As I approach the end of my Robert Frostian “less traveled by road” — a path “… that has made all the difference” — I feel moved to share some of the “truths” that I have found along the way. I am a “truth-seeker,” not a myth believer.
Seeking and speaking truth, however, sometimes gets quite lonely and becomes difficult to do as various forms of “silencing” set in when one seeks and speaks critically in and on dominant domains of cultural reality, beliefs and myths.
I am so grateful for our Constitution’s First Amendment right to “free speech” that enables us to be heard.
All hell broke loose in a series of “letters-to-the-editor” rebukes of my recently shared “truth,” not “opinion,” that undemocratic “command and control” is the essence of militaries everywhere and then of my “opinion” that perhaps Colonel Emeritus Morris’s 29 years of military time might not have been the best place to have learned how to be mayor of our beautiful little democratic university-city, Athens.
I did not attack Morris as a person. All I did was state an experientially derived “truth” and an “opinion.”
Those letters of rebuke enable me to share some of the roots from which the flowers of my discontent blossom — of which the above militarist “command and control” issue is but one manifestation. These experientially derived roots enable me to sadly see a very militarized and corporatized 21st century USA.
Here are just a few manifestations of this phenomenon.
1. We spend about as much on our military as all the rest of the world’s nations combined.
2. We spend about half of our general tax revenues (not counting money taken in for Social Security and Medicare) for past, current and future military adventures.
3. We are a roughly 800 foreign-military-base empire that circles Earth, bases that are not there to bring democracy, but rather mostly to enable us to get the “oil” and other resources that we need to maintain our unnecessarily profligate and inequitable consumption culture and to help protect our global corporate operations. In my opinion, that model is a poor one to demonstrate to the developing world.
Insight for item No. 3 arises in part out of a 1977-78 yearlong sabbatical leave, working as a registered professional engineer, in Washington with the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Our small group explored some dimensions of the USA’s resource consumptions — the immensity, profligateness and resulting consequences that include oil and other resource wars and our war on planet Earth herself that we now call “global warming.”
There are no military solutions to those problems or our culture’s addiction to drugs for which we stupidly, militarily fight “drug wars.” Suggestions as to nonviolent alternatives to war as means for trying to cope with these problems (and there are some) would have required another long paper — some of which I might aim for in future letters to the editor.
Unfortunately, the space available to me in this commentary is inadequate to enable me to explain myself; therefore, a few citations where one might find significant amplifications: Let me start with a book by Michael Sherry.
Sherry’s In The Shadow of War: The United States Since The 1930s eloquently captures the essence of things where he defines the “militarization” of the USA as “… the contradictory and tense social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence.” He uses the militarization word “… to refer to the process by which war and national security become consuming anxieties and provide the memories, models, and metaphors that shape broad areas of national life.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address warned about this matter when he spoke of the “military-industrial-complex,” something that I now see, at the beginning of the 21st century, as a “military-industrial-academic-complex” — a phenomenon that would require several pages to explain.
Ironically, in 1953, Eisenhower presided over the CIA’s overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mosaddegh, so as to help British and American oil companies.
See any of the late Chalmers Johnson’s books, beginning with Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire or Nemesis: The Last Days Of The American Republic, where he outlines multitudes of our government’s military, CIA and other related actions against people in other lands. See also U.S. Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich’s continuous flow of books, such as American Empire and The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War.
My favorite U.S. Marine, Gen. Smedley Butler, wrote a 1930s book titled War Is A Racket, in which he discusses his role in Central America, the Caribbean, and other places, where — in the corporate “robber-baron-era” of the last part of the 19th and early 20th centuries— he helped to make things safe for American corporations.
Do a Google search for the name “Elizabeth Warren.” Look for her wonderful, recent two-minute video commentary on this corporatized and militarized culture of ours.
One of her memorable phrases on the corporate world reads as follows:
“There is nobody in the country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; … etc., etc., etc.”
Let me conclude by saying that I am so grateful that, more than 40 years ago, young people massively helped to end our Vietnam obscenity.
I see some hopeful signs out there now with: the present “Occupy Wall Street” movement and our own “Occupy OhioU” activity here in Athens and assorted “occupiers” throughout the USA; and the wonderful efforts to overturn that U.S. Supreme Court Jan. 21, 2010, Citizens United v. FEC, “corporate-personhood” ruling that defined corporations as people, entitling them to buy elections.
Chuck Overby is an Ohio University professor emeritus of engineering and a veteran of World War II and the Korean War.
