In Memoriam

By Paul Edwards
August 31, 2018 "Information Clearing House" - 


 The commedia dell’arte mourning of McCain is in full bloom.  In a vulgar orgy of pompous, bathetic praise from Congress and the media, he is being piously canonized.  To counter this shameless obsequy by attacking him for what he actually was would be an exercise in futility, just as the endless ad hominem hatchet jobs on Trump accomplish nothing.

It’s more useful to examine the grisly American disease of which he was a champion and cynosure.  The son and grandson of Admirals, a bred-in-the- bone military man, he flew a fighter in Vietnam.  Shot down--and amazingly not summarily executed--he was held as a POW, and became a lifelong advocate of unlimited use of military force for American world domination.  

Nothing unusual in that.  It is and has been the baseline political credo of all American politicians since Monroe, at least, up to and including Trump, Hillary, Sanders, and Warren.  The surest way to the graveyard for political hopefuls is to be seen or slimed as “soft on defense”.

The fact that actual defense of the country has not been necessary since the War of 1812, and is not now, and that the hoax only exists to suck our national wealth into the War Machine has not been effectively articulated.  The idea, false to its core, that America must spend astronomic sums to “defend” its polity and its people has taken on the character of revealed religion in a country where multitudes believe in angels and Endtimes.

This appropriation of the wealth of the people by the corporate forces of imperial murder has not come suddenly.  Oceans of innocent blood have drenched the world from our military violence since Quincy Adams said of America that “she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy”.

World War II proved to Eisenhower’s Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex the obscene profit to be had from annihilating people, cities, and countries.  Schumpeter defined the War Machine far better than Ike did: “Created by the wars that required it, it now creates the wars it requires.”

Since 1945, America, by then firmly in its grasp, has relentlessly scoured the world behind the gross and cynical lie of defense of freedom, to foment, ignite, and expand the brutal, devastating, shock-and-awe gorefests the War Machine has to have.  That Korea, Vietnam, and the catalog of Middle Eastern horrors the US perpetrated were failures on a cosmic scale except as cash cows for the War Machine has been of little concern to the most somnolent, propagandized, passive public since that of the Third Reich.  These national mass murder atrocities were sold to Americans as defense of our indispensable “homeland” from barbarian, sub-human “others”. Some, such as Al Qaida were, absurdly, our Deep State’s own creations.

It is commonly said and believed that the American public is not at fault for its profound, intractable moral cowardice since War Machine swag has kept them in a combination insane asylum, crack house, and human zoo.  How else could they have lived with the intolerably bitter truth that their country is the serial violator and exterminator, the voracious destroyer, of so many millions of simple, guiltless, victim peoples?

This is where John McCain and his ilk comes in.  Exploiting his bogus and accidental credentials, he became a pitch man for the massive con of American purity and idealism as a front for imperialist greed, and made a career promoting and lionizing the War Machine as it raped the peoples of  earth and robbed Americans blind in pursuit of its cancerous enrichment.

Still, McCain was only a cracked and bent tool.  He was always an effect, a symptom; never a cause.  The real driver of the War Machine is heartless, soulless, predatory Capitalism.  Its credo is exploitation of everything to maximize profit.  In a closed system, competing capital conflicts, collides. Greed eclipses reason and war results.  The greatest capital concentration requires the most terrible military, in which violence displaces conscience.  There never has been, and never can be, Capitalism without war.

Indoctrinated, baffled, saddled with a cesspool Congress and the deeply stupid, vulgarian Trump, centrist Americans, desperate for refuge, rush mindlessly to the new War Party, Democrats eager to use McCain’s $700 billion dollar hogwallow “defense” bill, to insult and provoke China and Russia, and to attack Iran.  Hubris, false bravado, and panic rule; nowhere is there self knowledge and with it, long overdue, sorrow, regret, and shame. 

Karmic retribution--the pitiless hand of Nemesis--is all America deserves.

Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net

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