Military Industrialist Capitalism and the 1,000 Yard Stare

Does anybody remember the famous picture from Word War Two—"The Thousand Yard Stare?" It always reminded me of the way the rich treat the poor. It's the latter, of course, who always pay the price of being rich; no, I didn't say get rich—I said pay the price. This "Thousand Yard Stare" is from our country's latest Little Big Horn, Iraq. Another kid paying the price of somebody else's riches. That's the fundamental meaning of "capitalism," let's not forget.

For an example, and just by way of reminder, here's something from Jim Hightower's site, www.Alternet.org

"'Since leaving Halliburton to become George Bush's vice-president, I've severed all of my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind.' --Former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, September 2003."

Since 2001, on the other hand, this is what Halliburton has paid Mr. Cheney.

2001: $205,298

2002: $162,392

2003: $178,437

2004: $194,852

2005: $211,465

Halliburton's "cash bonus" paid to Vice-President Cheney just before he took office was $1.4 million. His "retirement package," given to him in 2000 (after FIVE years as CEO was $20 million. According to Slate magazine, President George W. Bush has a net worth of around nine to twenty-six million.

We might recall that during the Vietnam War, Mr. Cheney asked for and got five deferments, the better to assure that he would never have that "thousand yard stare." President Bush, scion of a multi-millionaire family, of course, ducked the war by learning to fly jets for the Texas National Guard. No danger of the "stare" for him, either.

As FoxNews Bill O'Reilly is wont to say, "If you're poor, you're gonna get hammered."

And, when somebody threatens the rich and what they live for, you'll get a uniform, and a rifle; and, soon thereafter, probably, that "thousand yard stare." The following, by request from two guys named "Don and Carl in Iraq," is a reprise of my essay of Sept. 16, 2005. I like it, too, because it deals with yet another of “America’s” myths:

"Poverty as Viewed by the United States"

"In the movie, “The Mask of Zorro,” Anthony Hopkins, in the role of Diego de la Vega, the old Zorro, is instructing the new Zorro, Antonio Banderas, concerning a party they will attend in disguise. Raphael Montero, the story’s villain, will not recognize his old enemy de la Vega, Hopkins, says, because a member of the Spanish nobility 'would never look directly at a servant.'

"A few months ago, I happened during a trip to read the 'Letters to the Editor' section of the San Angelo, Texas newspaper. A lady wrote indignantly that the poor in the United States had, “house, cars, even televisions sets.” Poverty in the United States, she said, was different from poverty elsewhere. A couple of days ago, referring to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, another American Hidalgo, this one a columnist, expressed the same opinion. It frankly fascinates me.

"You see, it is like so many other things in our benighted nation. We live – evidently (and I mean the evidence is, not that this is a mere figment of imagination) – in a state of virtual reality. For nearly ten years, the victim of IRS and mercilessly relentless federal government criminality, I was one of those poor our ivory tower talks about. I lived off the wilderness, often digging squaw root and other tuberous plants for food. I hunted and fished, planted gardens on public lands and in forests. I also walked into pizza parlors, to avail myself of the tables’ left-over slices of pizza. I gleaned coins in the parking lots of the malls, where the wealthy people lose carelessly enough money to provide someone like I was a meal.

"I did not have a television set. I did not have a car (I walked or rode a bicycle everywhere I went). I lived either in a tent or an old RV (1971 Ford), a gift from a friend.

"And I lived among the nation’s poor. There, I met engineers, lawyers, a doctor of medicine, an aerospace technician (Ph.D. degreed), farmers, auto mechanics, several ex-professional athletes (one who once made more than a million dollars a year), and one ex-showgirl. I met, and occasionally cared for, dozens of children. Several stray dogs, too. None had a television set, none a car, none a roof to sleep under. All were primarily concerned with their next meal.

"Oh, I also met a lot of drunks, alcoholics who simply couldn’t save themselves from the “couple of quarts” they desperately needed. I met druggies, too, pushers and pimps, a few outright thieves. I met dozens of people just out of jail, people who knew damned well there was no way to get by outside of crime. I knew what they meant. Having been pretty pissed off, I was very, very close to crime a number of times myself.

"I discussed the ethics of poverty a number of times, with some very bright people. All poor. When you can’t get an honest job, it’s a crime not to have housing, and the only way to get money is to find or steal it, ethics takes on a whole new meaning.

