Hours of Daylight – Less than yesterday

Stick a fork in me; I’m simply done. Reading about the latest bombing, this time at the resort of Sharm El-Sheik, the whole picture has finally come together for me. Basically I can no longer stop repeating the quote attributed to George Orwell: “It’s not a matter of whether the war is not real, or if it is, victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”

Ok, so i might be late to the party, but i made it. I’m here now.

In the book “1984″ the city is under constant bombardment by an unseen enemy. Surely Orwell used his experiences of the German “buzz bombs” when he created his world. Today the buzz bombs come in the guise of knapsacks and cars packed with explosives that go off unpredictably. We declare we will hunt down those responsible and punish them, but that’s impossible. Those responsible are probably dead, and there remains a limitless number of others standing ready to make the next attack. But even that assumes there is a “us” and “them.” I no longer believe that. I believe now there is only power, and those without power. Like i said, i’m late to the party. Many many people orders of magnitude smarter than i have been saying this in various forms for decades.

Speaking about the late General William Westmoreland on Morning Edition, Stanley Karnow spoke of a General who could not grasp the idea that we were no longer fighting an enemy to whom losses were a factor. Westmoreland believed that if we could only kill enough of the shadowy “enemy” in Vietnam we would win. What he simply could not grasp was all the bombs in the world would not have been sufficient because our enemy had no choice, it was die in combat or die some other way. Vietnam was the turning point for the US. It was our first brush with the next generation of ideological warfare. The men in power, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Communist leaders in North Vietnam, they didn’t care about loses, they only cared about power. And as we all know true power is the ability to make your people believe that, sometimes, 2+2=4 and other times 2+2=5.

But today the masters of spin, of control, those with power, have realized they’ve found perfection in the new shadow enemy. Perfection in the sense that they have found a war which can be continued as long as necessary to drive the cycle of fear and to maintain their positions of power. Do i believe agents of “our” government are building car bombs and sending them into populated areas at quasi-random intervals? Do i believe “our” government knew what was going to happen on September 11th? Well, that’s not really relevant, is it? All that matters to those in power is the war has come to our lands… the terrorists are here. The enemy walks among us. Our government must take whatever steps are necessary to protect us.

The German buzz bombs were a brilliant psychological weapon. The did little actual damage, and probably did more to galvanize the Brit’s resolve against the Germans. But that’s because the population was united against a known enemy. On “The West Wing” CJ Cregg pointed out that people need feel like soldiers in a crisis, not victims, and London was pretty much together at that point.

But change the scene. Remove the highly visible enemy leader. Make him a shadowy figure who remains unseen most of the time. Remove the uniforms and make the soldiers speak an alien language not taught in our schools. Now, throw the buzz bombs at a non-unified population. Make it so everyday things, the little things, randomly become matters of life and death. How can a population feel like soldiers when they can’t find the enemy? But be careful. Too many bombs and maybe a pattern emerges that points to a recognizable source. The population might unite in that case. So, better to keep the bombings spread out and nearly random. And be sure to mix it up. The key is to keep everybody guessing. The goal is not to kill, the goal is keep it all going… all of it… the people in power, the people fighting, the people building the bombs, the people carrying the bombs, the people guessing where the next bomb will be, all of it… all of it!

America is at war with Iran, America has always been at war with Iran.

America is at war with Iraq, America has always been a war with Iraq.

America is at war with Osama Bin-Laden, America has always been at war with Osama Bin-Laden.