Pyrotechnics

In the 1980s, the budgets of mainstream Hollywood cinema exploded, due in part to producers' growing fondness for explosions. And cocaine. When in doubt, the answer was usually one of four options: A.) make something big go boom...  B.) throw in a montage sequence set to terrible music featuring lots of action verbs... C.) include some gratuitous nudity, often accompanied by an equally unnecessary saxophone solo... or D.) do another line of coke, then decide.

Throughout this period, action heroes such as those played by Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone made destruction look cool. Their movies were visceral celebrations of spectacle that invariably presented vengeance as a just and noble motivation for violence. All the while, producers were fueled by an apparently endless supply of terrible ideas that no doubt seemed brilliant at the time. It probably had something to do with all that coke.

"Two words: exploding arrows. The screenplay practically writes itself."

Meanwhile, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union would intermittently reach a boiling point, threatening to thaw out the Cold War like a TV dinner that nobody wanted to eat. On some level, many Americans probably slept a little more soundly at night knowing that their nation has all this badass weaponry capable of such massive and indiscriminate annihilation.

...including Chuck Norris.

Audiences were reminded of this whenever they watched these movies in which the tough guy heroes would commit unauthorized acts of war while spewing vague platitudes about justice and freedom. In every choreographed scene that features one of these over-the-top caricatures of American masculinity blowing shit up with extreme prejudice, it reinforces the fabricated notion that we are the moral arbiters of the world... and any disagreements to this effect will only be met with more explosions. The underlying message here is: Just be thankful that these guys are on our side.

...except Steven Seagal, who officially became a Russian citizen last year.

So Americans like things that go boom. No big surprises there. I hate to say it, but firepower is kind of our thing. Well, that and type two diabetes. We even celebrate our nation's independence every year with explosions. Meanwhile, American action films, particularly those of the era that I am discussing, tend to feature communicatively impaired alpha males operating outside of the law in order to solve complex problems through improvised acts of violence -- you know, kind of like terrorists, only patriotic.

These guys get answers with karate chops and rocket launchers, not diplomacy. This, in turn, has the effect of justifying an interventionist and militaristic foreign policy based upon the exact same premise. That is, just like how the characters embodied by these action stars may "righteously" murder dozens of bad guys and extras in non-speaking roles through excessive displays of force that are often motivated by revenge, the United States does the same thing in the service of neoliberalism under the false flag of democracy.

"They said I could pick out one of them codenames,
too, like in Top Gun. So from now on, call me Doofus."

Take the first Iraq war, for example... except it wasn't called that. It was officially known as Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm, which certainly had the effect of making the whole thing seem more like an action movie. It has even since had its own sequel: Operation Iraqi Freedom, and it seems that there may be talk of turning it into a franchise. I'll get to that in a moment.

Back in 1990 and 1991, for the first time, audiences of the televised news had front row seats from which to witness these awe-inspiring explosions from multiple angles, just like in a movie, including night vision POV shots from the bombs themselves. Despite any "collateral damage" (the inhumane euphemism for innocent lives lost -- as if referring to the scores of uncredited extras that get killed in every action movie), it was all justified under the ambiguous banner of freedom. Audiences ate it up.

Action movies, generally speaking, started being less jingoistic, focusing instead on matters of interpersonal violence while increasingly making audiences privy to the scenes that take place between the stuff that they were used to seeing. For more information, see Pulp Fiction... or practically anything else directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Just don't watch it with your grandma.

Today, of course, we have military drones, the operation of which bears an unsettling similarity to video games. Psychologically, they change the idea of combat on both sides of the equation. On the ground, people live in constant fear of drone attacks, and many of them join militias in order to fight back -- because it's kind of all they've got. Meanwhile, from a safe distance behind a command console, drone operators can witness the awesome destructive force of these state-of-the-art weapons while maintaining an emotional detachment from the actual damage caused, both in terms of lives lost and enemies created. From this perspective, a human being is reduced to little more than a pixel on a screen... much like those POV shots from the news coverage of the first Gulf War.

