumer ring to it (extras on a new car, clauses in a
contract). We buy in and consume, mostly selecting from prefab choices
-- even though, looking back, the best of life's changes have usually
come from creating options instead of choosing from the ones in stock.

When, in 1969, biologist George Wald said that "we are under repeated
pressure to accept things that are presented to us as settled --
decisions that have been made," the comment had everything to do with
his observation that "our government has become preoccupied with death,
with the business of killing and being killed." The curtailing of our
own sense of real options is a concentric process, encircling our
personal lives and our sense of community, national purpose, and global
possibilities; circumscribing the ways that we, and the world around
us, might change. Four decades after Wald's anguished speech "A
Generation in Search of a Future," many of the accepted "facts of life"
are still "facts of death" -- blotting out horizons, stunting
imaginations, holding tongues, limiting capacities to nurture or defend
life. We are still in search of a future.

And we're brought up short by the precious presence and unspeakable
absence of love. "All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit
it, that mirrors can only lie," James Baldwin wrote, "that death by
drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love
is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the
masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live
within." This love exists "not in the infantile American sense of being
made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and
growth."

The freezing of love into small spaces, part of the numbing of America,
proceeds in tandem with the warfare state. It's easier to not feel
others' pain when we can't feel too much ourselves.

If we want a future that sustains life, we'd better create it ourselves.


[Excerpted from Norman Solomon's latest book "Made Love, Got War: Close
Encounters with America's Warfare State" (PoliPointPress) is available
now. For more information go to http://www.madelovegotwar.com.]

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