Watch Out for Those Pinko-Commies in Camouflage
by Christopher Ketcham
counterpunch.org (April 22 2010)
I got into an e-mail conversation recently with a former CIA officer and
ex-Marine, who, in horror at the Obama administration, went into a Tea
Partyist fit denouncing the “communists, socialists, wealth redistribution
folks, Democrats in Congress”. This was not his usual lucid style (he has
helped me as a source on several stories), and he seemed to have
momentarily lost his mind in considering the matter, or, at least, that
part of the mind wherein a cold assessment of facts might operate. I wrote
him back: “Where are these communist/socialist/wealth-redistribution
folks? I see none of their ilk anywhere in Congress.” He never replied.
Perhaps that’s because the “right-wing” types such as my good pal refuse
to recognize – or perhaps recognize all too well, and therefore don’t want
to talk about it – that whenever wealth needs to be redistributed for the
benefit of corporate personhood, our Congress goose-steps to the line.
It’s “socialism” for the rich, the powerful, the influential, those able
to marshal cash incentives to get their cats’ paws to pass laws that favor
their interests, for the doling out of public funds for private benefit.
It’s socialism for banks and automakers and big pharma and big
agribusiness and the behemoths in energy and defense, and on and on. So
much for the glorious independence and striving of the perceived paragons
of the free market. The derangement of so many rightists in this country -
namely the dingbat Tea Partiers – is clear: They fail to understand that
when large corporations hold sway over government there is no “capitalism”
and no “free market”, certainly not as Adam Smith imagined it in The
Wealth of Nations (1776). And as businesses grow bigger to capture
government, so does government grow when captured – how else could it
service big business?
Then again, my ex-CIA/ex-Marine source may be on to something about the
socialist menace – as he would know all about it, having been trained,
directed, housed and pensioned by a grossly expanding branch of government
for most of his working life. Consider the path to happiness paved by the
bomb-makers and the aircraft and tank and battleship manufacturers and the
makers of grenades and rifles and teargas and bullets, and all the
ancillaries of the military industrial complex, the “counterterror”
thinktanks and mercenary contractors and intelligence- surveillance-
security firms. These would not, could not, survive without government
contracts, government intervention, government swaddling and succoring and
snuggling, and, of course, the perpetual preparation for and making of
government-run wars that feed their industries. The imperial war-machine
is the great socialist enterprise of our time.
Indeed, if we want real socialism for actual persons, we should all join
the US military: Everything is socialized in the military, the personnel
getting socialized medicine and socialized housing and socialized
transport and much else (socialized bullets and bombs), the ideal and
modus operandi being one of purest collectivism, the training the kind
that teaches recognition of hierarchies and obedience in that long chain
of command – chain is the operative word – wherein you do what you’re
told, you listen to the boss, you don’t question, you don’t fend for
yourself, you don’t step out of line. How totally un-American. Thus does
the military man, having given up the struggle for self-command and
self-reliance, receive diapering and feeding and care, ideally from cradle
to grave, never opting to grow up and survive in the rigors of the
marketplace. Those filthy pinko-commies in the US Army! Who woulda thunk
it!
It’s astonishing, though, that these same government-trained and -paid
personnel so often are to be found griping about the shape and size of the
tit that keeps them alive. I have a close relative, for example, who talks
the hard-core right-winger line, complaining endlessly about big
government and “socialism” – yet he works for the ever-metastasizing State
Department. When he calls me a “leftist”, I like to tell him I have never
worked for government, never gotten a government paycheck, nor any grant
or subsidy from government, nor any loans, never profited from government
personally (as opposed, say, to profiting from government roads), never
gotten food stamps or welfare or Medicaid or workman’s compensation or
unemployment insurance, nor cashed in my Social Security benefits (forced
to pay for them in the first place), nor received any other scrap of
so-called “wealth redistribution”. What a leftist I must be.
_____
Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, New York, is working
on a book about US secession movements. Find more of his work at
www.christopherketcham.com or contact him at cketcham99@mindspring.com.
http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham04222010.html