Chapter Seven

I told you so!

John St. John
 

It is generally conceded that the Vietnam War was a disaster from start to
finish. The fact that an architect of that war was a Harvard graduate and a
professor who received the Nobel Peace Prize has not been evaluated. Even
today the good professor gives advice that is solemnly listened to. I am not
going to waste time rehashing an event that must go into our history as
another mindless adventure. If the results of that war were not affecting
our national goals today I would be happy to forget it. My position is that
we are a nation of blunderers. We are still going into situations where not
only "angels fear to tread" but that would give the devil a heart attack.

In order to illustrate this I offer an extract from an article by Brigid
Schulte of the knight Ridder News Service . . . "Clearly, Somalia has had an
impact. It caused all of us to go back to the drawing board." Gen. John
Shalikashvilli, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters
recently . . . "We were enormously naive" said a defense Department
official, "The lesson we clearly learned in that certain rudiments of
nationhood have to be in place if we are going to expect to put a government
back on its feet and leave. Somalia was media-influenced, naively
underestimated and good intentioned. But isn"t that what paves the way to
hell?" . . . "What we have learned other than when the going gets tough, we
get the hell out?" said Lawrence Korb, a Reagan administration official now
at the Brookings Institution.

The perception that the United States is weak-kneed and will turn tail and
run if a handful of soldiers are killed gives military leaders pause. "It
bothers not only me, but others in uniform and other nations, as well, as
they judge what participation from the United States might mean,
"Shalikashvili said."

No one will admit today that the Vietnam war was an illegal aggressive war
as defined by the United Nations Charter. This was what caused the populace
to revolt at the sight of American soldiers giving their lives in any
quixotic adventure. The problem is that our leadership does not think, but
merely knee jerks to a popular will influenced by the media and defense
contractors. The difference between Vietnam and Somalia or Bosnia is
evident. Vietnam was fomented by our military industrial complex as a
weapons testing ground. Somalia and Bosnia represent legitimate use of force
to stabilize an increasingly anarchic world. For the most powerfully armed
country in history, these disputes are tempests in a teapot. Why do we test
the water so daintily? . . . Could it be that the C.I.A. a seventy billion
dollar a year intelligence agency does not even know what its own agents are
doing let alone what Abib is doing in Somalia and what the situation in
Bosnia is? Is it possible that our soldiers are so loaded down with
equipment (to keep from laying off defense workers) that they can hardly move?

Since the Cold War, thinking has been verboten. Listening to the glib
talking heads on television is no substitute for thinking. Someone has to
stand up and say "Good God! dummy . . . use your f...... head!

Anyone who says there is not a crisis in health care should be carted off to
a mental institution. It was a seven-hundred-billion dollar a year gorilla
in 1994, and will be a trillion dollar business by the end of the
millennium. There are all kinds of solutions out there, but any solution
that does not eliminate the insurance industry from health care just won't
work. This is only common sense. Winston Churchill said: “Americans will do
the right thing . . . after they have used up every other alternative.” We
reject socialized medicine even though every other industrialized country
has it. It is 40% less expensive than what we have now. In order to
eliminate the enormous cost of medical care due to the AMA and the
pharaceutical corporations to Medicare we have given the industry over to
the corporation HMOs. The argument against socialized medicine was that it
took away our right to choose our own doctor. Under the HMO’s the doctors
have become employees and the right to choose is history.

With our experience with the Volstead Acts prohibition of alcohol, and the
admission of everyone that the war on drugs is lost, how long will it take
to legalize narcotics? I am not just standing up for the right of anyone who
wants to do to his own body what he will, but pointing out that our present
course in this area is hopeless. The "war on crime" is another stumble and
grope proposition. It has turned the dope industry into a trillion dollar a
year business . . . bigger than auto and steel. It is packing our
penitentiaries and the corporations are going into the penitentiary business
as Wakenhut takes over. The war on crime is beginning to look like a plan to
militarize our police forces.

Putting carts before horses has been our approach to the welfare problem.
First they will cut out welfare . . . then they will find jobs to make these
people self-supporting. Turn it around. First find the jobs, and the rest
will take care of itself. Do we have any money? We have more than enough
money to turn the world into a gigantic Disneyland. Money is made by
technology . . . money is technology. The early Townsend Plan that was
considered so radical in the thirties would be laughed at today. Social
Security makes it look like a pittance. How come? We have more money today
because we have more technology. We have so much money today that we can pay
the interest on a four trillion dollar dollar national debt, and pay a
baseball player ten million dollars a year . . . Where does it go? That
which is social(taken from the taxpayer) is used to pay for medical services
that are inflated by the jungle, and to bail out savings and loans that
should have had no connection with government. It is given as foreign aid to
benefit the arms industry, subsidize the tobacco industry, and support an
un-needed military industrial complex that should not be a complex at all.
If one fifth of the wasted money was spent on social welfare our national
security would be inviolable.

What is technology? Technology is a labor saving device. Then why is the
work week still forty hours? Why must unemployment doom us to sleep on the
streets? More technology is coming along and Clinton must find more jobs.
People are working longer hours with more overtime, and both husband and
wife have to work to realize the standard of living that their television
tells them they must have. Technology does not mean that we need to find a
job. Technology means that we now have leisure to enjoy life . . . but we do
not. Why do we have to keep on killing buffalo when we have enough meat for
the winter? Why? . . . why? . . . why? Could it be because we do not think?
Or could it be because the corporation stock-market casino must continue to
go through the roof.?

The onset of the "Cold War" was presaged by an attack on those who think.
Thinking has become a lost art. Do the universities have a course in
non-thinking? Of course they do . . It is anthropology. M.I.T.'s Department
of Anthropology and Philosophy combines two widely disparate disciplines. It
should be called the Department of "Don't Think." Anthropology under Boas
discarded theory. Philosophy is all theory. What brought these two together?
Like Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew" it was a marriage born in hell.

I realize the dangers of telling a dummy that he is a dummy. This
predilection has been the curse of my life. It never raised anyone
consciousness. It is a failure. Telling the stupid to wake up is like
telling a tree to dance the tango. It does not say a lot for my intelligence
either. Why can I not just smile and nod as one would to a child? Why don't
I just write a novel about the violence in my life? The sex . . . maybe
expose some of my secret perversions to the world and get rich.

Everyone knows that the universities developed agent orange . . . that they
performed experiments on unsuspecting Americans. Thast they sat on their
behinds while the Hanover pollution poisoned the northwest with
radioactivity. Why is it so hard to believe that they mind-fucked everyone?
None of these atrocities could have taken place had the American people been
properly educated. American universities are minor league football clubs
organized to provide meat for the professional teams. They are taxpayer
funded R and D for chemical companies and drug manufacturers, and the
sellers of armaments to the world. Do you think that their social sciences
also might be flawed? . . . If you do you are beginning to see the light.

The quest for understanding begins at the top. The young rebels who raised
hell with the universities during the Vietnam war are now running the
country. Have they been given a lobotomy too?

If you think I am concerned with anthropology, or with a left-wing attack on
the defense industry, think again! . . . The topic is stupidity.
Wide-spread, rampant, universal, destruction of God's gift to humanity
(intelligence), and organized, calibrated, pervasive glorification of the
very dumb is my subject. My poor factory-worker father predicted that I
would become a millionaire. When I asked him what caused him to get this
idea? He said "The only people I know are poor . . . and you aren't like
anybody I ever met." How was my poor father to know that in the coming years
more money could be made by moon-walking with one hand on your crotch, than
by the president of General Motors.

IT IS THE CORPORATIONS . . . STUPID!