Tell Me: Who Let the Dogs of War Out?
Nicholas Johnson
The Gazette, August 26, 2018, p. D3
Most Americans and their elected representatives take “ain’t going to study war no more” to heart. They’re neither studying nor upset by war.
Put aside the inability to rationalize continuous wars of choice, personnel in 150 countries, the human slaughter and misery, devastated cities, death and lifelong injury to our troops. Just “follow the money.” When military-related costs exceed a trillion dollars a year, and are put on our grandchildren’s credit card, maybe it’s time to get back to studying war. [Photo credit: By DVIDSHUB - Operation Unified Response - CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22430525]
Conservatives care about constitutional “original intent.” Liberals care about sacrificed infrastructure, education, healthcare and other needs. Both should care why the founders gave Congress power “to declare war.”
The founders knew burdens of wars fall heaviest upon the people, those who fight and pay for wars. They explicitly rejected giving a president the unchecked power to start wars claimed by kings. They wanted the branch most responsive to the people to declare war. [Photo credit: Foreign Policy, WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/Getty Images]
As the Constitutional Convention Record reports, “Mr. [George] Mason … was for clogging rather than facilitating war.” James Madison later contributed, “No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Pay-as-you-go war meant increased taxes. World War II rationing meant little or no gas and tires for cars or bubblegum for kids. The draft impacted even small towns during the Viet Nam war. Without the draft we might still be there. [Photo credit: Ames Historical Society]
Not only was there no rationing during post-9/11 wars, our president told us to “go shopping.” No burden of increased war taxes. No young marching protesters, fearful of being drafted. Sacrifice fell only upon those 0.4 percent of Americans fighting the wars.
After 9/11, given the lack of public protest the founders forecast, Congress became more complacent and compliant about executive encroachment on Congress’ war powers.
(1) In 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex. Its grip only tightened as legislators became ever more entangled with their districts’ military bases and generous weapons manufacturers.
(2) For-profit private prisons create political support for longer sentences. Similarly, political support for longer wars results when for-profit contractors’ battlefield employees outnumber the military.
(3) The old Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have competitors. The CIA, once an intelligence agency, now has its own military arm. Both CIA and Special Operations, like Delta Force or SEAL Team 6, are outside the conventional chain of command and thorough congressional oversight.
These factors contribute to President Donald Trump’s signing a $717 billion Defense Department authorization bill. Like the banks’ insistence they are “too big to fail,” the DOD is “too big to audit.” Trillions can’t be traced. Add $200 billion for Department of Veterans Affairs, war’s share of $300 billion yearly interest on the national debt, billions for Department of Energy’s nukes, other military-related expenses and the total’s well over a trillion dollars.
Whose fault is this?
Those who wrote the Constitution assumed “we the people” – not the president, Congress, or judges – would tightly leash and not let slip the dogs of war. In response to the people’s sacrifice, their paying the human and financial costs of war, they would speak up, protest, organize and otherwise clog the path to war.
War hawks and weapons makers understand they must eliminate war’s impact on we the people if they are to continue their profits from perpetual war.
However, they have not eliminated our founders’ hope, nor our responsibility to honor their hope that we will fulfill our responsibility to resist.
As Edward R. Murrow closed his documentary about Senator Joseph McCarthy, “We cannot escape responsibility for the result. … Cassius was right. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.”
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Nicholas Johnson, as U.S. Maritime Administrator, was involved with military sealift to Vietnam. www.nicholasjohnson.org Comments: mailbox@nicholasjohnson.org
Columns of Democracy (2018)
For those interested in more on this topic and others, Nicholas Johnson's latest book, Columns of Democracy (2018), is now available from Amazon, https://tinyurl.com/yama2h3b (scroll to "Books by Nicholas Johnson," click on "Paperback," for "Sort by" select "Publication Date"), Barnes & Noble, https://tinyurl.com/ybjwxuuh (scroll down), Lulu Press, https://tinyurl.com/yd8g47de, and all Iowa City bookstores requesting copies from the author, mailbox@nicholasjohnson.org.
May 10, 2012, 8:15 a.m.
Who, What, Threatens "The Institution of Marriage"?
Two days ago this blog addressed the basic human decency and respect owed everyone with regard to those suffering from problems of overweight and obesity. "Speaking of Obesity."
Today [May 8], following on the culmination of President Obama's "evolving" thoughts on gay marriage, here are the long-ago-evolved thoughts of another heterosexual about the basic human decency and respect owed all of our fellow humans in the GLBT community.
Last evening PBS' Newshour, as a part of its coverage of the president's "personal" position on the issue, included a debate of sorts in its story "Obama Supports Same-Sex Marriage: Now What?" (with transcript and video). Judy Woodruff hosted the segment, interviewing author Kerry Eleveld, and then questioning Evan Wolfson, president and founder of Freedom to Marry, and the Rev. Harry Jackson (not the Rev. Jesse Jackson), senior pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland, and presiding bishop of the International Communion of Evangelical Churches -- an outspoken opponent of gay marriage.
