Charley Reese

War As A Distraction

Wed Sep 18 20:59:52 2002
208.152.73.172

War As A Distraction
By Charley Reese 9-16-2

Ernest Hemingway had today's politicians pegged while most of them
were still in short pants:

"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the
currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both
bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and
economic opportunists."

He wrote those words during the 1940s. They are still true.

The currency is inflated. Just measured from 1967, it is so inflated
that $5.29 is required to purchase what $1 would buy in 1967. When I
married about that time, my wife and I could buy three or four big
paper bags of groceries for $16 or $17. Today, you can carry $18
worth of stuff out of a supermarket in one of those little plastic
bags hooked over your little finger.

Of course, a dollar in 1967 would buy only what 42 cents would buy in
1940. Politicians and the Federal Reserve inflate the currency by
putting more and more of it into circulation. Congress runs deficits;
the Federal Reserve issues bonds to create the money to cover the
government's otherwise bad checks.

Then we had the wars - World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War,
the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the War on Terrorism (and, pretty
soon, little Bush's Gulf War II). And those are just the ones we were
in. There were a lot of profits for defense industries and big
construction companies in those wars; as for the men who had to fight
them, there were public debt, deficits and high taxes if they were
lucky enough to escape the grave or a VA hospital.

Today, many veterans cannot get proper health care. The government
cheats its retired soldiers. If they are eligible for disability pay,
it is deducted from their retired pay, though in fact they are two
separate things, both earned separately. Most Americans can't afford
health care, and it's only a matter of time before the premiums get
so high that most of them will not be able to afford insurance. We
have homeless people, jobless people and children in schools with
leaky roofs and no textbooks. The unluckier of the elderly are
rotting away in some fly-by-night nursing homes. Thousands of
Americans have lost their pensions and most of their life savings to
corporate shenanigans and stock-market bubbles.

But, despite all that, our president believes it is necessary to
spend $30 billion to $50 billion and God knows how many lives just to
remove a third-rate dictator 7,000 miles away. There will be some
good profits to be made on this war, but the young men and women who
have to fight it won't get any.

I'm not going to try to talk you out of this war. I've learned that a
president, when he sounds the war tocsin, can convince 74 percent of
the people that Jesus Christ is the devil and needs to be lynched.

I do hope you realize, though, that the war is a distraction, just as
Hemingway said, to take your mind off all the real problems that
President Bush is not even trying to solve. I do hope you realize
that Bush is risking a number of very bad unintended consequences. It
could become a regional war. We could get stuck in Baghdad for years.
We might end up, if it spills over into the oil fields, with $80-a-
barrel oil, which would wreck what's left of the economy.

Yes, I know, Prince Bush is saving you, just in the nick of time,
from the bloody jaws of the Lion of Baghdad. Believe that if it makes
you feel better.

© 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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