It Takes a Villain

For as long as I've been alive our country has had an archvillain. From the time I was born until about 1989, it was the Soviet Union. The Cold War ended (cold only because if it had been hot we wouldn't still be here), and from appearances, we won. I'm taking our victory on faith, because I'm not sure the final chapter has been written. Anyway, what were we to do with all that extra productive capacity freed up by our victory? We had something the politicians called the "peace dividend." I don't believe I ever got my dividend check, but nevertheless we were supposed to have some extra wealth around. That wasn't such a great thing after all when we realized that many of the working people in this country were dependent on the defense establishment. Even people that worked in so-called civilian industries found themselves out of work. It was a hollow victory for them, even though they helped bring it about.

Just in the knick of time, we found ourselves invading Panama. Our government had whipped up a little minor hysteria about General Noriega (former US government employee) in Panama. I think it was no coincidence that we had "won" the Cold War just at the time we were "forced" to invade Panama. Once we had Manuel in a basement jail cell in Florida, we looked around for some new place to use our military might. Remember, we had all these people that needed to be kept busy in their defense industry jobs, so we had to keep using their production capacity.

Another good friend and former employee of ours, Saddam Hussein, stepped into the breach. He went about invading Kuwait. Now, forget we had just done the same thing in Panama, he had violated international law and we had to forcefully remove him. Of course, it didn't hurt that the surrounding area in dispute was sitting atop the largest oil reserves in the world. Don't think that Panama was just about the dope either. Remember that little stretch of planetary highway called the Panama Canal? Oil may not be pumped out of the ground there, but it sure does pass through there. Anyway, we got a chance to use up a lot of excess military hardware while wiping out a decidedly low-tech army that was no match for us.

A new President came to office with different priorities in the area of defense spending. But, let's be clear, Democrats aren't conscientious objectors! We may have waited a long while and diverted some of that money to social programs, but eventually we had to find our madman to destroy, and we did! Slobodan Milosevich. Who? Yeah, that's right his name is Slobodan. It sounds like it was made up for the name of a comic strip villain, but it's real. So, we bombed Serbia and "liberated" it's province of Kosovo. By the way, we also built the largest military base in Europe at Camp Bondsteel just across the border in Macedonia. Just a little work to keep Halliburton busy.

Well, we all know what happened next. We got attacked on our own soil after getting hit a few times at installations overseas. So, Ossama bin Laden was our next villain. Now, don't get me wrong, some of these guys really are bad news, but they seem to have mostly had some previous connection to us in the clandestine arena. Yes, we gave secret (and not so secret) money to Ossama. He's sort of one of our inventions. He was a lot harder to kill off, so we needed a new villain. Well, not entirely new, we had left Saddam in power back in '91 contrary to a lot of folks wishes, so it was time to drag him out of mothballs again.

See a pattern here? It's time to face it...we cannot live without a villain. It's like George Orwell predicted, we are now living continuous war, and it doesn't really matter who the current villain is. The important thing is that we have one.

- posted by Marcos @ 9:41 AM