Last March the White House reported to Congress that the U. S. is engaged in seven wars: in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Yemen and Niger. There is also the war Trump's foreign policy leaders John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, along with Israel, are avidly promoting with Iran, hopefully before the coming elections. Which is why, contrary to the talking heads of cable networks, it's not the scandals, security clearances or collusion with Russia that may determine the outcome of the November elections. The wars are a boon to military contractors and suppliers located in dozens of congressional districts across the country. War creates jobs, creates money.
While it all costs taxpayers trillions its appeal to voters is that it articulates the myth of American greatness and righteousness and is therefore key to the Trump and Republican machine's power to win the November elections after all.
This two-headed myth of American innocence and American righteousness is a "religion" more than half the country follows in spite of the current wars' unspeakable tragic human realities: hundreds of thousands of non-combatants--men, women and children--have died and hundreds more are dying each passing week (more than one hundred last week by suicide bombers in Ghazni, Kabul and Nangahar). Such slaughter has nevertheless come to be thought of as part of the great battle righteous America is waging against the forces of evil.
This false religion prevails even when it savages American soldiers implementing the strategies of Generals that in a dozen years in Afghanistan have added up to nothing. One combat brigade's nine month experience was
"sixty-five soldiers died. Four hundred seventy-seven wounded, 60 percent of those so badly they had to be medically retired for life...included thirty-three single, double or triple amputees." [Directorate S by Steve Cole]
The first task of this Fall's vigorous young candidates for Congress seeking to unsubscribe from the nation's popular war mythology begins with confronting the sorry fact of the politically opportunistic, nearly unanimous, bi-partisan support congresspersons voted supporting the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Each became graveyards of immense slaughter, and while thousands of American soldiers died, millions of Vietnamese and Iraqi people perished. This is the world our new generation of candidates have to change if elected. T. S. Elliot once wrote
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just...
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
Such is the blind visage and practice of American politics that makes the second task for our new generation of candidates, and ours, indispensible: to recover the lost language of moral reflection and prophetic outcry destroyed by both political manipulation and the tepid theologies that are common parlance in today's mainstream faith communities.
Christians, especially, are addicted to comforting doctrines of grace and the magical atonement of Jesus that undermines their own agency and responsibility to directly and personally engage now in the struggle against the nation's growing totalitarianism. De-mything American delusions of grandeur requires explicit treatment and is critical to the outcome of the November elections.
The role of Interfaith and human rights coalitions is crucial. Having together embraced the universal rights of all humankind they can be a new and indispensible third force in the next 12 weeks. In this crisis their moment has come. Sikhs, Buddhists, Democratic Socialists, Muslims, Jews, Quakers, Presbyterians, Catholics et al must help win this Fall's election contest for the new generation of democratically-oriented candidates.
Playwright Jean Giradeau created the role of the "ragpicker" in The Madwoman of Chaillot to explain to her how in the post WW II world all human values had been reduced to selling, to pimpery. If re-written for today's immense crisis the rag picker might say "Madam, the high purpose of God is not to save your sad derriere, but to establish justice."
