If you want to know why Barack Obama has already lost the presidential election, you may want to travel back in time and read a 1990 article in Time Magazine by Barbara Ehrenreich.
In a nutshell, Barack is not a card-carrying member of The Warrior Culture.
In a Warrior Culture, aggressive behavior is rewarded and any reason suffices to embark upon war. President George Bush the First is a classic example of a product of the Warrior Culture. After American forces invaded Panama, a small, defenseless country in Central America, Bush bragged that no one could call him timid.
Much worse, however, the press praised him for successfully completing an initiation rite and lauded him for his “willingness to shed blood.”
In other words, Panama was a symbol of Bush’s macho manhood. He was a man with cojones.
Among its primary characteristics, a Warrior Culture doesn’t like peace. Somehow, it’s unnerving, feminine, sissy, cowardly. If a Warrior Culture isn’t actively engaged in a war, it is preparing for war by increasing its stockpile of lethal weapons and looking around for new enemies.
Those who oppose the Warrior Culture concept of foreign policy find themselves the targets of unrelenting attacks on their patriotism. Bill Clinton, who was lucky to become President, was labeled a draft dodger, despite the fact that those branding him evaded military service themselves. He escaped the scimitar but was punished after his election by impeachment on specious grounds.
But there are draft dodgers and then there are draft dodgers. In America, a draft dodger is a patriot if he supports the war he is dodging by using an acceptable means of dodging like, say, influence to gain successive college deferments while those less fortunate, by some misguided twist of logic, proudly give their lives for the daft dodgers.
The United States has been a Warrior Culture for more than 200 years. The list of military engagements throughout our short history includes innumerable military excursions in places far and wide. Most of these have been against small and weak nations. It’s easy to see why.
When we stack our 8,000 nuclear warheads up against Iraq’s none, North Korea’s none, or Iran’s maybe-someday-a-single-device-without-the means-of-delivering it, one wonders if we have been a victorious Warrior Culture because we haven’t braced, for example, communist China with it’s nuclear arsenal and delivery systems sufficient to incinerate the globe. After all, a good warrior knows when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.
Yes, Barack is going to lose the election. But even if by some Hail Mary miracle, he squeaks in, the Warrior Party will quickly neutralize him. To the Warrior Party, politics is war. Governing a nation is for sissy-men.
The U.S. will be in Iraq a hundred years or more regardless of the occupant of the Oval Office.
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