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The best part of the coming shutdown: It'll end the wars.
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2011 Feb 23, 4:38pm 1,477 views 4 comments
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EightBall
2011 Feb 23, 10:42pm
As long as the media continues to glorify war, drugs, illicit behavior, etc you won't change many people's minds. The entertainment media, of course, says they are only reflecting what is present in society - but that is completely false. How many of your know the source of "I love the smell of napalm in the morning"? There is such rage against politicians of all stripes but any attempt to reign in the vile sewage bellowing out of hollywood is met with screams of censorship and fascism. If I cooked some brownies and handed you one and after you took a bite I told you there was only a "little human feces" in it you'd throw up and probably kick my ass. If we only had the same response to the filth that we swallow out of the entertainment media we'd all be the better for it.
I like brownies
Id prefer you bake some Headband or Sour Diesel. Butter into them, over the whole fecal idea
As to ending the wars, not bloody likely! We import virtually ALL of our raw meaterials and petroleum. Usd hegemony only goes as far as our longest reaching inter continental ballistic missiles reach. I'm no fan of our military offense, but get real, americans want five hours of boob tube to stare at every day, and cheapish fuel so that they can travel back and forth from the shoppes, to their urbanly sprawled house, and then to their storage units and the dump
You should factor in the probability of compulsory service in the military, which is something the Communitarian Party supports. The system may shutdown, but the system will still likely require protection from terrorists (the anti-Communitarians and carbon polluters), both international and domestic.
Americans love the wars, despite polls to the contrary. Most will say something vague about not being happy about the direction that they're going, but outright criticism of the wars themselves are still a (significant) minority.
This is because the wars have become abstracted from our daily lives. The general population isn't impacted by the wars like we used to be. In prior wars we paid very real prices, like materials rationing and a draft.
With the shutdown looming, though, the real costs of government are going to be laid bare and a real assesment is going to be made about what we keep and what we get rid of.
Put simply, the defense is the only non-discretionary spending that matters, weighing in at an impressive 84% of the non-discretionary budget. More than 2/3rds of this goes directly or indirectly to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yeah, Social Security and Medicare are going to need to undergo some restructuring to make them remain financially viable, but you can't restructure defense -- you just have to cut deep.
I think that most Americans, when they actually see the true cost of the empire, will decide that they'd rather have medicare than army bases in a desert shithole.
Democrats will love it, because they'll be able to use it to appeal to their anti-war base.
Republicans will come to love it, because it'll appeal to the libertarian wing of the party, and because they'll be able to claim to have stood up to big government or some such. Previous rhetoric about why we were fighting these wars will be conveniently forgotten, chalked up to the misguided Bush legacy.
So, I think we should look at the current congressional clusterfuck of ineptness with optimism. Ending the wars alone isn't going to fix our budgetary problems, but it will act as a catalyst to get us out of the rut, and may very well put us on a path towards long term fiscal sanity with regards to military expenditure, at least as long as we aren't dumb enough to elect a Palin or the like in 2012.
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