| WILL SHOT AND SHELL MAKE US WELL? |
I'm getting to like the White House Correspondents dinner, which has had so
much publicity lately. If they keep on happening, it seems likely one of
them will break out in a first-class brawl eventually and that will make
terrific television. C-Span features lots of arguments, but so far no
actual fights.
The business the other night with the comedienne calling down curses on
Rush Limbaugh's head while Obama sat grinning pointed the way thing are
going. First it was Bill Clinton rapping Limbaugh in his presence, then a
couple of buffoons cracking on Bush while sharing the dais with him, and now a
first, a female comedian who's just as unfunny as the men. Bob Hope has
left a great gap behind him. He was the last comedian who could actually make
a speech at a dinner and get people to laugh. I read that the Academy
Awards have gone to the dogs without him and so have Washington dinners
obviously. A good fight would do a lot to brighten them up.
All discussions of Obama now turn on his spending plans to cure the
recession, which inspire just as much fear as hope. I'll admit that I feel both
of these emotions, sometimes blended, sometimes standing alone, but always
arising one way or the other. I've written here about the Great Depression
a few times and how we who lived through it knew when it was over. That
was when the world went to war and started pledging its credit everywhere
to buy weapons. A wave of prosperity swept over the planet and in this
country was not accompanied by a wave of destruction incidental to war. We had
the best of it. The borrowed money of the whole world was spent here for
war supplies after which we started borrowing money ourselves for more of
the same.
So borrowed money ended the depression. Now Obama wants to do it again
and everybody is worried that too much borrowing will bring inflation and
things will get worse instead of better. Well, maybe so, but it also might
work like it did before. Even the idea that it might involve a lot of waste
doesn't bother me. There's nothing more wasteful than war. In WWII we
spent millions just to fire rounds in the air that never hit anything.
Millions of shells and bullets did this. They hit the sky doing no damage, or
the ocean doing the same or dug themselves into the landscape to no effect,
but they kept the economy going all the same. Every spent shell had to be
replaced, so the production lines kept humming and the munitions workers
kept plugging and spending their wages and the boom (both kinds) continued.
Waste makes want, they say, but it also makes work, as I've just shown. We
're already in a war today, so we can't fall back on that as a way of
wasting money constructively, but welfare might provide us with an equivalent.
Universal health care would be a form of welfare that would allow us to
fling money away in the same way firing a howitzer barrage does. As I
understand it, everyone in the country is going to get an equal quality of
health care no matter what might be their condition or how they got into it. I
see problems arising from this.
The first problem is that millions of our citizens are grossly obese and
poor prospects for health insurance. Millions of others are drug addicts
and equally uninsurable. Then there's the millions of alcoholics...you see
the problem. These people today get along without insurance or with highly
expensive insurance or with public charity. I refuse to go into mourning
over this. If people have bad habits and can't shake them, the rest of us
can only shake our heads and wish them luck. We're not obliged to strip
ourselves naked to compensate for their improvidence. They won't change
anyway, even if we have compulsory care, as we do in prisons.
So, if I look on health as a wasteful way to generate spending as an
economic stimulus, what do I think might really work? In spite of my remarks
above about war spending, I actually see it as useful in the larger scheme of
things. I'm afraid whether we like it or not, we've got to have war. I'
ve heard lots of reasons for this, e.g., we have to stamp out terrorism, we
have to stop aggression, gotta find those WMD's, whatever. What nobody
ever mentions is that we can't maintain the world's greatest military
without giving it something to do from time to time. We simply can't ask men to
spend their lives training for combat and never give them any combat to
cut their teeth on. Armies with no work to do fall into alcoholism and other
bad habits, as General Schwarzkopf has written.
No one is frank enough to say this because it sounds as if we want war for
war's sake, not for the sake of liberty or democracy or universal
brotherhood or whatever, but simply because people like Winston Churchill used to
say things like "You've got to blood your troops" or "Muskets must flame."
Luckily we don't have to dream up outlandish excuses for going to war
which no one will believe, we simply have to pick and choose between the
provocations which are always coming up and which we can ignore or respond to as
the spirit moves us. Right now we have enough on our plate so we're
ignoring North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and a number of other nuisances we can
always fall back on if things ever start to get too dull.
The current world situation where one power, the United States, is conceded
the right to a military establishment superior to every other one in
existence, is actually splendiferous as compared to any other era in history.
The Twentieth Century was the century of arms races just like every other
century before it. No country could possibly afford to be outgunned by any
neighbor country. Every one of them armed to the teeth just in case
someone might take it into his head to attack them. The world was always on the
brink of war and everyone lived in fear.
Today there are no real arms races. America could blow up any part of the
world, including Russia and China. But they don't care because they know
we won't do it. We are what is called a "satiated power." Nobody has
anything we want. Everybody's territory is safe from us. So we're trusted,
something which has never happened before in history. In return for our
unique position, though, and our unquestioned right to bear arms, we're
expected to do dirty work from time to time which no one else can handle. So
Kosovo and Somalia and other cases land in our laps. They're our new Germany
and Japan and it was shooting at them that got us out of our last
depression. |
|
|
|