Andrew Bacevich, Requiem for the American Century

This is a basic read from TomDispatch. All that imperialism we didn’t pay attention to until the second Bush brought it into public view is very clearly spelled out here and was helpful to me. There were no comments accepted and I wish there had been. What to do in what is an impossible impasse of endless war is what I’d speak to. I’d say we can’t end war from the consciousness that created it and a sweeping change of basic perception is the only solution. How to pull that massive change off? Bring everyone in the world up from poverty — a sort of UBI for every person in the world. That changes the playing field. Then, a campaign worldwide for kindness. It’s easy to do and keeping it in people’s awareness could be all it would take for the whole tenor of the world to change. Kindness is love in action and love as the playing field would be the realization of our true nature and our ultimate possibility.

“War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin’!” So went the famed Vietnam War-era protest lyrics first sung by the Temptations.

Looked at a certain way, however, like so many Americans, war has been the backdrop of my life. After Pearl Harbor, my father, 35, promptly volunteered for what was then the Army Air Corps; my mother, a cartoonist, would, in her own way, mobilize herself, too; and I would be born in war-time 1944 (on the day, as it happens, of the failed officers’ plot against Adolf Hitler). My father had, by then, returned from duty as operations officer for the 1st Air Commando Group in Burma. (His own commander, Phil Cochran, would be made famous as Flip Corkin in Milton Caniff’s popular comic strip Terry and the Pirates.)

Read more: Andrew Bacevich, Requiem for the American Century | TomDispatch

Reader Interactions

Leave a Comment Cancel reply