Competing Ads, Washington Style

DC, as I've noted numerous times in the past, is a rather idiosyncratic little town.

That particular truth was reinforced to me this last week in a couple of advertising circulars that came inserted into our Washington Post.

Yeah, we got the half-ton of Getmas sale catalogs, reminding us to be about our Sweet Lord Mammon's bidness.   Most of the ads are in flagrant competition with one another.   Best Buy or H.H. Gregg? Giant or Safeway?   Each trumpets its superiority over the other.

But y'all get those no matter where you are.  In Dee See, we do things differently.

What was different this week was a great big ol' advertising section...formatted like a newspaper...from the China Daily, the official English language mouthpiece of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China.   It trumpeted, in language produced by Chinese Communist writers and then massaged out of Chinglish by well paid expatriate editorial staff, the vital importance of China to the business community.

Without China, the global economy would suffer!  China, the key to recovery and prosperity!

There's a reason for this appearing.   In the midst of our being distracted by all manner of silly things in this silly political season, America is semi-quietly pre-positioning itself in the Pacific Theatre.  We're putting bases in Australia, for the first time ever.  We're making overtures to Burma, whose military dictatorship is suddenly compliant.  Why?  Because as China grows in strength and flexes its muscles, its neighbors are getting skittish.  Suddenly, being allied with the predominant military power in the world seems, well, prudent.

And so we get a "look how nice and important and business-friendly we are" insert from the world's dominant Communist nation.  Right there in the Washington Post, where lawmakers and lobbyists can read it.

The next day, the insert was from the competition.

It was an equally glossy, equally pretending-to-be-news advertising insert.  This one was produced, apparently, by a coalition of military-industrial corporations.   It pitched the necessity of maintaining naval power at current levels, and of simultaneously investing in new drone technology for seaborne operations.  We can't cut our force-projection capacity in these uncertain times!  There were big patriotic shots of F-18 Hornets flying in tight formation over aircraft carriers, advertising the wares of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and several major naval shipyards.

The threat?  The reason for maintaining dominance?  To insure that we remain ahead of a resurgent China.

I'm going to guess that if you're not a DC Denizen, you didn't get these competing ads.

Mine is an odd little town.

Remembering Product Placement

This long weekend, the family and I spent some quality time at the local mall multiplex.  The missus and I went to see Bridesmaids, which was...well...actually quite entertaining.  I was a bit worried that the ambient estrogen in the room might be too intense, but other than having the strangest feeling that my menstrual cycle was trying to synchronize, I really enjoyed the film.  We cut the boys loose, giving them tickets to Pirates of the 'arribbean: It's the Same Movie Again, Suckers and cash to hit the food court and wander the mall afterwards so Mom and Dad could hang out together.  It was a very, very American evening.

During the ads before the movie (not the trailers, the ads), we were pitched the next movie in the Transformers franchise.  Well, no, actually.  We were pitched a Chevy Camaro, as Bumblebee leapt and blasted and jumped.  Paramount and Hasbro aren't the only companies that have skin in the franchise.  General Motors also makes a point of connecting product to entertainment, insuring that as we watch we are filled with desire for Chevrolets.

We all know this.  Anyone with half a clue knows that product placement goes deep into the culture of moviemaking.   But as I watched the Transformers trailer-slash-ad, I realized that other products were prominently featured.  Very prominently featured.

In the ad, we see a swarm of CGI Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey tilt-rotors move towards a Decepticon besieged city.   That's identifiable product.  Not one we buy ourselves, of course.   But product nonetheless, product that needs to be marketed.  The V-22 has a long and troubled development history.  It's an interesting bit of tech, but any weapon system that was in development when I was in high school and still hasn't really been fully adopted...well...it requires a bit of marketing assistance.

So I find myself wondering...to what extent does our arms industry intentionally connect to our entertainment industry?   When I see a Ford or a Chevy, or a can of Coke, or a prominently placed glowing Mac logo, I know that someone's people talked to someone else's people.

But when we see a General Dynamics M1A2 Main Battle Tank blasting away at alien robots, or a Fairchild-Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II raining down depleted uranium rounds on a Decepticon from it's General Electric GAU/A 30mm rotary cannon, I find myself wondering if maybe this isn't random.  These are products, produced by corporations, who have a strong interest in our feeling a stir of boo-yah when we see them dishing out destruction.

