Well Really, Are We So Ideologically Bankrupt on Ukraine?

Joe Biden has chosen to pour armaments into Ukraine in response to the Russian buildup of troops on the Ukrainian border. Well, why not? Surely if we arm the Ukraines and supply their flimsy army with weapons against one of the world’s largest military forces, no one will shoot. Obviously, in the face of such a threat the Russians will pack up their military might and go home, tail between legs.

Joe, you are obviously a statesman of rare ability—either that, or a witless politician trying to save face in a time when your political life is fragile, and do it at the expense of others. It is not your children who are at risk, not your cities that will be destroyed and not your blood spilled on the ground. You have chosen this, Joe. If Putin takes up your challenge, as he surely will, you will come down on him personally with the full force of personal financial sanctions, although he holds no foreign bank accounts or assets.

That oughta work out really well as a deterrent.

And so we meander towards a war neither the Russians nor Americans want, because it has become ‘what we do’ over the eight decades since the end of WWII. We did it in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and got our ass handed to us every time. Our mightiest of the mighty military machine slunk out of battleground after battleground, defeated by enemies without either navies or air forces, with nothing but rags around their heads and a determination that they were patriots in their own cause. 246 years ago we felt the same and did the same. Is it possible they are us in a different time-frame?

The quote 'Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results' is attributed to Albert Einstein, although there is controversy over that. Controversial or not, the quote survives in the popular lexicon because it is so painfully and apparently true.

War doesn’t work for us, Joe.

There was a time—and I am old enough to remember that time—when America avoided foreign entanglements. We were dragged into WWI and had war declared against us in WWII, but there was an enormous unwillingness in both cases to adventure our way into war. Henry Ford and Charles Lindberg both represented a large degree of American opinion that Hitler was Europe’s problem. In both wars we entered reluctantly. Our vast oceans protected that island mentality of isolation from much of the world’s more warlike instincts. Until they didn’t.

Yeah, we won WWII—the last of our winnings by mightiest of the mighty military machines, and we finished it off by what may well be the most unselfish and healing move ever made by a nation in the history of the world—the Marshall Plan. Essentially, it rebuilt a destroyed Europe. Ask someone on the street (under thirty) if they ever heard of it—my guess is they haven’t.

But then we changed.

The mightiest nation left standing in the world lost confidence in itself. We got ourselves a CIA to keep us worried and a Pentagon to keep us safe and a war machine made up of Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Boeing and Raytheon to keep us rich. We became fearful of Russia, a WWII ally without whose 25 million casualties we couldn’t have won the war. We even changed the language. Our War Department became the Defense Department. Defense? Against whom? You see, language counts, as George Carlin illustrates.

And who did we choose to defend against? Well Russia, I guess. But we even punted on the language back then, calling it a Cold War. Bring your mittens. I remember school drills, where we cringed under our desks, preparing for a nuclear attack. I also remember at the time hoping that if it happened, it would go off right over my head, so I wouldn’t have to crawl out and find my friends and neighborhood destroyed.

Russia and China, both of them former allies, were communist, so we were told the enemy was communism.

But we didn’t win that Cold War, as Reagan so proudly proclaimed—the wheels merely came off because communism was too incompetent to bring in the crops. What was supposed to be communism (an egalitarian paradise) should have been called incompetentism.

Considering the massive cost of the Cold War to both adversaries, probably the most expensive war ever fought without bombs (but barely), America had to forego revitalizing its industrial base, trading it off to China, where we currently buy it back in plastic replicas. But that’s okay, because it made the rich fabulously richer and only cost us our middle class—who needed them anyway?

But the fear remains, because when you keep people fearful of spooky enemies lurking out there and the possible loss of their job at home, you can get them to do any goddamn thing you want.

So Joe, settle down and act presidential.

The nonsense brewing in Ukraine and Taiwan is not good for the country. It’s not our circus and neither country is our monkey.

I know it’s an almost welcome breather from trying to get Build Back Better back on the rails, but don’t take the bait, Joe. Administration after administration after administration has taken the bait for half a century now. And it’s left us with a fearful Congress that doesn’t trust its members enough to move out of deadlock, a fearful electorate that doesn’t trust Republicans or Democrats to run the country and a universal fearful mindset that can no longer separate truth from lies.

We’re turning into fearful wrecks, Joe, scared of our neighbors, our police, our medical advice and where our normally safe and sane America is headed. Stop this shit and give us leadership. Trust us.

We’ll recognize it if you give it to us.