No Exit—from the Not-So-Great Depression
by Charles Potts
No Exit is the title of one book by Jean Paul Sartre, a French writer, communist and co-father of Existentialism that I’ve never been able to read, even though I have always admired the fact that he thumbed his nose at the Nobel Prize for Literature saying something like, “I don’t accept prizes, whether the Nobel or a sack of potatoes.” The Nobel Prize for Literature, as you’ve probably heard, is passed out by a pack of gunpowder academics from the net proceeds of the fortune of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, by confusing politics with literature. Each year they make some kind of difficult-to-decipher gesture toward one or another enclave in the Third World. They haven’t given one to an American for a long time—trying to snub the Empire, I suppose. Who knows what all they read on their way to spurious decisions.
To give you an example of how far into the mire language has fallen, I’m under the impression the Swedes delegated the awarding of the Peace Prize to the Norwegians, and as an old Swedish girlfriend of mine used to say, “He ain’t Norwegian” when she wanted to insult somebody, the way dweebs from Eastern Montana make fun of the hapless denizens of North Dakota. I mean, they gave the Peace Prize to the Boy Scout from Chicago and he had to pick it up the very week he announced he was sending an additional 30,000 troops to win the war in Afghanistan at a cost of $30,000,000,000, i.e. thirty billion dollars. I hope the unemployed are sitting down for this but my honorary degree in rocket science suggests that it is impossible to win a colonial war when it costs the Empire A MILLION dollars per soldier to put a pair of boots, as the talking heads put it, on the ground. Even if they were taking gold out of Afghanistan by the trainload, colonial war is a losing proposition. And there is nothing else there to “win” either. The last time I can remember that the Peace Prize went to such a warmonger was when the great war criminal Henry Kissinger accepted it, on behalf of the scut work he did for the scoundrel Richard Nixon in the Empire’s war on Vietnam. Americans have forgotten their own colonial history, if they ever knew it. Back in the day, early 1600s, with the importation of some good tobacco from the Orinoco River in South America, Virginia became the drug producing capital of the new world. Fortunes were made. Now the Empire has the effrontery to try to wipe out the opium producers in Afghanistan.
Colonial War in all its many disguises is one of the primary reasons why there is No Exit from the not-so-great depression. To give the Tea Party sympathizers among the audience an example they can get their red meat teeth into, the Cheney-Bush Administration started and lost three unnecessary wars simultaneously while bankrupting the Treasury and blowing a hole in the world economy that likely won’t get re-filled in the length of an ordinary lifetime. And Republicans wonder why they are out of office.
To take their undeclared wars one at a time… (By the way, this civilization declared war in 1941, two years before your author was born, and has never declared peace. We have war as a way of life, described in the political literature as “Peace and Prosperity,” going down in history as a violent parody of standards even double-talk can’t reach.) In their post 9-11 mind set in concrete, they launched the aforementioned War on Afghanistan, allegedly because the perpetrators of 9-11, mostly Saudi Arabians and Egyptians, once trained there. It was described by that half-an-asshole semi-Colon Powell as asymmetrical warfare, overlooking the fact that the asymmetry was provided by the Empire, when a handful of special ops could have taken out the survivors of the plot for chump change. At least that’s the way Eisenhower’s CIA used to do it during the “Peace and Prosperity”-driven 1950s. Discontent with starting a war they couldn’t finish much less win led them on to the War on Iraq, a regime changer if there ever was one, to depose a war criminal satrap the Empire had set up years before, one Saddam Hussein by name, who never made the slightest dent in his long war against Iran, even with the Rumsfeld-provided poison gas.
Lying their way into war is the modus operandi of the Empire, now in need of a theme. Voila! A War on Terrorism. A war on abstract nouns is the perfect setup for the Empire. The enemy can’t be found, so Osama bin Laden is still at large, generating funds for both sides. The siege mentality of the Paranoid Christian Fascists has them fighting Islamo-Fascists and the Fascists are winning. For every terrorist killed three new ones are created, an endless supply for an endless war, in an Empire presided over by endless fruitcakes. The Empire has 16 separate spy agencies, all gathering information and hoarding it from one another, much less the people on whose behalf it is purportedly gathered. If you have a secret and somebody else wants to discover it, that somebody else becomes pro forma an enemy. The interlocution of paranoia; the structure of political madness.
The algorithm for the end of empires has three integrals and derivatives. How fast the leaders burn through their assets, chief of which is the support of their populations; the size of the asset base; and the quality and focus of the opposition. Costs of empire are borne by the entire population while the benefits accrue to the very few with inside jobs: no-bid contractors who milk the sacred American cow. In other words, the calculus of empire and colonial war is an exercise in socializing the costs—socialized war, anyone?—while privatizing the benefits. This best of both worlds is a dream scheme for plutocrats and a nightmare for everybody else. An Alice in Wonderland foreign policy presided over by the presidency, no matter who holds the office, presages an epic disaster.
If you haven’t dropped out yet, it’s probably time.
Charles Potts: wikipedia
Previous work by Charles Potts in Arthur…
“The Recession and How to Live Through It” (Jan 2009)
Poem in Arthur No. 5 (special “Arthur Against Empire” issue)
Charles Potts & SUNN 0))) at ArthurFest 2005 – video footage