Believe me, I wish everyone the best of health and personal safety, and I am sure defending our national security is very important.
But I think we all sense that this War on Terror threatens to be the undoing of the America we know (what’s left of it), the Constitution, the American Dream. Not because of the strength and nature of our enemy, but of the lesser qualities of our own leadership. Our leadership politicians are concerned about getting re-elected, so they cannot take a strong anti-spending stance on the DHS, and for the most part for the policy of interventionist preemption. It seems like we are stuck in this bizarro world of Bush’s for some time. But we can’t just let America turn into some weird corporatist empire out of Blade Runner either. So how can we move from a scenario where spending on speeding the disastrous American transformation can only increase because no one in power can afford to call for anything else, lest they lose their power?
This is America’s Greatest Weakness, it’s Shakespearean tragic flaw:
It is always looking for the next threat and when it finds one, is compelled to spend Billions in response. It would make sense, if one wanted to do our nation harm, to simply shower our defense and security structures with bogus threats. Become expert in triggering expensive CIA, DHS or DoD responses. Do things that will incite this government to further curtail the rights of the citizenry, thus promoting instability here at home and the further descent of our nation into soul-destroying corporatism. The more extensive our security apparatus, the easier it is for our ‘enemies’ to spend our money and spirit at will.
In a sense, the more of an over-reaction we have to threat, the more ‘preemption’ that proves to be based on false assumptions, the more we lose ground in the War itself. Our politicians lack the spine to do anything but try to out-tough each other with their designs to spend more and more on pursuing a utopian ideal: ‘Homeland Security’. With each incident comes one more inconvenience or curtailment of rights, another expensive program or procedure, another victory for ‘The Terrorists’ who seek to do our economy harm.
With the new DHS and a trigger happy Administration, you don’t have to fly a plane into a building to cost our economy billions of dollars. All you have to do is buy too many cell phones in Peoria, bring glitter hair gel on a few planes and make a few crude video tapes.
