I understand the world we live in isn’t the way it ought to be, but I also understand that I have to work with what’s available. And I, like you, and your cat, hate the Blue Angels, hate the sky-ripping rocket-racket. But we are in a military empire. To pretend otherwise, I still believe, is to prefer the illusion to the reality.

I have said this before (two years ago to be exact), and it deserves repeating because, despite all that’s going on with Trump, nothing about the US has fundamentally changed. And I say this as a person who voted for Kamala Harris, and would vote for her again and again. 

Getting rid of the Blue Angels will only hide the fact that our society is a military empire. There is a good reason why the US's defense spending is still, by far, the largest in the world. This is not simply a waste of money (though that reading, which has its intellectual birth in The Grundrisse and is developed by Rosa Luxemburg. has economic value and cannot be easily dismissed). But it's the raw power to hurt and kill that makes the excessive (even obscene) consumption Americans enjoy possible: cheap goods at Walmart and Amazon, access to the resources needed to lock consumers into automobile debt, and way too low prices at the pump (even in Washington State).

In the same way we should not sweep the homeless from the streets (putting aside the humanitarian argument for it, of course), we should not scrub the Blue Angels from our skies. The suffering our rich society deliberately throws onto its streets does not go away when it's swept out of sight. And yet, this is what many left-leaning voters want: the consequences of the unreal inflation of housing prices, the absence of anything close to meaningful social housing, and the rejection of rent controls made invisible.

The removal of the Blue Angels will only increase the size of Seattle's famous liberal bubble. But it will not in any way impact American militarism. We will have peaceful skies in early August while we are still in the heart of the empire, still supporting the armed forces in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Egypt, El Salvador, and elsewhere. Submarines with nuclear weapons will still be a ferry ride away from downtown. The last thing we should have is a mind whose sky is eternally clear of the Blue Angels and the Navy that supports this spectacle. When you are putting gas into your car and the sudden roar of the jets shatters your nerves, do not separate what you are doing from what just flew over you. The latter makes the former possible. 

The sequence is ideology in a state of perfection, which means: It's actually telling the truth. This is how the system functions. This is the empire as it is: the baseball park in Seattle, the army base in Tacoma; the cruise ships on the Sound, the nuclear submarines beneath the Sound; homes on San Juan Islands, the battleships serviced in Everett.   

A weaker ideology (and there is no such thing as no ideology) results from a sky without the Blue Angels. We may or may not like the truth of their noise and the empire they represent and impose, but this is where you live, this is how you eat, and this is the traffic jam you often find yourself in. And hating Trump, as most in Seattle do, doesn't change this fact. In the way change is not likely if we do not see the homeless, change is not likely if we do not see that our form of consumption is not outside but very much inside of the empire.