"I also discussed poverty with capitalism’s ivory tower. And the rich (not always the same people). When you have three cars, live in a house with six bedrooms, vacation in San Moritz, and jet to San Francisco from Texas in order to have fresh lobster, ethics also has another meaning. When you’ve commissioned the construction of your own $17,000,000,000 island (built by dredging up the ocean floor) in the Philippines or off the coast of Dubai (in the shape of a palm tree, no less, so everyone can have ocean-front property), and your income is $1,000 a second, ethics has still another meaning. In fact, you need to have few ethics at all. “Poor” doesn’t really have a meaning. You don’t see it, because you never have. You’ve never looked.

"One of the conversations I had with the rich was with a retired Air Force officer, a graduate of West Point. Another, almost identical in topic to the one I had with the officer, was with the owner of a National Basketball Association franchise. Drawn out on the subject of whether I could steal a million dollars and get away with it, I gave each of the men ten ways to succeed. Both professed astonishment, but agreed that I was right. I could get out of poverty, and be a millionaire, in less than a year. I would only have to pay what every other rich man pays. It goes without saying that, for me, the price was too high (it wasn’t for one of the gentlemen, incidentally – he used one of my ideas to “earn” just under six million dollars).

"Ethics is not only a different thing to different people, it varies a great deal with the nature of the test given it.

"Poverty in the U.S. and nearly everywhere else is the natural result of what is now known as capitalism. There isn’t any logical or rational doubt about that, something demonstrable by a simple mental experiment model. If there are twenty people at the table, and one or two eat all the food, the rest eat nothing. The fact of there being only so much food and so many people is an obvious one, too. That’s when the table is just a table; when it’s a planet, the obvious may not be so obvious, but it’s nevertheless an inexorable fact.

"And, of course, the ethics must change. Capitalism was once referred to as the Law of the Jungle, but with riches, ethics becomes a matter of mere justification. The poor must be their own victims, not those of the rich. The rich not only seek comfort for the body, they seek comfort for the mind, too. The legerdemain is simple, easy, a matter of rhetoric alone.

"But they mustn’t look at you. Oh, they can be near you every day, walk by on the street so close you could reach out and touch them. They speak to you, even eat and drink, sometimes, with you. They might even give you something. Money, even.

"But they don’t look at you. Not really. The truth – and reality - might explode in their faces."

I might add here that when I wrote that, several people wrote regarding their own imagined nobility to quote Thomas Jefferson. “There is a natural aristocracy among men,” they asserted defiantly, “the grounds of which are virtue and talent.”

Interesting, isn’t it, that none of these folks remembered that the 3rd President of the United States was chronically in debt, and, in fact, died in debt. This was, mind you, the same man about whom another U.S. President, John Kennedy, once said to a group of Nobel Prize laureates, "This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

My detractors – for the obvious reasons, not caring - wouldn’t know, either, that Jefferson was described by a contemporary as “. . . a gentleman of thirty-two who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin.” Thomas Jefferson also was able to read and speak a number of languages, including Arabic and Gaelic.

For all his legendary genius and the tremendous contribution he made to his country and mankind, Jefferson was not a capitalist success, at least not in the minds of the people of whom he once remarked, “Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” It was also Thomas Jefferson who said, "Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; I can think of no milder term to apply to the general prey of the rich on the poor." The readers who choose to justify their attitude toward the poor with the words of our 3rd President would have gotten little support from him in that, it seems. It was Jefferson, after all, who said in his valedictory that he was proud to leave office no better off financially than when he acceded to it.

Having been both the capitalist's idea of success and failure, I always stop for a moment when confronted by a member of that particular religion to reflect on the shallowness of thought it betrays. The idea that people’s capitalistic success is indicative of their great worth as people is, in fact, logically absurd – an example of what H.G. Wells once termed “a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and to humbug themselves and one another for the general good.”

Wells, of course, lived long before the advent of today's professional athletes – men who play children’s games for pay – and “earn” millions. The apologist for capitalism must – does, in fact - argue that Thomas Jefferson was a man of less value to society and nation than, say, Kobe Bryant or Shaquille O’Neal. Or Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, Ricky Martin (the only examples someone like me, of course, can think of on the spur of the moment where that particular kind of abject failure is concerned).

There’s more to it, even, than that. The United States may well be in its death throes as a nation—hoist, to paraphrase Shakespeare in Hamlet, on its own petard. The “petard,” of course, is runaway capitalism – the religion of greed.

“Where a man’s treasure is, there will his heart be also,” scripture says. Not many people think further than that. In my book, “Jonatha’s Truth,” Johanna the heroine, notes, “You can never trust a capitalist – everything is for sale.”

