Well, it looks like Eisenhower’s fears are coming to a 5 decade anniversary now. His closing address to the nation asked that the American people be wary of the military-industrial complex. You’d think that as a general and as a President, people would have listened to him. But the only ones who did were dirty, nasty hippies who most normal people (in other words, voters) wouldn’t be caught dead with.
The last century was one of great wars and a massive inferiority complex brought on by the previous generation’s perceived greatness. It was a burned out hippie newsman, by the name of Tom Brokaw, who dubbed the World War II generation as the “greatest generation”. I guess the generation that founded this great nation were terrible people by comparison. In any event, Brokaw’s characterization is evident of some kind of collective inferiority complex that the baby boom generation all experienced. They all heard the stories of the glories of war from their parents (and believe me if I had participated in a war that brought down the Nazis and Imperial Japan, it would be a great story) and wanted that glory for themselves.
Then came Vietnam, which was started by a Democrat and lost because of a single newsman’s comments (Walter Cronkite proved that an individual with a microphone is a dangerous thing to behold). Somehow, the Left always blames Nixon for the war, when he was really trying to win it, to a degree. Sure he was bombing another country and breeding discontentment with the local populace, but LBJ was probably the worst of the two considering his obsession with planning out the war effort himself. At least Hitler was smart enough to leave a lot of the war planning to his generals.
In any event, Eisenhower predicted the Vietnam War inadvertently by taking about the insidious relationships between the Federal government and defense contractors. Now the Department of Defense budget is over 800 Billion tax dollars a year, not to mention all the other ‘Homeland Security’ items and Federal Law enforcement that pushes our total budgeted defense spending to over 1 Trillion tax dollars a year. This of course leaves out all the ‘emergency’ spending that happens each month to fund the war efforts overseas, which Obama had promised to pull us out of. The dirty secret is, the Democrats only oppose war when it’s being run by a Republican. And pretty much the attitude is the same on the Republican side.
So where am I going with all this? Well, it looks like Afghanistan’s ‘war’ is now the country’s longest. That’s right, my generation is lucky enough to make history with the longest peacetime ‘war’ to go on since the Baby Boom generation got a megaphone and won’t shut up (seriously, can someone please grab that megaphone?). So now we are engaged in a war that isn’t officially a war since Congress never lived up to their responsibilities and declared war on Afghanistan or Iraq. The Constitution is a pesky thing when it demands formal declarations of war before sending off the troops. And don’t mention the Barbary Pirates in the early 1800s. It was wrong then and they could’ve easily issued Letters of Marque for that whole group, but they didn’t. I guess the Founding Fathers never really wanted any of this to be taken seriously (no, I haven’t read Judge Andrew Napolitano’s latest book yet).
So now my generation, the most apathetic and idiotic generation, is stuck with an unwinnable non-war that’s been going on since I was in college. We haven’t made any progress in the Muslim world and it appears that our economic infrastructure is about to collapse. And with 52% of all workers getting their pay from the government in some fashion (in other words, non-productive jobs), I doubt that anything will change anytime soon.
So the state appears to be healthy and thriving, just like a parasite would right before the host dies. And then the parasite dies shortly thereafter. The sad part is, there are a lot of people who were dumb enough to believe that the good times will never end. Considering that most people have an average IQ of around 100 and those with a higher IQ tend to waste their time on mindless garbage, it’s a shame our central planners couldn’t see through all this and plan ahead. Or maybe they were all just homosexual hedonists like John Maynard Keynes was and decided that in the end we’re all dead.
I’m thinking my generation will be the last generation because when we begin to realize just how screwed we are, we’ll all become nihilists. As H.P. Lovecraft once wrote, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”. I have a vague idea of what’s going on and already I know that we’re so screwed.
And to the Baby Boom Central Planners I have one thing to say: thanks a lot assholes.