Lord knows the big players in the weapons industry pay attention to marketing.  Like in today's Washington Post, where a full page Memorial Day color ad from Boeing reminds Congressmen and Senators that "the people of Boeing honor those who gave their lives for our country's freedom."  And where another full page color ad from the men and women of Lockheed Martin announces, under a flag, that we have "A Nation of Freedom From the Courage of Heroes."   And where, on another undulating flag background, Northrop Grumman tells us that "Bravery Lives Forever."

Seeing those ads, I do remember, but I remember two things.  First, I remember the deaths of men and women who committed themselves to serve our country.  That's a significant thing, and an important thing to honor and remember.

And second, well, second I remember that the wars that claimed their lives are the hundred-billion dollar lifeblood of some very large corporate entities.  That is also something it is important we not forget.

Toy Guns

This last weekend, I served as the Party Bus Dad for a minivan full of boys. My little guy was turning 10, and rather than one event, he wanted a smorgasbord of a party, a great heaping tapas plate of fun.

Stop number one on this multi-event delight involved unloading my bad self and six fired-up pre-teens at the local laser tag emporium. Both of my boys, and their dad, are most fond of laser tag. It's a hoot. The tactics and strategery of simulated combat are exhilarating. It doesn't hurt that we're not half-bad at it. Of the 45 players in the arena that afternoon, my oldest son rocked the highest score, my little guy came in slightly behind, and yours truly...who specializes in lower-scoring base defense...came in third. Our team, "Team Green," managed to completely rout our opponents. Of course, they were mostly panicked clusters of eight year olds whose grasp of close quarters combat tactics were woefully lacking, but why let a little detail like that dilute the glory? Hoooah!

That fascination with things martial extends deeply into the games my boys play. And, frankly, the games I play. Unlike many progressive parents, who hover and micromanage and try to get their boys to play with happy homemaker sets, I'm quite happy to have my pups charging around with giant squirtguns, or firing Nerf projectiles at one another. I, too, was once a boy. So long as they're aware of the difference between toys and real weapons, aware of the deep difference in cost between play combat and the blood and muck of real war, they know what they need to know.

I do wonder, though, just how many Americans grasp that difference. That wondering particularly applies to members of our Tea Party movement. One of the more dominant threads in American conservatism is the Second Amendment thread. It asserts, as was the intent of the folks who wrote that portion of our constitution, that unrestricted ownership of firearms is necessary if citizen soldiers are to be prepared to defend our nation. Every once in a while, one of the more...um...earnest folks who are affiliated with that movement will darkly grumble about the need for us to have that Glock in our dresser drawer to throw off the yoke of tyrants.

I understand that desire to defend the homestead and the nation. I also understand that fascination with weapons. What I can't quite understand is how you can 1) support gun ownership on the basis of the second amendment and 2) be utterly and uncritically supportive of our current approach to national security. America's warfighters are, by the standards of militaries throughout history, without parallel. Our immense and sprawling defense budget may include a whole bunch of waste, but it has also produced the single most ferocious fighting force in human history.

Because of our engagement in Afghanistan, that budget is increasingly dedicated to developing tools for use against insurgent populations and local militia. Sophisticated drones and Joint Direct Attack Munitions are really rather effective at disposing of little groups of human beings bearing small arms. We're a very short step away from a revolution in military robotics, one that is being actively funded and pursued and could be the biggest game-changer since iron swords sliced through bronze shields like they was buttah. The fantasy of local militia being able to put up any kind of meaningful resistance against an unfettered mid-21st century army is just that. A fantasy.

What I just can't quite figure out is how folks who ferociously proclaim that they own small arms because they don't trust the government to provide health care are simultaneously eager to provide that same government with the most impressive destructive tools in the history of humankind.

Human beings are strange, strange creatures.

The King You Have Chosen

During a conversation last night with another pastor who serves a congregation here in the Washington Metropolitan area, we found ourselves noting just how...well...rich everyone in DC is. Not everyone, mind you. There is plenty of poverty here. But when you step back for a second and look at the population in and around our nation's capital, you realize just how much money there is here.

