Finally, we have ended the charade and let Branding and Marketing have its hegemony in the abode of war. Sure, we’vehad propaganda, pamphlets and the like, but now you can sense a real shift in philosophy. It feels like those formerly Mad Men-style, Madison Avenue types have made it into the smoke-filled rooms where the biggest decisions are made. And, at the head of the table, they’ve decided that masking war to make it palatable for public consumption is just so last generation. No, the marketers have determined that warfare is an actuarial product, a commodity that is limited only by the difference between return and exposure. Moreover, the return doesn’t have to be simply money; we’ve learned that war can bring about impetus, helping people see it your way. Death and destruction boiled down to risk management; it’s a wager on the value of life vs. resources, variable only to P (proximity), π (profit – in its many forms) and P² (popularity). Finally, the means to calculate how many foreign troops it could take to get a dollar reduction on energy costs or a tack-on tax cut to a relief bill.
I came to this conclusion as the term “Lethal Aide” made its way around the Sunday Morning political shows. Besides its obvious oxymoronic leaning, this term seems warmed-over and focused-grouped. One can imagine a group of white male mid-westerners, ranging 18-34, sitting in a sterile room being feddifferent terms like “Death Help” and “Kill Assistance” before, finally, finding the perfect phrase: Lethal Aide. “Yea, I mean…it makes me think…like your also kinda…helping the people you’re shooting at,” one of the focus group members must’vesaid. It’s a softening of the hard reality of war and it is highlighting a grave cowardice that has become all too common in “modern” warfare: the outsourcing of responsibility and blood. As long as another country’s soldiers and people take on the risk of death, there is no need to delve deep into the soul of a nation in order to find a morality and then the will to support it.
Of course, there will always be despots. Even in the sandbox, we dealt with tyrants, but their crimes were petty or ridiculous. They needed the proper turns of fate and resources to grow into the monsters we always knew they could be. Consequently, when the beast comes to maturity, he or she will feast on a people or a country or a world. Free Nations will rush in to condemn and denounce, but do so in the company of their own allied autocracies, hand-in-hand with the “Lesser of Two Evils”.
Strip Clubs are Sad Discos 