Could the presidency of the United States be hijacked by a group who’d use the office solely for their own purposes? That’s a question for which the answer is so obvious that it’s actually stupid. The answer is: “Of course!”
That’s been the main point, at least since the early part of the 20th century, of spending immense amounts of time and money to gain the office. It was really in the 1890s that the U.S. government both started to build a foreign empire, and truly control the domestic economy, first via the Federal Reserve and the income tax (both in 1913), and then with scores of regulatory agencies.
As the government has become ever more powerful, it’s become evermore valuable a prize to gain. So, of course, every sociopath out there can be counted on to try to control the president. Most just aren’t as overt as the ones in “The Manchurian Candidate.” The movie is as appropriate to the times as is “Farenheit 9-11.”
You’ve got to love the characters in the movie – you can easily see Bush, Kerry, Hillary and Rumsfeld among them. You’ll love the political speeches, where various blow-dried pols mouth vacuous and meaningless platitudes while the morons supporting them scream mindlessly, just like in a real election. You’ll love the vicious and corrupt federal agents engaging in all manner of fraud and cover-ups, just like in real life. But the scariest depiction of all concerns the U.S. military.
For some reason, the U.S. military are now viewed as icons of American virtue. They’ve been transformed in the public eye from the drugged-up, psycho baby-killers they were alleged to be during the Vietnam era, to sincere and bright-eyed paragons of youth, so sincere they could be cast in one of those old Soviet socialist realism posters. Of course, neither view is accurate, but what’s interesting is how perceptions change while the actual reality remains fairly constant.
So I think it’s worthwhile to look at soldiers, and heroism, since both Bush and Kerry (well, especially Kerry) are running on their military records. As if that had anything to do with whether either is a decent human being, or either is qualified to control the lives of 300 million other people.
The “Manchurian Candidate” depicts a character who was awarded an (undeserved) Medal of Honor in Kuwait, and effectively used it as leverage to get into politics. For some reason, Americans currently seem to believe that someone who has “served his country” in the military is, for that reason alone, a cut above his peers. It’s a stupid idea to start with. Hitler and Mussolini were both bona fide war heroes.
Is it that people believe that military training makes a better human being? That notion probably got started in ancient days. As the Chinese say: “Good steel is not used to make nails. And good men are not used to make soldiers.” Then, as now, the enlisted ranks have always been the dregs of society, suitable mainly for use as cannon fodder. But there’s little doubt that a measure of training and discipline will improve on the raw material. So, of course, the army has historically been a good thing for the type of people who’ve belonged to it – as long as they emerged in one piece.
But for a normal, middle-class person, the military is, and has always been, basically a degrading experience and organized harassment – a waste of time, at best. Learning to fight and kill isn’t ennobling, it’s debasing – it certainly isn’t a desirable characteristic in a leader. It’s not that I don’t think some people need killing … of course they do. But it’s ignoble not to do it yourself if you’re of that opinion. And worse to do it for others who don’t have the necessary courage or ability.
In any event, if fighting ability and courage are measures, I know a number of competent bar-room fighters who are a lot better qualified to run for office than either Bush or Kerry. But Gibbon was right when he said that any order of men inured to slavery and violence make for very poor guardians of a civil constitution.
In fact, the sanctimonious idea that soldiers “serve their country” any more than any other class of workers is fatuous. In the first place, soldiers serve their government, not their country. The purpose of their training is to get them to follow orders, regardless of their personal views on a situation. Like trained dogs, they’re expected to do as they’re told, without regard to risk or moral distinctions.
Right now, they’re thoughtlessly killing Iraqis and Afghans because they’ve been told people defending their country against invaders are “terrorists.” Good soldiers – especially Marines – are, in effect, brainwashed. The fact they’ll go to any place on earth and kill the natives says nothing about “serving their country” under the guise of “defending freedom”; it mostly speaks to the fact that they’ll do what they’re told, to whom they’re told, by any scumbag who might outrank him. Tomorrow they could be doing it here, to Americans, in the interest of “national security.”
One of the positive fallouts from the Abu Ghraib scandal is that U.S. soldiers are no longer automatically treated as “heroes.” Of course, many soldiers act heroically under certain circumstances. But that’s not by virtue of their being soldiers, but because they’re human beings, and almost all human beings are capable of heroism.
It’s a mistake to characterize everyone in a given occupation as “heroic.” Many soldiers joined for the money, or the adventure, or because they have an aggressive nature, or because they knew they needed the discipline, or just to get away from home. Firemen and rescue workers, for openers, are generally much better candidates for the overused term “hero.”
Personally, I have no more problems with soldiering than with any other occupation that sports a uniform – from security guards, to airline flight attendants, to garbage men. They’re mostly just guys doing a job, although the job necessarily involves maiming people and breaking things. It’s that Boobus americanus has gone from portraying them as the worst of men when they were in Vietnam, to now, somehow, the best of men in Iraq.
One thing is for sure: The fact someone has been in the military shouldn’t be viewed as a positive when they’re running for office, any more than having been a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker acts as a qualifier. The fact the average American apparently thinks so simply indicates he’s going to get what he deserves this November.
A second movie to catch – and with a theme not unrelated to “The Manchurian Candidate” – is “Collateral”, superbly acted by both Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. Cruise plays a hitman who’s gravitated into the private sector after learning his trade in the process of “serving his country.”
The Cruise character is to be admired for his professionalism, coolness, good humor and skill. Foxx asks him “How can you kill people you don’t even know?” and Cruise responds, “You think it’s better if I just kill people that I know?”
