Bombs are good and I don't care

This article.  The impetus to write my thoughts down in a weblog.  The article a cause of ire and consternation.  Perplexity: this is acceptable now?  To casually claim that being an accomplice to murder is okay since the manufacturers of the armaments provide jobs?  Let me paraphrase the sentiment offered by the interviewer:

Mmm, okay, you mentioned morals.  So, yeah, that’s bullshit first of all.  I mean listen to the tone of my voice . . . morals do not concern me in the least and sure as hell do not come primary in my view of reality.  “We” need those jobs and who even really cares about what Saudi Arabia is doing with these weapons.  Jobs.  JOBS.  And I’ll go ahead and state what I’ve implied about these jobs.  These jobs are the best jobs ever.  The only jobs we will ever need.  Screw using this money for education or aid or rebuilding domestic infrastructure.  No.  Boom, boom, boom!  And when those bombs hit and those lives are ripped apart in every which way, I DON’T CARE.

How common this attitude?  Is it a belief?  Or is it just a sign of the absence of any questioning or concern.  And this cultivated understanding of the world and understanding of how our economy works is coming from the smart people.  Someone voting for either of the candidates for president thinks this.  Even someone voting for the “lesser of two evils” must think this.  Bombs are good and I don’t care.

Virtues are vices, the modern world is less than times past

Look at the modern world and consider that it is a de-evolution. A regression.  Examples of progress are mapped over the faults.  If they are not in fact themselves faults: technology, democracy, equality – go down the line.  Maybe some good.  What is good and great and is an exemplar of our modern world is, it turns out, unjust and perverted.

Perhaps this is manifested in the healthcare system of the US.  For profit (docs earn a pretty penny), big business, allied with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.  Allied with the soft drink lobby.  All in cahoots.  This inversion is not to be fought against though it is meant to be understood.  These are the shackles that define the outlines of our slave status, a world where the slave permits the chains on one condition: that he may criticize anything but the chains, i.e. that he has the right to live in a fantasy, the chains untouched and ignored except for periodic perverse maintenance done on the chains by the wearer in acts called voting, consumer choice, patriotism, inclusiveness and the principled acquiescence to war.

That technology will deliver us from the ills that it created is “magical thinking” as James Howard Kunstler says – though, well, erm, okay I guess I don’t have a beef with term “magic”.  It’s true.  Magic itself is not inherently good.  It can, in fact, be used to influence people to consume, to “buy into” the status quo. We marvel at our own bedazzlement.  We laud our actors who entertain us into a state of distraction, whose fictions capture our imagination.  We believe, or suspend disbelief, in the ability of consumer goods to deliver a solid, seamless reality where product types are improved each year and “coolness” may likewise be perennially purchased.

A bad myth, a celebration of captiveness.  Everything is opposite.  Constraining our life energy into a safe standard conduit – it will never change; can’t I use this as a decisive argument that utopias – where all are equal – will never, ever materialize.  To help realize that those utopias by definition will never exist because their definition includes man, groups of men and women . . . therefore mass behavior will exist.  Might I use this definitive understanding to do away with the moral pangs that want to turn an idea like magic into an operative of some assumed good?  Might I still have compassion?  Do I have to scale the ideas of love, the good, and compassion into the redoubt of the family or of the tribe?

A small thought that pops up, I will welcome it into the circle as it arises and make peace with it in order to nullify it.