If you stop and think about it, though, the use of drones also marks a clear shift in the stakes of combat. We are essentially fighting humans with dollars. If a drone gets shot down, it can be replaced. No American lives are put at risk. I suspect that's why Obama favored their use so much. Meanwhile, the casualties on the ground, both innocent and otherwise, become martyrs for the oppositional cause, only motivating recruitment in its support. Consider too that to them, our use of drones is a form of terrorism because it operates on exactly the same principle, which is to deny people any sense of security. Drone strikes, much like terrorist attacks, can happen anywhere at any time, and they are just as likely to kill civilians and allies as they are to take out their intended targets.

This brings us to Drumpf. Since I did begin this article with a brief discussion of the 1980s, cocaine and bad ideas, you probably knew that I would get here eventually. Last week, he authorized the use of the "Mother-of-All-Bombs," a 21,000 pound bomb that was so big that it had to be pushed out of a cargo plane and then dropped with a fucking parachute. That sounds like something straight out of a Road Runner cartoon. At the bargain price of only $16 million (presumably purchased from Acme, Inc.), it is said to have taken out 36 ISIS militants. So according to neoliberalism's own tendency to reduce everything to a dollar value, that works out to about $450,000 per bad guy. Meanwhile, of course, most Americans have to take out loans to go to college.

Some heads of state bomb with reluctance, others with glee. Trump has certainly shown his cards in this regard. Yes, it seems that he has set out to grab the whole world by the pussy. Only fueling the fire, so to speak, is all the positive press that he receives for using military force like a locker room bully. Narcissists like him live on shit like that, and this is a man who has already demonstrated a profound disconnect from reality, as well as a psychotic willingness to authorize acts of extreme violence without the approval of Congress or the American people. At this point, we should all be concerned.

In Syria, you may also know that Trump ordered that 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles be fired upon an airbase controlled by the government because of their suspected use of chemical weapons. However, since it has still not been proven that Assad's regime was directly responsible for these attacks, according to international protocol, no action should have been taken before an independent investigation was conducted. Unilateral strikes on a sovereign nation with whom we have not declared war is not ok, no matter who the fuck you think you are.

Despite the ill-informed contentions of America's negotiator-in-chief, the United Nations actually does serve a purpose, which is essentially to resolve issues such as this without resorting to acts of aggression. The UN doesn't just hoard the fees that it collects and then offer as little as possible in return. He must be thinking of private insurance companies.

In all this patriotic posturing, Trump promotes his bullshit image as a tough guy. And while the United States flexes its muscles on the world stage, not only are we provoking our enemies into further conflict, but we are also creating more enemies in the process. What exactly is the endgame here? Or is it naive to think that anyone has actually thought that far ahead?

Consider too that it is entirely possible that ISIS militants (or even some other entity) used chemical weapons and blamed it on the Syrian government for the sake of provocation. It's not that far-fetched. ISIS in particular would love to start a war between the United States and Russia. For a lot of them, bringing about the end of days is kind of what it's all about, and from that fucked-up perspective, what better way to achieve this than by igniting a world war?

And this brings us full circle.

Immediately after the missile strikes on the Syrian airfield, there was an article on NPR that listed the official reactions of different countries. I truly hope that I am wrong on this, but it looks an awful lot like sides are being taken for the next world war. And why is it that Albania always gets picked last?

In closing, here is an awesomely bad clip from the 1989 movie Action USA, which includes some truly unnecessary explosions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koM5VIyipR0*


...but not nearly as unnecessarily as dropping a sixteen-million dollar, ten-and-a-half ton bomb just to show the rest of the world what a tough guy you are.


*Skip ahead to about 1:53 if you want to cut to the chase. I mean that literally. Then prepare to be blown away (not literally).

Trans-Atlantic Transmissions

In 1927, everybody knows that Charles Lindbergh became the first person to ever fly across the Atlantic Ocean… except he wasn’t (not by a long shot).

Back in 1913, a British newspaper called the Daily Mail (not to be confused with the Daily Male, which is an entirely different publication) offered a prize of 10,000 pounds to anyone who could cross the Atlantic Ocean by airplane in seventy-two hours or less. Adjusted for inflation, that would be over a million dollars today. Then World War I happened. Among the less devastating consequences of global armed conflict was the postponement of this contest. 