Unfortunately, the two did not really join issue. Wolfson hammered away on his assertion (kind of self-evident on the surface) that individual straight couples suffer no harm as a result of the marriage of gay couples ("you're not able to point to a single, actual, real consequence"). Rev. Jackson was saying, "It [gay marriage] may change the institution [of marriage], though. That's the issue."
My point is that, with regard to "the institution of marriage" both are right. How can I say that?
There are many issues involving gay marriage. (1) Central, I think, given the role of religion in the arguments of many gay marriage opponents, is the fact that the legalization of gay marriage has no effect, none, on the ability of any given religious organization to refuse to perform, or recognize, gay marriage. There are two parallel tracks here: what the state can (and many, including myself, would argue, constitutionally must do) and what individual religious organizations can do with regard to "marriage." There is a significant body of constitutional law declaring, put most simplistically, that the state should stay out of our bedrooms. (2) However, the president and Mitt Romney both agree that states should be free to define civil (not religious) "marriage" as limited to a man and a woman -- and 30 states have decided to do just that (including North Carolina this week). (3) At the same time, polls seem to indicate that 50% of Americans, give or take, and especially younger persons, are totally untroubled by the idea.
I leave discussion of those, and other gay marriage issues, to another day.
What I want to address are Rev. Jackson's assertions regarding the changes in "the institution of marriage" brought about by permitting gays and lesbians to marry.
I think he's right. Gay marriage does change "the institution of marriage." It's just that the change it brings about is insignificant compared with other changes.
Title IX has changed "the institution of college athletics." Prohibitions on "sexual harassment" have changed "the institution of courtship."
The real and very, very significant changes in "the institution of marriage," however, have come from the heterosexual, not the homosexual, community.
At its inception, marriage in a patriarchal society treated women as chattels, "owned" (and certainly controlled) by their husbands (as they still are in some countries today). Children born of unmarried parents created a significant problem for a community. There were more than moral reasons to prohibit sex outside of marriage (still punished by death, at least of the woman, in some countries today). Children were necessary for the perpetuation of the species. (As late as 1600 the world's population was about 500 million, compared with today's 7, and soon to be 9, billion. World Population Estimates, Wikipedia.org.) As recently as the 19th and early 20th Century children were needed to do their share of the unending work involved in a married couple's operation of a farm. Infant mortality rates were such that a couple needed many births to be assured of enough survivors. Divorce was theoretically possible, but thoroughly discouraged socially, legally -- and economically (given the many ways in which women were oppressed, and economically dependent upon their husbands).
That "institution of marriage" has certainly changed.
Today's (at least potential) economic and other independence of women, coupled with multiple forms of birth control, means that their sexuality no longer either requires, nor is restrained by, marriage. (E.g., when I entered law school in 1956 there were but two women among the 700 or so students; today's UI Law School entering classes are roughly 50% women.) Access to abortion, an abhorrence to many Americans and unavailable in most of geographic America (of 3100-plus counties in the U.S., among non-metropolitan counties only 3% offer access to abortion) is another major change. There are good reasons for being married, and monogamous within marriage; but today those reasons are more self-discovered and lived by as a matter of choice than externally imposed. This has been an enormous "change in the institution of marriage" for both heterosexual men as well as women (as we are reminded daily by the media).
Divorce rates are up, in part, because (at least many) women are not economically compelled to stay in "bad marriages" (sometimes including domestic violence). Most people would consider that a net plus for society. But it also makes divorce possible for somewhat more frivolous reasons. In any case, the easier access to the termination of marriage has to have been the cause of significant "change in the institution of marriage."
Procreation is no longer a societal necessity, either to tame Planet Earth or to have access to an adequate workforce on the farm. Indeed, one of our species' most urgent needs is to curtail births, not increase them. We seem to be approaching (if not exceeding) the maximum number of humans our Planet can sustain. Infant mortality rates, still too high in many countries, are radically below what they were. Super-sized farms and farm equipment have reduced the farm population from roughly 80% of all Americans in 1800 to 3% today.
So, is Rev. Jackson correct? Yes, the legalization of gay marriage is "a change in the institution of marriage."
But to truly understand these changes, and keep them in perspective, we need to recall the observations of Edward R. Murrow and Walt Kelly.
In explaining the Senator Joseph McCarthy anti-communist phenomenon, Murrow concluded his famous "See It Now" McCarthy program with the line from Shakespeare, "'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.'" "Edward R. Morrow," En*Cyclopedia, State Library of North Carolina; the quote is from Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene ii.
Walt Kelly, creator of the "Pogo" comic strip, is perhaps best remembered for his comparable line regarding environmental degradation on a 1971 Earth Day poster: "we have met the enemy and he is us." "Pogo (comics)," Wikipedia.
If Rev. Jackson, and other heterosexuals, are fearful of any "changes in the institution of marriage," and feel the necessity of a "Defense of Marriage Act," they should begin with a good long look in the mirror. It is not the gays they need fear, but themselves.
Rush Limbaugh, May 9, 2012
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