That’s just a funny, little, local story, but Maddow offers up several rather more horrendous examples of wasteful spending, like the creation of “ultra-high-security office space (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities, or SCIF, in bureaucrat-speak) …” in and around Washington, DC, that fills “twenty-two US Capitol Buildings: seventeen million square feet of offices in their three handsome and generously funded new complexes powered up twenty-four hours a day, where an army of nearly one million American professionals spies on the world and the homeland.” It goes on from there, fact after fact, all documented, and the next time you wonder where your taxes are going, I recommend reading this book. You may also want to take an aspirin or a Xantac, or at least a glass of wine before reading this section, to dull the pain.
However, Drift is not just a depressing exposé of money mismanagement. The author takes a long and careful look at how we slipped into this mess, starting with our involvement in Vietnam, where Johnson believed that as long as he didn’t call up the reserves, we weren’t technically at war, so, he felt, the president didn’t need Congress’s approval.
While earlier America went to war with great reluctance, after Vietnam, we seem to have slipped into a new, casual, acquiescent mode that finds us accepting war after war with not much to say about it. Pride in our military has dwindled, along with that “we’re in this together” kind of active, civilian involvement that many of us remember from World War II.
The ensuing years have brought us Ronald Reagan’s occasional forays into armed aggression, like our bumbled invasion of Grenada, or the Iran-Contra mess, followed by the first President Bush’s involvement in the Gulf War and President Clinton’s clever “managing” (i.e. support) of the Bosnian and Croatian battle with the Serbs. And after that, of course, came the 2nd President Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
Most disturbing, perhaps, is Maddow’s look into the actions of our modern intelligence agencies, which are outsourcing a great many of their activities in a way that makes accountability difficult to pin down. In a chapter entitled “An $8 Trillion Fungus Among Us,” she recounts many of the nuclear accidents or near-accidents occasioned by the storage and moving around of our huge stock of nuclear bombs. This tale will keep you up at night, or rather at nights, plural. As she says, if we built it, we own it, and are responsible for it.
Herewith, her closing assessment:
“As the national security state has metastasized, decisions to use force have become painless and slick, almost automatic. The disincentives to war deliberately built into our American system of government – particularly the citizen-soldier, and leaving the power to declare war with Congress instead of the president – [have been worked around]. We ought to see that constitutional inheritance as a national treasure, yet we’ve divested ourselves of it without much of a debate.
“It’s not done and forever, though. We can go back. …If specific decisions in time landed us where we are today, we can unmake those specific decisions. We can walk them back. We could at least start with a to-do list.”
Having spent some 248 pages describing the intricacies of America’s relationship to war (and vice versa), Ms. Maddow offers a list of eight suggestions concerning where to start that walk back. It is worth buying the book just to read them, but even more, to read her assertion that none of this is impossible.
©2012 Julia Sneden for SeniorWomen.com
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