That foundation of wealth just got a little bump upwards this week, as defense contracting giant Northrop Grumman committed to relocating it's headquarters to the Virginia suburbs of Washington. In fact, they're likely to locate themselves within walking distance of my home, right near my high school, in an office park where me and the missus...well...we used to...err..."hang out" in the empty parking lots there on occasion when we were dating. You know, talking about politics.

Ahem.

In the Forbes list of the wealthiest counties in the United States, for instance, six out of the top ten counties are here around the Beltway. That's a supermajority of American wealth, kids, the kind of majority that lets you ram any legislation you want through the hallowed [buttocks] of the Senate. Loudon, Fairfax, Howard, Fairfax City, Arlington, and Montgomery all have pretty stunning levels of wealth. How stunning? The median household income here in Fairfax is $106,000. Nearby Loudon County has us beat, with a median household income of $110,000. That's more than twice the national average.

Now, many of those households are two-income. Many fall below that level. It is worth noting that the folks who skew that median upwards are not federal workers, but rather the impressive array of industry lawyers and industry lobbyists and defense contractors. Civil servants aren't the folks living in the 10,000 square foot homes in Potomac and Loudon. Associate Vice Presidents of General Dynamics and Executive Counsels for Lockheed Martin are.

Honestly, though, the blame for this peculiar skewing of wealth to the power elites lies not with the increasingly fat cats here in Washington. This, my fellow Americans, is the government you want.

It's right there in the Bible, in 1 Samuel 8. We Americans have an obsession with defending ourselves, with being sure that we have the weapons and organization needed to protect our national interests. That's why military spending, which is the primary generator of inside-the-Beltway wealth, is entirely off the table as we consider ways to reduce our insane national debt. Only slightly crazy folks out on the margins like myself even think about cutting military spending.

That obsession should be familiar. It is the very same desire that spurred the demand of the Israelites for a king. We want that centralized power, because in that centralized power lies our ability to organize and plan and research the various ways to crush America's enemies under the boots of our shiny new orbital battle platform.

But, as with any king, our demand for that power has a cost:

This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive grows and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day. (1 Samuel 8:11-18)

Jerusalem and Washington. Saul and the Military Industrial Complex. Six of one, a half dozen of the other.

For a nation purportedly steeped in Judeo-Christian values, it's impressive how utterly clueless we are about this.

"Those who do not know the Bible are doomed to repeat it."

Where Our Heart Is

There are, among pastors responsible for drumming up financial resources to sustain their congregations, a variety of little proof-texts that we're compelled to go to. One of the more painfully cliche Bible passages that always show up when the church needs new carpet for the youth room is the Matthew 6:21:

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Meaning, if something is really important to you, you commit of your material resources to support it. It's a practical measure of assessing what is truly important to a person. If I give money to insure orphans in Malawi have clean drinking water, I make a statement about my priorities. If I give most of my money to Jack Daniels, Louis Vuitton and Jimmy Choo, that also makes a clear statement about my priorities.

Jesus, of course, spun this saying in some very interesting ways, ways that radically subvert our conventional understanding of wealth. But that discussion is for another post. What strikes me this morning is how the simpler funderstanding of the saying plays against the recent talk of a federal spending freeze. From both parties, we're now hearing concern about the exploding federal deficit. So now comes the idea...no more increases in spending. Hold the line. No more growth until we get our addiction to debt under control. I'm actually fine with that principle. We need to learn to live within our means, and soon.

But there is, of course, one exception. Our spending on weapons and the coercive implements of state security will be exempted from that freeze. There are many reasons given for this. Most of them boil down to this: We are at war and facing possible dire threats from possible enemies at home and abroad, as we have been every day of my forty-one years. And every day of my parent's lives. America is always at war or preparing for war. So even though we spend more on guns and jails than the rest of the world combined, we cannot possibly even consider the possibility of not spending more on that area of our national life.

That is because, as any pastor could tell you, war is where America's heart is.

That Sound is Eisenhower Rolling Over In His Grave

Another interesting bit of collateral damage the recent SCOTUS decision allowing corporations to directly influence elections may only be immediately evident to those of us who live in the Washington Metropolitan Area. From my vantage point inside the Beltway, I see things that most Americans don't get to see.

