Putting Nation back in National Defense

Dear George,

The authoritarian regime controls an issue when it is properly framed by pungent sound bites that make both thought and discussion unnecessary. A sound bite is a sound bite when it is not a sound bite, when it is so integrated into the mind that questioning exactly what it means never arises.

When you speak of our “national” security or our “national” defense, nobody, but nobody, stops to ask exactly what the fuck you mean by “national.” They simply assume national defense is what defends all the mom and pop stores on Main Street that are now boarded up because a Wal-Mart opened just outside of town. To other, it conjures up images of America’s youth discovering the joy of oral sex in their abstinence classes.

The truth is that national is simply a synonym for “corporate.” War is that snarky institution in which laid-off drones get their asses shot up to defend our corporate interests overseas. Nothing shores up a king’s strength like a bunch of peasants getting hacked to pieces on a battlefield, a battlefield that will be used as glorious icon to attract future peasants to their death. “National” casts such a spell that it is considered heresy to question it. The kiss of death for a politician is to appear weak on national defense and national security.

A robust defense bubble is a must if we are to keep our economy afloat. We need more wars because we are about to lose the consumer spending that makes up 71 percent of our GDP. Right now, defense spending makes up a pathetic 3.7 percent of our GDP. That is a 67.3 percent gap war must close.

You touched on a solution when you said a nuclear Iran would start World War III. Well, I say God bless them for it, and the sooner the better. Once you get a good world war fired up, you can ration everything and solve the problem of reduced consumer spending by eliminating it altogether.

Invoke national pride and national security as you send more peasants out to die for their king, even though there is no king in a democracy, only a corporate oligarchy. But, the idea is still the same.

We must preserve the sanctity of their vacation villas in the south of France. The waterways must be made secure for their corporate yachts. The oligarchy is our nationhood, our pride and joy, the source of our meager pay.

Where peasants once died for the flag, they now die for a logo.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones