Friday, July 3, 2015

The relative nature of success or failure


The Salon.com interview with the foreign policy theorist Andrew Bacevitch is well worth reading. It provides an interesting perspective on the last 35 years of waste; wasted lives, wasted trust, and wasted resource. So many things we could have done to address far more critical priorities, for us and the rest of the world. Just wasted.

Seen in the context of enlightened foreign policy this was certainly failure of the first order. Seen in the light of the interests of Big Money, however, it was an unqualified success. Big Oil had its interests protected, for the most part. The Military Industrial Complex had its interests seen to on a scale that one could only describe as the "wet dream" to end all "wet dreams." And the holders of capital in general now find themselves positioned with power, and protection, not seen for quite some time.

And then there is the question of why the American people cannot remember very important events. This is interesting because it also relates to how Americans perceive anything initially, and the ongoing factors that either reinforce those perceptions, or distract from them. And in this Big Money has also had some success.

Between the manipulation of the fear dejour, the creation of unintended booms and busts, and the ever expanding media-marketing, and info-entertainment matrix, what Americans perceive has gotten a lot more complex; a new edged reality seen through the worries of working or not, keeping health and home or not, wondering what meaning even is anymore, let alone whether you might occupy yourself to achieve it; all the while immersed in ever more distracting dreams of what should be desired, or what should be desire to dream, all of which, of course sells one thing or another.

How can we remember? How do we even get to understand what has happened today? Let alone remember it tomorrow.

This is the legacy of insanity that a mutated, formerly mechanistic, economic operating model bestows now that it leaves the mechanistic behind and embraces holistic environments of effect and disbursement. Ever more instantaneous, multi-channeled and re-engineered in a constant state of feed back. We become chameleons then on electric mirrors that are also cameras. This is madness that not even Kafka could have imagined.

Want to have a foreign policy that works towards the best interests of the people who are the grit of the nation who's name it acts under? Change the operating system that turns information into something must be horded by a quite selfish minority. Perhaps then occurrence can be understood and recalled.

"Where is the public outcry for an explanation of how the longest war in American history is on a course to end in failure?"


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