The newspaper's challenge resumed in late 1918, and the following year, a full eight years before St. Louis even had any spirit, Lt. Commander Albert C. Read flew his aptly named seaplane the "Lame Duck" from New York City to Lisbon, Portugal, making numerous stops for repairs along the way. This included a ten-day layover in the Azores, and although he probably got some nice photos while he was there, since it took longer than three days, Read was ineligible to claim the prize money.

Less than three weeks later, British aviators Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Brown said "fuck it" (metaphorically) and flew 1,890 miles nonstop from Newfoundland to Ireland. They crash landed in a swamp, but only after inadvertently flying upside down through dense, icy fog. Let me repeat that. They crash landed in a swamp after flying upside down through zero visibility conditions somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, a body of water that no one had ever crossed nonstop by airplane before. These men were soon awarded the 10,000 pounds for accomplishing this feat, and I’m going to go ahead and assume that someone bought them a round of drinks in the first pub they stumbled upon.

The truth is that there were actually dozens of people who flew across the Atlantic Ocean before Charles Lindbergh. We know Lindbergh's name because when he landed in Paris, he was declared the winner of a different highly publicized contest. New York hotelier Raymond Orteig had offered a prize of $25,000 to the first Allied pilot to make this journey unaccompanied. The offer had been on the table for eight years by the time Lindbergh won it, and what better way to promote American nationalism and fancy New York hotels than with a photogenic young hero? 

Lindbergh was also the first pilot who made this attempt to have his progress broadcast live on public radio. This was huge. People tuned in to hear if he would make it. The drama was palpable. When he safely landed in Paris, he went from being a curiosity on this newfangled medium of radio to a mass-media celebrity whose images and exploits were broadcast throughout the nation and the world in order to sell stuff. 

And so it all began...

Corporate Policy

Neoliberalism is kind of like the Greenland or the American cheese of economic theory, which is to say that the name was almost certainly designed to be misleading. People who are only vaguely familiar with the term may think that since "neo" means "new" and because liberalism is generally associated with left-leaning politics, then this must be some kind of progressive new form of liberalism, right? Not exactly.

In reference to the economy, "liberal" means free from the meddling hands of democratically-elected representatives. The idea is basically that capitalists, those unsung stewards of the public good (known, of course, for their unwavering benevolence toward humanity and the natural environment), are free to do whatever the hell they want and that we're all better off for it.

So if a company proves to be highly profitable, those who own the means of production can use these (often untaxed) profits to increase worker wages, reopen American factories, or sell their goods and services at a lower rate in order to ease the economic strain on consumers. Or they could buy a third yacht, this one with its own helicopter landing pad. Since we pretty much just let them write their own laws anyway, it's really up to the "job creators" to decide what they want to do with all that extra money... which didn't materialize out of thin air, by the way. It came from you, the employee and consumer.

This ideology also makes a very deliberate and concerted effort to equate wealth with virtue, as it is premised on the assumption that the richest among us will always do what is best for everyone else. Trickle-down economics isn't just some rich dude pissing on skid row from a penthouse apartment, though it does bear a number of similarities.

Adding insult to injury, this belief system also demonizes the poor (or the already pissed upon, metaphorically speaking) by implying that the inverse is true as well. The common refrain is that poor people are so as punishment for their bad choices, while a select few among us were born into a life of obscene privilege, blessed with more wealth than they could ever possibly spend in one lifetime. Why? Because they are better than us. Just ask them.

It's not like we get the good states, either.

This, in effect, maintains hereditary aristocracies -- you know, like the one from which we declared our independence so many years ago -- all while normalizing their position of privilege as though it is their birthright. This is what neoliberalism has done for you. It is an economic system designed to promote the interests of the already absurdly rich in their endless pursuit of more wealth. Neofeudalism might actually be a more appropriate term.

In order to unpack this idea of neoliberalism, though, we should first figure out how we got here, and that means starting with what is sometimes referred to as "classical liberalism." For this, we will need to go back in time. Since I am fresh out of plutonium and my flux capacitor is on the fritz anyway, we're going to have to just use our imaginations. Set your wayback machines for the year 1776, then follow me.

