Democracy versus willful leaders

[mqbush]

The right sanctifies flags, sanctifies military medals,
sanctifies bombs and guns and, as an abstraction, troops.  The
left believes that any country is its people, not its symbols,
not its military, and that the people hire some bookkeepers
(the government) to keep track of the people’s pensions and
health care, and to assure access to truth and justice.  

The right is all about taking money and power from the people,
by force.  The left is about removing knives and scissors from
the hands of this sociopathic element, for the greater good.

The right goes into the world’s Harlems and yells “m_f_ing
N_s!” and then pretends to feel unfairly persecuted by a world
of unappreciative hotheads, and arms itself to the teeth in
defense.  The left lives with its neighbors; if one of the
neighbors does things that the majority can’t stand, they deal
with this through the strength and legitimacy of numbers,
democratically, to bring peace again.  Peace is, after all,
what people want.  Peace is what the left wants.  The left,
therefore, are the people.

People don’t go to war on their own.  Leaders have no right to
send the people into wars they don’t want, wars that gain the
people nothing but debt and pain.  Leaders even have the nerve
to demand loyalty and oaths of allegiance, when they should be
trying to slip out of the country to escape comeuppance for
being so presumptuous.  The head of state is the head
bookkeeper, nothing more.  He is not the king.  Kings are no
longer tolerated.  Someday, neither will presidents.  And
without leaders to do evil, to incite evil through appeals to
fear and prejudice and greed and moral absolutism, wars would
go away, and civil strife will have so much less fuel to fire
it.  And without leaders to cant of honor (For whom? 
Refugees?  Suicidal soldiers?  The mangled?  For whom, I
demand to know.), of duty (To whom?  Not the victims of war,
obviously.  To whom, then, I demand to know.), of dignity, (So
dignified, to destroy a country!), of glory (You can’t be
serious!), of all the absurd rot that comes out of the mouths
of war-mongers,- without this, arms dealers would have to go
back to kiddie porn and home mortgages to make their precious,
precious profit.

The right chants that WILL is the magic ingredient in war and
all other real things.  If only some leader has the will to
show that “we mean business,” then we will surely prevail. 
Well, both sides in Northern Ireland showed they meant
business.  For a hundred bloody years.  It was only when the
willful fanatics were removed from the decision-making
process, and reason replaced will, that peace was finally
restored.  The British army in occupied India showed it meant
business when it machine-gunned to death a thousand men,
women, and children in a soccer stadium, to make a point.  But
the British empire was nevertheless driven out of India by
unarmed, non-violent insurgents.  Oh, sure, someone on the
right will insist that the British just didn’t have ENOUGH
will.  But, since they didn’t have the a-bomb, they would have
had to use up the world’s supply of machine-gun bullets to
maybe have their way.  That would have been admirable, an
earned victory of will, right?  It all makes such perfect
sense, no?  How can the left not see that “the medium is the
message,” that it doesn’t matter how many decades or centuries
a war lasts?  Just so long as willful leaders are
slaughtering, that proves how dangerous the world is, proves
that we have to have the will to slaughter in “defense.” 
Perfectly circular reasoning.  Perfect rot.

The right wants a perfect military machine in control of the
world, even if there were no longer any people left to
“protect.”  Can the left be wrong to favor something more
people-friendly?  It’s not that the left has only vague,
bumper-sticker sentiments to replace lethal solutions.  It
only takes one madman in Washington to undo decades of
progress in nuclear disarmament, but that progress was real. 
If leaders are going to kill, it behooves us to at least make
it difficult.  War should never be easy.  It should never be
an arcade game played in air-conditioned bunkers by those who
already can’t grasp that every god-like exercise of will
blasts eyes and breasts and stomachs and knees into glop. 
Nukes make annihilation too easy.  Undoing progress in nuclear
disarmament was an act of destruction.  Healthy people create
what they can.  Individuals with certain mental disorders have
neither the inclination nor the patience to create, and,
instead, destroy what they can.

War is not the rugged, sweaty face of John Wayne playing a
soldier.  The real face of war is the dazed face of the
refugee, the homeless, the mangled.  It is the face of a
person who never wanted war, didn’t ask for it, didn’t deserve
it, yet pays all the costs, while leaders strut about in
bunkers, silly popinjays spouting silly slogans about noble
causes while cavalierly consigning numbing numbers of people
to arbitrary dismemberment and death.  One hundred thousand
people burned to death in their homes in Dresden to test some
bunkered leader’s theory that it might influence Hitler to
surrender.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were cities of mostly women
and children.  These innocents were blasted and burned and
irradiated because sociopaths in war-rooms wanted to show the
world how mighty the U.S. was (Not to end the war; Japan had
been asking to surrender for months, but the bombs weren’t
ready yet.).  Sixty million people were killed in that war,
that war that made the world a better place, we’re told.  Not
better for the sixty million dead, surely, nor for the sixty
times that whose lives were disrupted forever.  The German
people would never have invaded the rest of Europe without a
leader.  The Japanese people would not have attacked Pearl
Harbor without a leader.  Willful leaders make wars.  The
right wants willful leaders.  ‘Nuff said?