Bombing the World for Fun and Profit

Dear George,

One of the joys of being a right-wing stoner is an expanded vision. The Right wanders the dark side, but no matter how thick the darkness, the stoner sees all and rejoices in all. The stoner sees what a slut language is, how willing she is to perform for the highest bidder, how quickly she can change lingerie to suit her customers. Whatever the fetish, she is up to it.

Language works best when she dogpaddles nude through the black bile of bigotry and odium, when she can demonize and tear down. She is well suited to our dark age for she sings her songs of death and destruction in a voice thick with blood.

Slowly, she is birthing a new song. It is a song, like many of her songs that make holy that which was once evil; her magic is to give darkness the appearance of light.

Her new song sings of the bomb as an instrument of creation.

For it is a truism, George, that whatsoever we destroy we must reconstruct, after a manner. This is why the bomb gives our lives meaning because it makes of us builders of the new and better, after a manner. Must not an old building be demolished before a new and better building can be built? Bombing simply accomplishes in minutes what it might take a demolition crew weeks to accomplish.

If Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for war and a time for peace, then it follows that there is a time for destruction and a time to award cost-plus reconstruction contracts.

What you describe as the “defining struggle of our time”[1] is our struggle to find something to destroy so we can contract out its reconstruction.

And as always, the first bars of a new song issue forth from the miasmic basements of the Beltway. Your Department of State is looking towards a future fraught with opportunities for new creations. So they created the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization.[2] It seems they weren’t too happy with the reconstruction of Iraq. The operating assumption of shock and awe was that the Iraqis would be so shocked and awed they wouldn’t mind if foreign contractors, using foreign labor, came in a rebuilt the place while unemployed Iraqis starved.

They did.

Never again, George! This new office has drawn up plans to reconstruct twenty-five countries after we destroy them, even though we haven’t even begun the demonization process. Citizens of these countries can sleep well knowing that even before we level their homeland we will have awarded the cost-plus contracts to reconstruct them.

A cost-benefit analysis of bombing confirms that it is a zero-sum enterprise. The loss a devastated country suffers is offset by the income American private enterprise derives from rebuilding it. Bombing is a sound economic practice.

Americans desensitized by seven years of warfare, torture, black holes and eroded civil liberties, will be easily convinced that bombing is a creative force. It is a vehicle of economic growth as it creates new jobs and pumps public money into the private sector. The income generated by bombing justifies our bloated defense establishment. Without it, we would have nothing to reconstruct, and that would surely dull the creative edge that is bringing the third world into the twenty-first century, one bomb at a time.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones





[1] State of the Union, 2007
[2] Naomi Kline. The Shock Doctrine, page 380.