As a frightening number of Americans would likely tell you, this was the first year that we ever had a fourth of July. Prior to this, they just went straight from July 3 to July 5, but then boom: fireworks.

Obviously, there was a bit more to it than that. In fact, a pretty important document was also written that same year. I'm referring, of course, to the book that is now more commonly referred to simply as Wealth of Nations, by Scottish economist Adam Smith. It was first published in 1776 and quickly became a bestseller worldwide. Hollywood has yet to make it into a movie.

"Let's just call it Death Dollar."

If his incredibly ordinary name or the boring title of his book don't sound familiar to you, perhaps you've at least heard the term "the invisible hand of the market" before. That's his baby. Smith is the guy behind lassez-faire economics: the idea that capitalism regulates itself naturally through consumer choice... plus a collection of other fairy tales. As a staunch proponent of what is now referred to as 'classical liberalism,' he also theorized that an economy functions best with the least amount of government intervention.

Basically, Ted Nugent + Quaker Oats = Adam Smith.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, there just happened to be a brand new nation being built from the ground up by a bunch of rich white guys who didn't like paying taxes and who were looking for some new ideas about self-governance. Many of the Founding Fathers read Smith's book and more or less said, "Hey, this sounds like a good way to stay wealthy. We should try this."

Of course, two of the main reasons that the United States formed in the first place was so that it would be independently recognized in matters of international affairs and be able to print a common currency for interstate trade. In other words, without a federal government that supersedes the authority of the states (and the corporations that operate within those states), there is no economy. This was the basic argument of the Federalists, but it still would be more than two hundred years before they took their case to Broadway.

History has proven the Federalists right, that without a strong central government capable of regulatory oversight, the American economy is highly volatile -- rife with frequent booms and busts and invariably leading to unsustainable levels of wealth inequality. Today, the eight richest men in the world control as much wealth as the poorest fifty-percent of humanity. For those of us who are willing to learn the lessons of our history and apply them to the present, the facts indeed tell an interesting story.

Back in the first half of the 1860s, as you might know, here in the US, we had a civil war between Waffle House states and IHOP states. Once the country was whole again (but still deeply scarred), they presumably had breakfast. There was also an almost immediate postwar boom in railroad construction.

As with any boom, it lasted until it didn't, and when the bubble popped, it caused a ripple effect throughout the entire economy. This also happened to coincide with the sudden collapse of the silver market as this commodity was no longer given a fixed value relative to the US dollar. This, in turn, caused a rush on the banks as everyone tried to withdraw their savings all at once, forcing these institutions to close because they didn't actually have these people's money on hand. Sound familiar?

Overzealous speculation, stock manipulation and a change in the currency standard led to a catastrophic economic collapse that was commonly known at the time as the "Great Depression." But not the one you're thinking of... this one actually lasted through most of the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. Mark Twain later referred to this period as the "Gilded Age," drawing parallels between American culture at that time and cheap, possibly corroding metal that is covered with a thin gold veneer in order to present the false appearance of wealth.

By the 1930s, though, when the exact same thing happened with industry stocks, farm commodities, real estate and gold in the aftermath of another major war, they started referring to the old Great Depression as the "Panic of 1873." Since hardly anybody alive still remembered it firsthand, this whole period during which millions of Americans endured trying economic hardship had apparently lost much of its gravity. Yes, it seems that the gradual progression of history changes people's perspectives of momentous events a lot like the goddamn telephone game. Sixty years after silver had been decoupled from the dollar, when a new economic recession hit, the last quarter of the nineteenth century was no longer seen by many as a time of misery for millions of Americans... it was more of a panic, really.

In the 1930s, while millions of people throughout the world "panicked" about things like eating, having shelter and not dying, John Maynard Keynes, a renowned British economist, suggested that maybe government intervention was in fact necessary in order to prevent these kinds of booms and busts from occurring in the first place. Keynes thought that with a little bit of federal regulation, this might even prevent the bankers from making high-risk gambles with people's life savings, which, combined with an overvaluation of the housing market, were among the major contributing factors to the stock market collapse in 1929. For those of us who can remember back to 2008, this whole scenario may sound strangely familiar as well.

