Back in March 2003, we were relentlessly bombarded with one news story after another about how magnificent the Iraq war was going to be. How the “shock and awe” of it all was totally kick-ass and such, and that on top of it all, the Iraqis were going to be eternally grateful to us for our kindly acts of goodwill.
In response, I wrote “The Most Awesomest War Ever” which questioned if the Iraq war should be classified as “totally great” or “totally super great.” Or maybe it was -I grew up in southern California in the 80s- “Gnarly and Rad to the Max.”
Going back and reading that ten-year-old article, I noticed that many of the same rubes who now complain about the government having too much power, were more or less in absolute ecstacy over how much power the government had in 2003:
9:28 pm on March 19, 2013In all this talk of unbounded military might, it is amazing that so few Americans have even considered that a government with such fantastic power may some day prove to be an obstacle to the liberty of the people who like to pretend to control it. Most of this is due to our willingness to buy the farce of a proposition that in a democracy, we are the government. Example: “We are really pounding the hell out of Iraq tonight!” Americans speak in these terms as if we were all members of some giant posse hunting down bandits. I’ve got news for us all. Not only are we not members of the posse, but the sheriff’s got a much bigger gun than all of us, and he don’t much like uppity townsfolk. As far as he’s concerned, our input is neither needed nor desired, but if some of us want to be members of the sheriff’s ceremonial “Junior Posse” that’s fine.
Consequently, America is full of Junior Posse members who think that the fact that politicians submit to elections before taking control of the most powerful military machine in history will somehow keep the sheriff from getting a little too uppity himself. Should he decide that the townsfolk are being “uncooperative,” who’s going to stop him? It sure won’t be the Junior Posse.
