Fearlessly the idiot faced the crowd … Smiling
Merciless the magistrate turns ’round … Frowning

And who’s the fool who wears the crown?

And go down in your own way
And every day is the right day
And as you rise above the fear-lines in his brow
You look down; hear the sound
of the faces in the crowd

Pink Floyd, Fearless

Furthermore. If you walk on with hope in your heart, you’ll never be walking alone. Even if, as is very likely, that hope is baseless, and even demonstrably foolish. So what’s better? David Gilmour or Roger Waters?

Or poor dear simple Syd.

I have the answers to those questions

Waters if you want to see what’s real at any cost. Gilmour if you’d rather not see and prefer a nice hot rock massage at a resort where high-school dropouts and meth-heads clean the pool for you. You won’t have to bother with their backstories or their trauma. Probably.

Syd, if you’ve cracked your heart and are ready to die.

***

Meddling. Oh, the sad song of Russian meddling.

Any noble citizen of Empire who sings it unironically is a hypocrite.

It’s very difficult to find a full and comprehensive list of every Intervention the US has been a part of since the Bombs dropped eighty years ago. This is because some compilers only count shooting wars, others focus on regime changes, assassinations of the overseas variety, or black ops mired in the realms of conjecture and speculation. Including any and all forms of ‘election interference’.

This one’s pretty decent though.

This one helps round out the picture–what does the Empire need military bases all over Africa for? Uruguay? National security? Please.

They need the bases to ensure that the exploitation and hegemony continues uninterrupted in a nice smooth predictable profitable manner. Businessmen love mitigating risk.

They need the bases in case locals start to get uppity or talk commie. They need the bases to fuel the permanent war economy, and to recover their regime-changer spooks if things go sideways, like they did in Libya a few years back–oh my god, Americans died. That’s very bad for Empire PR, but in the end it just greases the wheels.

Everybody points fingers and screams at each other back home about whose fault that was.

In all the howls of blame, no one thinks to question what those ‘diplomats’ and the soldiers who failed to protect them were even fucking doing there in the first place.

They were doing America’s business, and America’s business is War Without End, Everywhere. Promoting …

“Our Interests”. The interests of sleek oligarchs, that means, not the residents of Flint drinking poisoned water.

There is a literal and tangible connection between the image of Qadaffi’s severed head rolling around in the gutters of Tripoli, and your eyes as they pore over what’s on the massage menu today.

Or mine. Naturally. We don’t like to think about such things. It’s much easier to believe that we’re special, exceptional, blessed, smarter, more hardworking and moral, or just plain luckier than the poor benighted slants, or apes, or whoever’s country we happen to be fully or partially occupying at the time. Which is most of them.

Most of them. Which is why it’s so hard to say which episodes or incidents qualify as interventions, or meddling, or whatever euphemism you want to pick for what it is your Empire does in your name.

Academic drones write whole books trying to create a more perfect list.

On this sunny afternoon in March, far away from all that in the mountains, I have another question.

When the same spooks and MICs splattered John Kennedy’s brains all over his wife’s pretty pink dress in Dallas, did that count officially as an Intervention?

Was that “meddling”, with the process of democracy and free elections?

Just … endlessly academically curious, about those sorts of abstract distinctions, you know.

The real point of the question is … let’s say we don’t give a shit about what our System and Way of Life does to random Iraqi children or some bag of irrelevant cambodian grandmas.

What has it been doing all our lives to us? Let’s get realpolitik about it. Let’s be hardnosed and practical and selfish and serious. Let’s acknowledge that there are bad people in the world and that some of them will, and need to, end up dead in the name of Liberty.

What has all this done to you and me, baby?

(“I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons …”)

That’s what’s really important, isn’t it?

How much for the truck? How much for this saw palmetto, this anti-aging serum, this tummy tuck, this beach house? How much for an F-22, an M-1, this suitcase full of cluster bombs, this nuke rotting in a North Dakota silo, and how much to buy the Donbass and get rid of Vlad forever?

An arm and a leg I’m sure.

A human soul, sold cheap by the dozens, the hundreds, the millions.

Oh the millions, to buy us security and freedom and hope and a pillow that will suck the pain of knowing ourselves right out of our brains as we lay back peacefully on these luscious organic Egyptian cotton sheets.

In the name of Jesus and Tom Jefferson and Reverend Martin and General Eisenhower we pray.

Amen.