So in the broad spectrum of economic theory, on the far left, of course, is Marx, who believed in an economy that is more or less completely run by the government. At the other end of the spectrum is Adam Smith, who said, "Fuck the poor. Why the government always gotta be cock-blocking big biz?" (paraphrasing). And then right in the middle of the whole thing is this guy:

Don't look directly into his mustache.

Ladies, that suave son-of-a-bitch pictured above is none other than the aforementioned John Maynard Keynes, the lead singer of Tool. Wait, no... that's Maynard James Keenan -- but you can see how I'd get them confused.

Keynesian theory, the idea of limited but necessary government intervention in matters related to the economy, was first put into practice by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration in the 1930s. Most of the policies of the New Deal were designed to use the machinations of government as a tool for the people. The revolutionary ideas of Maynard James Keenan, sorry... John Maynard Keynes, were implemented as a way for a government by the people to protect those same people from the insatiable greed of the robber barons.

The contributions of the New Deal to a better American society will be the subject of another article. For now, let me just say that FDR and his "brain trust" gave us: electricity in rural areas, those stickers on bank windows that tell you that your money will be safe, an end to the dust bowl (the product of nearly a century of environmental neglect), most of the state and national park facilities in this country, child labor laws, the standard forty-hour work week, workplace safety standards, and Social Security. With that last one, the idea was that it is the moral imperative of society-at-large to take care of those of us who either cannot work or are beyond a reasonable working age. After all, what kind of country would we be if we made it a policy to let the most vulnerable among us perish?

Ask me that in four years.

Keynes was arguably the most widely respected economist of his day, and "his day" lasted even well after he had passed. That is, he died in 1946, but economic policies inspired by his theories continued to dominate the global economy until the late 1970s. The idea was basically that the government should function as a system of checks and balances on the titans of industry in order to keep these assholes from destroying the entire world economy. They had done it before, just as they will almost certainly do it again.

Pictured: the encyclopedia entry for asshole, smug.

In 1944, economists from around the world met for a conference in Bretton-Woods, Connecticut, which I will also discuss in more depth in a future article. Two of the biggest things to come out of this were the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (and later the World Trade Organization), all of which had initially been conceived as ways to implement Keynesian economics on a global scale. In other words, they were intended to provide independent administrative oversight of international financial relations. However, these institutions have since become little more than instruments of leverage for promoting corporate colonialism.

Keynesian economics fell out of favor right around the time that a growing number of people also believed that disco music should exist. Ronald Reagan was elected president and Margaret Thatcher became the prime minister of Britain. Their faces televised throughout the world, they evangelized the neoliberal creed, all while steadily dismantling any progress made toward social and economic equity during the New Deal era. It was a golden age for mediocrity.

This brings us back to neoliberalism. Right around the time that John Lennon asked listeners to "Imagine there's no countries..." corporations made bold moves in their coup of the global economy. Since that time, from the perspective of these multinational companies, "free-trade" agreements have essentially made the idea of borders irrelevant through their elimination of tariffs and other restrictions on the selling, producing and marketing of American goods in the broader international marketplace.

At its core, neoliberalism is a theory of human relations based upon an inhumane system of capital accumulation. Much like classical liberalism, which was also conceptualized by the already wealthy, it assumes that wealth should equal power, as this is believed to be the natural order of things. It is "neo" if you consider the contemporary scale of this power. Nation-states no longer rule the world; corporations do. This is the new world order, and neoliberalism is the ideology that is allowing it to happen. How much longer do you suppose until we become the United States of Wal-Mart? (I'm only half-kidding.)

Political leaders of the neoliberal movement aim to convince their tragically misinformed disciples that the government they lead is little more than a hindrance to the ruthless ambition that defines late capitalism. Ever since the era of Reagan and Thatcher, just as fast food culture began to take the place of actual culture, greed has increasingly been celebrated as a virtue.

The highly influential conservative strategist Grover Norquist would later say that he hoped to take the US government and "shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Basically, it was his way of saying, "I already got mine, so fuck you." Nothing sociopathic about that, right? Meanwhile, the puppeteers of the world economy have since put a great deal of effort into convincing people that this is all perfectly normal.

It doesn't have to be.