Lazy Saturday Reading Blogging

"Reading blogging," is that even a concept? Since if one isn't cat blogging, dog blogging, photoblogging, convention blogging, or whatever else you can think, then they're reading a blog. Well, this post is reading blogging, because I said so. Hits typically go way down on Saturdays, so I figure it's as safe a time as any to abuse blockquote at length.

I'm going to quote a few passages from "Return to NORTHCOM?," a letter by Tom Engelhardt in reply to Jonathan Schell. Both letters are at that link, kind of lengthy, but definitely an interesting read if you don't have anything to do for the next half hour. They discuss, among other things, the possibilities of American imperialism and how the militarization of our society, started during WWII, has increased and normalized, creating a rubber stamp body out of our Congress which is supposed to check the Pentagon in check but doesn't have the balls to try anymore. Like I said, interesting.

This is the imperial roadblock they've come up against in Iraq and elsewhere abroad, and both of us in our letters have been looking abroad -- to that terrain, that landscape, for which empires are supposedly made. But what if we look instead to our "homeland" -- an ominous term only recently introduced here that seems swiftly to have replaced "country" or "nation" and that, with its Germanic overtones, hints at where we've been headed these last years. Whatever our military can't do abroad (despite its staggering technological power), it has proved capable indeed of quite peacefully transforming our society at home, which in the last sixty years has experienced a striking, if until recently hardly noticed, degree of militarization.

The militarization of the United States, which started during World War II, accelerated in the 1950s with the creation of a "national security state" and Eisenhower's famed "military-industrial complex" (with its "revolving door" for employment between its military and industrial halves, and the artful scattering of military bases in congressional districts nationwide, not to speak of the artful seeding of funds and plants for the production of new weaponry hardly less widely). Washington in those years became a war capital and was rapidly Pentagonized. After a post-Vietnam dip, militarization proceeded apace in the Reagan years with the Pentagon functioning ever more as a central ministry for basic and advanced scientific and technological research and development (in a country that had no other centralized way to organize such funding projects). Reagan's Star Wars program for the militarization of space, for instance, was focused on research in part meant to spin off a dazzling array of future civilian products and projects.

By 1991, the interweaving of the Pentagon, vast weapons corporations, the military-funded academy, the intelligence agencies, lobbyists, and politicians who relied on all of the above had become so much the life of Washington and the nation that, when the Soviet empire collapsed in a remarkably peaceful fashion, there was no real hope that anyone in Washington would stop for a second to reconsider our way of war, much less offer the American public or the world a "peace dividend" of any sort. There is no greater evidence of how deeply our society had been Pentagonized than the continuing commitment to war and a vast nuclear arsenal in a world that briefly threatened (and that's the only word for it in this context) to lack all significant enemies.

What was striking though into the 1990s was how much of this had taken place out of sight of the ordinary citizen. It's what gave American militarism its distinctive form. In all those years when the Pentagon was creating militarized little Americas all over the globe, the creeping militarization of our own society was taking place largely beyond view and with none of the classic trappings that proud and assertive militaries like to display. There were in most of those years, no troops in the streets, no major parades, few uniforms in the news (when a war wasn't being reported), and so on.

A tipping point, however, seemed to arrive in the younger Bush years under the rubric of the war on terror. The police have since been given a military once-over and it has become increasingly commonplace in cities like New York and at airports, train stations, or even in subways, to see well-armed troops in uniform on patrol or at rest. (During the Democratic convention in Boston, for instance, I leapt into a taxi to rush from one site to another and, as we passed police squads on horses, groups of troops in camo with impressive guns slung over shoulders, and omnipresent helicopters hovering overhead, the driver, an immigrant from Africa, suddenly said to me, "This is the first time since I got here that I've felt like I was back home…"

How true. Boston suddenly had the look of some Third World dictatorship. This visual change has gone hand in hand with other changes -- the final defanging of Congress as an agency of budgetary oversight, the breaking down of barriers between spying abroad and at home as well as between military and civilian policing duties, the further bloating of the military budget, even the "privatization" of many military functions fusing the military and the corporate in yet another way -- which I briefly reviewed in our previous exchange of letters and which leave the Pentagon as the 800-pound gorilla in just about any room.

[snip]

Here's a small sign of the times: In previous decades, as Pentagon budgets grew and its weaponry became ever more expensive and exotic, Congress, that constitutionally-mandated holder of the power of the purse, still attempted to exert some small oversight on at least the Pentagon's more egregious workings. This usually expressed itself in criticism of Pentagon pork (overpriced simple objects purchased by underwhelmed military officials) and useless weapons programs like the B-2 bomber that were repeatedly challenged in Congress but, like so many Draculas with a host of vampiric followers in innumerable congressional districts, simply refused to die. Such modest attempts to rein in the military were reflected in our press in periodic rounds of outraged articles about ridiculous weapons systems and ludicrous Pentagon purchases. These have, strikingly, largely disappeared from the media. I never thought I'd be nostalgic for those peripheral pieces of reportage about million-dollar monkey wrenches or toilet seats.