“Americans”, nevertheless, never seem to realize that a nation of people who will sell anything cannot endure for long against any kind of serious enemy. You wouldn’t have to think much to see why that is true, especially were you to consider people like Robert Hanssen, the FBI traitor, or Aldrich Ames, the CIA turncoat—or literally thousands more (a recent statistical analysis by a RAND corporation-like federal think-tank suggests that at any given time as many as 30,000 people are selling as many of the nation’s 15,600,000 official secrets to any enemy who will pay for them).

Think about that. Look around you. You don’t relate the staggering amount of pornography—that’s women who will sell themselves for the right amount of money and men who will so use women for pay—with a nation where “everything is for sale?” How about a corporate nation who knowingly and aggressively sold cigarettes? Or alcohol to minors?

Interesting, too, isn’t it, that no one reciting those statistical facts ever notes the explosive growth of the music and entertainment industry, growth almost entirely due corporate willingness to exploit children and their unsophisticated tastes? Need I add the fact of industry literally willing to lay waste the planet and its ecosystem for profit?

Try this: In my book, “Letters to Aaron,” I recall the morning a van (the eight or ten passenger kind) “blew” a stoplight and rammed me as I crossed a street in a protected crosswalk. Hurled sixty-one feet and ten feet into the air by impact, I landed on the street to be hit again by the same van. It left eighty-four feet of skid marks. The aftermath was fascinating, and a warning microcosm of a society in denial, virtual reality created by ideology.


I pause parenthetically to say again, “THINK!”

"An old man (I have gray hair, and wore a jacket – you couldn’t see the muscles) has been hit in a crosswalk by a vehicle that was speeding and ignored a stop light. As he lies on the street, one of the men in the van attacks him viciously, smashing the vehicle’s door into his face, then proceeding to kick him in the stomach several times. Desperately (that’s admitted, I was scared), the old grabs his assailant, pulls him down into the judo hold (one of my own invention). Struggling against the grip that he realizes could break his neck, the assailant punches the old man in the groin several times. What do you think quickly gathering, and gaping, passersby do?

"Well, working at the time on my van, I was on the way to an auto parts story, and dressed in old, dirty clothes. I was also a frequently seen sight in the area, riding my bike and carrying on it groceries in small bags. There is little doubt (I was stopped several times and searched while leaving a nearby H.E.B. grocery) that denizens considered me a bum. The man above me, the one beating hell out of me so far as anyone can see (it’s highly unlikely that any recognized my hold on the man as anything potentially lethal) was well dressed, and had just stepped from a brand new Dodge van."
I pause again, to point out that this next line is also from the story. The line? "So you tell me what happened. It’s your country.”

"Fortunately, an ambulance called by personnel at an auto parts store also nearby arrived in only minutes. In the intervening time, I had pleaded again and again with people standing over my assailant and me to “get the names of witnesses.” No one did. When police arrived at the hospital emergency room where I was taken, I was questioned closely about what I was doing in the area. Days later, when I obtained a police report, I learned that no charges had been filed (as a matter of fact, I also learned that the name of the driver had obviously – for me, that is - been falsified)."This, I wrote in the essay I recited in part at the outset here, describing the van-crosswalk “accident”:

“Uh-uh. When you’re poor, no one looks at you. If Katrina changes that, I’ll be amazed. So should you. No matter what the media and your president tell you, the United States is not only NOT the Land of the Free, it is a nation of hypocrites.”

Realizing that I wrote my essay shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans may also give you pause to think.

There are today in the United States as many as (as with everything here, political and factional interest and ideation result everywhere in equivocation and dispute where the subject is concerned) forty million people who live in poverty or near it. The gulfs between rich and poor grow relentlessly, due far more these days to special legislation bought and paid for by lobbyists for the rich than to any other factor.

The question in these times has no longer to do with whether we will be sold out, or by whom, but to whom. Iraq? Afghanistan? Iran? Mexico? China?

I haven't asked "my" question for a while, so let me ask it again here: why is it that the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are still getting a tiny percentage of the money and assistance otherwise that the people of Baghdad are getting? Why are our own veterans of war, many of whom have been neglected for literally decades, still sucking off the hind tit, while the citizens of Iraq - including the men in their diffident military - get all the best medical care, therapy, and consideration otherwise?

With all the working class wage earners and poor being asked to "stay the course" and all the rest in Iraq and Afghanistan, why is it that government—the military industrial corporations and the like—asks the wealthy and privileged to contribute nothing? Why, specifically, should corporations like Halliburton continue to make staggering profits off the war, while the poor are required to sacrifice themselves and theirs?

WHY? Because as a U.S. Marine General, Smedley Butler, once said, "War is a racket." A capitalist racket.