By "things," I mean advertising. By advertising, I mean the aggressive but very localized ad campaigns run by defense contractors to influence the decisionmaking of military bureaucracy and your elected leaders.

I've blogged on this before. In no other city in the nation do you see advertisements touting the effectiveness of ships and tanks and weapons systems. Full page color ads in the Post and the Times. Tightly produced radio spots on the number-one rated station in the area. Posters with patriotic slogans, flags, eagles, and weapons systems festoon the walls in our Metro subway system, particularly at the Pentagon and Pentagon City stations.

These are not ads for you and me, because we don't tend to purchase fighter aircraft, no matter how much our 9 year old son might beg and plead. We don't buy military transports, or missile defense systems, or destroyers. But these products are all advertised inside the Beltway, by major corporations that produce systems that are only bought with our tax dollars. General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman exist in their current form not to provide products for individual citizens, but for consumption by the federal government. Their considerable profits are dependent on the largesse of Washington.

Now, lets for a moment imagine that a United States senator feels that a particular weapons system...say, the engine for the Joint Strike Fighter that the military doesn't want but that we're making anyway...should be canceled. The corporations whose profits are dependent on We The People buying this weapon already have a substantial advertising budget. What do you suppose the odds are that when this senator comes up for re-election that instead of just ads inside the Beltway, we might now see some attack ads running in this senator's home state? Or some juicy gotcha clips that seem to imply that said senator has a prurient interest in livestock? Or worse yet, that they Don't Support Our Troops (tm)? The self-dealing manipulation of the electoral process by corporations who need compliant senators and representatives is now perfectly acceptable. It's always been there, of course. Money has been funneled to oppo researchers and into the coffers of political action committees. But now it can operate unfettered in the light of day.

Looks like the military-industrial complex is going to be adding a marketing department.

American Christianity is a Low Light Environment

Many thanks to Jonathan for forwarding this little bit of AmeriChrist, Inc. strangeness:

A military contractor that provides rifle scopes to the military has apparently been inscribing Bible verse citations on the side of the scope. The Trijicon ACOG gunsight is the product of a company with an evangelical Christian founder, which has been quietly integrating bible verses into it's scopes for years. A secular humanist military organization got grumpy about this, which I'm sure will result in a Stern Letter being sent to the company by a mid-level acquisitions specialist.

Reading through the verses, I found myself thinking...hmmm. Are these the most appropriate verses for a scope? Pretty much all of them have to do with "light" as a keyword, which is unsurprising. The ACOG is a light-collecting scope. The verses selected are like little magical Bible talismans, selected to get the divine assist in gathering in photons.

So we get, among other things, John 8:12 used. Because you know, the light of Jesus Christ is intended to aid target acquisition in low-light environments. Or 2 Corinthians 4:6. Because nothing beats the light of the glory of God for helping you put a 5.56 mm round through the skull of that potential hostile skulking around the perimeter at dusk.

I think, though, this whole "light as a Bible search keyword" thing is a bit limiting. Go for the gusto! There are so many more...meaty verses one could use, particularly in context. Like, say, DT32:42. Or 2KG9:24. Or PS7:13. That's some kick-butt Bible, Marine! Hoooah!

I suppose you do have to be careful, though. You wouldn't want to inadvertently mess with the heads of the troops by slapping LK6:38 on there. Or MT5:39. Or MK12:31. The Bible can be really dangerous to the morale and focus of our warfighters if you aren't careful about censoring certain passages. Particularly those passages that get to the subversively unpatriotic and radically unsupportive-of-our-troops core of what Jesus of Nazareth taught.

Better to keep away from all of those pesky passages that seem to imply that the business of efficiently dispatching human beings in low light environments might not quite mesh with what Jesus had in mind.

Warfare and Welfare

With America's right wing now finally deciding that the budget deficit is a problem, I think progressives and moderates need to take them up on their newfound concern.

In fact, that seems to be where things are headed from inside the Beltway, as a bipartisan commission seems to be firing up to make some of the painful cuts and tax increases that will be necessary to bring the United States back into a position of solvency.

They'll need to put everything on the table. That means addressing every major entitlement and welfare program. They'll need to deal with social security. They'll need to deal with Medicare and Medicaid. They'll need to make cuts across the board, including major cuts to one of our most significant welfare-state programs: The United States Military.

