What are we fighting for?
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Went to see Jarhead last night with DC. What an amazing movie. Totally unexpected...a breath of fresh air - forget Saving Private Ryan, The Patriot, or any of the traditional American glorification of war movies. I don't want to give it away, so let's just say, go see it. It's just right...somewhere in the middle between Michael Moore and George W. Bush.
I vote for George himself to be the greatest magician of all time. David Blaine? Copperfield? Forget walking on air and not eating while suspended in a PlexiGlas box for a month...
Who else could convince a nation to back him up on a war so conveniently timed to coincide with the need to protect the US oil interests? Who else could convince (less than) half of a nation of 300 million people to vote him into office? Who could convince hundreds of thousands of troops to leave their families, risk their lives, and give up everything to fight in a fictional war while he drank Diet Coke and played golf and rode bikes with Lance Armstrong? And his most puzzling trick of all time...convincing the American population that there are bigger threats to them than himself - a man "elected" to lead "the most powerful country in the world" but who convinced Yale to accept him based on his father's credentials, who doesn't know his right from left, and who has mangled the true meaning of the words freedom, peace, and democracy for our children's generation and generations to come.
Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer concern the Great Powers alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by wind and water and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war - or war will put an end to mankind.
- John F. Kennedy
posted by jessica @ 9:31 PM
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