THE BEAST: THE WAR ON THE WAR ONby Buffalo Beast
by IOZ In the latter half of the 20th century, Americans were called to meet abstractions with metaphors in a series of gaudy figurations popularly called “The War On . . .” Intended to be wholly symbolic, rhetorical frameworks that loosely invoked the legendary national unity that accompanied America’s good wars, whichever those were, our Wars On various and sundry Things that Are Bad proved the power of language to mold behavior, for often the martial tone spilled into martial practice, and so we find heavily armed SWAT units kicking down doors like soldiers in Baghdad. More recently, Wars On have spilled into the private sector, where you’ll principally find inexplicably aggrieved majorities crying that they and their dearly held beliefs are under siege from the ravenous forces of queers or atheists or $3-an-hour day laborers from Chavezistan. For this new year, we might look back at the five worst of our Wars On whatever, and reconsider this, ahem, tortured metaphor.
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4. The War on Drugs
... America is a tippler that pretends to be a teetotaler—the world’s largest consumer of porn and loudest extoller of its own moral virtue; the world’s greatest user of drugs and harshest prosecutor of that use. Even more than the War on Terror, it’s the Drug War that shepherded the militarization of our police, the surveillance of our society, and the creation of the world’s largest internal prison population. The fact that we put people in jail for possessing marijuana is one of the great jurisprudential jokes of all time.
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A nation of pot-smokers doesn’t kill grandmothers in no-knock midnight raids at the wrong street address, nor does it spend billions a year arming South American brownshirts and spraying the only crops that their rural poor can produce that hasn’t already been rendered unprofitable and unsustainable by American and European agribusiness and subsidies.
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5. The War on Terror
... The self-described capo of our Nazislamo enemies stated in the plainest terms that his beef was with America’s constant meddling in the Middle East, our wars and oil-lust and sanctions and tyrannical client governments. How do we respond? By invading the Middle East, meddling in their politics, and setting up more corrupt, useless governments. Our need to “hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world,” in Tom Friedman’s immortally bloodthirsty formulation, was so immediate and disproportionate that it would be parody, but for all the bodies it left and is leaving in its wake. America went from being a mere back room practitioner of torture to its loudest global advocate, and the imperialism we’d always practiced abroad, which we formerly weren’t supposed to talk about, became a point of national pride. At home we rushed to disregard the old Franklinian aphorism about those who sacrifice liberty for security deserving neither, and the very same people who once (rightly) complained about Janet Reno’s ham-fisted massacre of the Branch Davidians and Bill Clinton’s relatively subtle efforts to undermine our privacy now shouted that the government must tap every phone, open every letter, and dump every toiletry bag onto the conveyor belt at the airport....
http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/reviews.cfm/id/1452/page/the_beast__the_war_on_the_war_on.html Haven't seen this posted here before. Good stuff. Heard about it through Fark.com.
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