Yeah, I know. I support our troops. We All Support Our Troops. But the reality of our armed services is that they are also a significant government work program. They provide an immense amount of funding to American corporations, as our military-industrial complex is one of the few sectors of the American economy that hasn't been farmed out entirely to China by profit-maximizing execs. The armed services are also an employer of last resort for the able-bodied.

It is not a coincidence that we're meeting our military recruitment quotas easily in a time of significant unemployment, where even a few years ago we were struggling to meet those goals. Sure, many folks join the Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines for reasons of patriotism. But many more are driven to it not because they are warriors by vocation, but because they need a roof over their head and health care. Or because the recruitment incentives help pay off debts. Honestly, it's a combination of many of those factors. But I've known enough active military folks to know that it is a place you go when financial hardship hits. It's viewed as a stable paycheck, a place of financial refuge. Yeah, you might have to go to war, which is not much fun. But at least the medical care is paid for, and you've got a paycheck. Even a tiny paycheck is better than none at all.

But if we're going to get serious about belt-tightening, and we're willing to inflict painful cuts on America's schools and our crumbling infrastructure and our poor and our elderly and our children, there's not a single good reason that our armed forces should be exempt.

Yet Another Reason for Us To Hate Canada

The American far right just hates Canada.

Canada is, if current rhetoric on the right here is to be believed, as much a threat to freedom as Nazis or Maoists or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We know this because their nationalized health care system...or anything like it...is a sure sign of a nation that has utterly given up all personal liberties. You can see it in their relative lack of stress, and their easier pace of life, and the slow thoughtfulness of their media. It's an alien world.

I hear some of them may even speak French.

While Canada trundles along genially, we are, as a nation, headed for insolvency. Neither of the American political parties are willing to take anything other than the most feeble ritual pats at our endlessly growing national debt. At some point, our vast credit as a nation will run out. It may not happen soon, but it will happen, as surely as a month-long drunken bender eventually ends with you waking up in a pool of unidentifiable fluid next to a snoring Samoan woman in a New Orleans flophouse. Not that I'm speaking from personal experience. No sir.

No country has ever done what we're doing, spending vastly more than we commit to the national treasury for decades, and not suffered catastrophic economic collapse. Not once in the history of humankind.

It's going to be bad.

Yet on Veteran's Day, as I was contemplating America's coming financial apocalypse, I realized there's another reason for the American Right to fear Canadian influence. What would happen to America financially, wondered I, if we didn't just think about having a similar health care system?

What if the military of the United States of America was the same size as the Canadian military?

We share similar land masses. Neither nation has hostile neighbors. Though we fret endlessly about energy security, our Canadian brethren don't seem to have any trouble gassing up their Ford F-150s. They innovate. They have a solid business community. They brew good beer. They seem to be doing fine.

We'd still have a decent little army, one more than capable of defending the homeland. To that small professional army, we'd add in the 80,000,000 American gun owners. You NRA members would be willing to use your guns to defend American soil against tyranny, right? That's what you keep telling us the Second Amendment is for, after all. You keep waving Old Glory around and telling us that gun ownership is a sign of your patriotism. It's why you have the Director's Cut of Red Dawn in your media cabinet. So...I'm calling you on it. You are now eight thousand divisions of Light Infantry Reserves. Hoooah! Wooolver-EEEEns!

We're also a democracy, the beacon of freedom and tolerance in the world. If that's true, we should have friends. Allies. Don't we? Those folks North of the border would help us out if things got rough. As would the Brits.

And if that wasn't enough and things got real ugly, we've got enough leftover Cold War ICBMs to slag pretty much anybody. Ain't nobody gonna mess with us. So...why not? Let's downsize.

What would the effect of a Canada-sized military be on our national treasury? The net effect of that decision would be to save the United States taxpayer over $550,000,000,000 a year.

That's a chunk of change, almost real money, but it's only a small downpayment on the debt, which stands at $11,000,000,000,000 and rising. We'd have to make it a pretty much permanent change to have any effect. But if we did, in my lifetime, we'd be back in the black.

It'd work. And the world would be no more dangerous. America would be equally safe. I mean, why not?

It's not like America is addicted to that military deficit spending, eh?

Pesky, pesky Canadians!