So What Do We Do Now?

Photo by Alfred Kenneally on Unsplash

Set the scene. A massive military presence halfway around the world. American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines on a wartime footing under a social media lockdown. Old and angry, the US President publicly threatens to “end” things for another country, and then does it.

In the proud tradition of another baby killer, Trump believes, as Madeleine Albright told Colin Powell 35 years ago, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?”

Economic and military assaults on the integrity and sovereignty of other countries around the world is part of American history, and this has been normalized for most Americans. Boomers, born the two decades after World War II, grew up in an “inflation and war” period. It pumped their retirement portfolios with real assets paid off in depreciating dollars and “profitable” investments in state-subsidized military industries, technology and pharma. Obama, Trump 45, Biden, and Trump 47 each boasted the “highest stock market ever.”

Boomers in particular have been reluctant to examine the US government’s transformation into an opaque machine of billionaire elites and capital firms that pursue and shape US domestic and foreign policy.

Trump joked for ten years that he would “Make America Great Again.” He meant America, Inc., but it’s not all his fault. The imbalance between spending on what government requires (war, domestic surveillance, regulatory controls, and more of your paycheck) and what the people want and deserve (peace, privacy, liberty, and more of our earnings) has been growing for decades. Even 38% of the Boomers and the Silent generations recognize this – but the ruling class doesn’t want to hear from those who oppose the war/inflation/murder cult. Instead, our modern Goldfinger says to a strapped American population desperately trying to be represented, “[I don’t expect you to talk]...I expect you to die!”

The problem of empire is not its historic predictability, but its determinism. You cannot vote away an empire. What the empire does is controlled not by the people, or the law, but by an arthritic algorithm, a thousand times less flexible than the ones managing your social media feed. This algorithm produces command and control economies and deeply indebted governments in a world where every other country is increasingly more free, more innovative, and more fiscally sound. As the indebted, corrupt, centralized system begins to blow gaskets and seize up, it sees new enemies inside its borders as well, and works to end freedom of speech, movement, and association.

The ever-jealous state ridicules faithful prayer to a supernatural God, reminding citizens that submission and obedience to a political system is far wiser in the short term. Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer” was published over 120 years ago, very close to the 125^th birthday of the Declaration of Independence. Facing our 250^th, I wonder how many Americans are shocked as we devotedly cheer the “most moral army in the world” and our own.

The US Senate, after multiple attempts, finally discharged Senate Joint Resolution 185 from the Foreign Relations Committee to the full Senate. Is the US Senate suddenly thinking about America’s younger generations who want, and need, peace and liberty? Is it reflecting on Trump’s failed military and absent diplomatic strategy for long-term US power projection – or just peace – in the Persian Gulf? Did it discover that the emerging security architecture there doesn’t include the US? Is it asserting Article 1 constitutional powers because of concern about wasted taxpayer dollars, or were 50 Senators just tired of being left out of the profitable shorts made by executive suite cronies? Is the Senate somehow acting on behalf of our nation and the Constitution?

The answer is none of the above. The uni-party, and the unitary state, is incoherently attempting, probably at the request of the real owners of this country, to fashion Washington’s exit from a deep hole that Israel needed the US, and specifically Trump, to dig. Trump dug enthusiastically, burying billions in our military munitions and capability, as well as the last fragments of our global good will, furiously slinging dirt and debris. Flag officers and teenage soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines alike have been awestruck by the strategic and tactical disaster of this war. A nervous world waits and watches from the sidelines, in gas lines, and soon, in food lines.

We shall see if the House likewise considers this resolution to bring the troops home, much less if both houses approve it – only to face down a Trump veto delivered on Truth Social, a minute or two after it is provided to White House crony investors. On paper, the House is the people’s representative body and overwhelmingly the American people oppose this latest Trump war. Except, as we saw in the unhinged Kentucky 4^th District primary, the prime directive remains that no US representative may disobey the Israel lobby. It’s not what Americans want; it is what Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben Gvir want, and in a few months, it will be what Naftali Bennett and his allies in the Knesset want. Which is to say, a tiny ethno-fascist empire halfway around the planet calls the literal shots in, and those fired by, the United States.

Central Command Dweeb In Chief Bradley Cooper, wormy-looking and wide-eyed, responded to a Congressional question about why he authorized the February 28^th Tomahawk triple tap on a girls school in Minab. While struggling to locate his spine, he answered with the equivalent of “It’s complicated.”

Indeed it is. What isn’t complicated is the message the empire is sending not just to the world, but to Americans specifically. That message is STFU and suffer. When we hear this message from “our government,” there is only one acceptable response: “You first.”

I am reminded of a famous letter written by Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith. Smith had sent him a copy of the new Constitution. Jefferson was contemplating the new America, and this new constitution. He wrote, “There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate.” Wait, what? It wasn’t perfect?

He goes on: “Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves.” Wow! Trump wasn’t even a gleam in his great-great-great-great-grandfathers eye in 1787!

Jefferson then addresses the kerfluffle in Massachusetts. “The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.”

The world is still burning. Let us resolve to be more honestly informed, and to conceive our facts more correctly. Let us be a little less quiet, as we clarify rightness and wrongness in our political arrangement. Let us embrace the Jeffersonian truth that liberty requires action. And just for fun, let us revel in the knowledge that our backbones are vastly more functional than those of our political and military leaders!