Beltway Dreaming

Dear George,

It’s snap quiz time!

Question: How does a country fight two wars when it’s insolvent?

Answer: With starry-eyed dreamers who feed on their own masturbatory fantasies in the hermetically sealed hothouse we call the Beltway. They are our dark dreamers, implementing policies grounded in the hard data of make believe. To their fervid imaginations, the War on Terror is “real” and they cling to the belief that a combination of bombs, superior firepower and hi-tech weaponry will lead us to victory, just as it did in Vietnam.

It’s that good old American “Can do” spirit on steroids, and it looks as if Obama has bought into their mad clarity of vision.

As one writer put it, “The financial damage inflicted on Americans by their own government is as great as would be expected from foreign conquest. While Washington ‘protected’ us from terrorists by fighting pointless wars abroad, the U.S. economy collapsed.”

I must say, the writer sort of missed the point. The GWOT wasn’t a war, it was a diversionary tactic that directed the drone's attention from the real war—the war on the New Deal.

Part and parcel of this covert war was the backlash against licentiousness that broke out with Ronnie’s ascension to the throne. You carried it a step further when the new propriety became defined as keeping your fly zipped and your panties on while you drowned the screams of the victims with your silence. (We introduced America's teenagers to abstinence education, and they discovered oral sex.)

Another writer speaks of the “emphasis on the shocking rise of promiscuity by American teenage females.” He goes on to say:

This, of course, was a particular point of outrage among old male conservatives of all nationalities, right up until the introduction of Viagra that at least allowed the old geezers an invitation to the orgy as well.

Ironic, then, that, as the conservative era ended in the US in 2008, it culminated with an explosion of permissiveness and irresponsibility that made the free-love hippies of the 1960s look like Southern Baptist preachers. After all, the hippies never cost the American nation over one trillion dollars.

We are all citizens of Orwell’s Oceana, convinced that war simply is, just as the sunrise is. So conditioned are we to this state of mind that a third writer tells us, “The honest truth is that the United States is technically bankrupt and in a state of chronic decline, and yet the nation persists in spending a trillion dollars a year on war and preparations for war, as though America were in danger from foreign enemies.”

That writer has sunk his teeth into a half truth. There are some real enemies out there; we should know because we’ve created them. Ask yourself, what is the ripple effect of a baby whose body parts are scattered across the pavement? How many parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and grandparents does this embitter? How far does this bitterness spread among their friends and acquaintances?

No, George, as long as the Beltway dreams its dreams and lives out its fantasies, your Eternal War will be eternal because we will continue to create enemies as fast as we destroy them.

The Beltway is the new Sorcerer’s Apprentice who can’t stop the spell it's created.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones