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.
Nicely put, Charles.
Why should we take climate change seriously while there are the Blue Angles spewing who knows how many times the amount of carbon released by all of Seattle’s traffic in a single hour?
@2 Was that before you all flew to Europe for vacation so you can come back and lecture us about the wonders of the NHS, Dutch cycling and Italian wines?
@3: Wrong stereotype, though Italian wines are wonderful.
@4 Poorly travelled, are you?
@4: Yes, dreadfully. But there’s still time.
“The removal of the Blue Angels … will not in any way impact American militarism.”
This is all that really needs to be said.
7: All successful countries have militarism.
I don’t know if I buy the empire moniker but there is no question we spend a ridiculous amount of our tax dollars on the military. Example, the US has over 13,000 military aircraft (which is just shy of a quarter of all military aircraft across the entire world) – that’s an insane amount. In terms of overall military spending, we are spending about a trillion dollars per year – and we are at war with no one (not even war-lite like Iraq or Afghanistan).
This is why you don’t have universal healthcare / do have a disintegrating social safety net.
All the outrage over The Blue Angels among a certain set here in Seattle ignores the fact that aerospace and the military are what built Seattle from WWII on. While Amazon is now the states biggest employer, Boeing is the second biggest, and if you add in all the companies dependent on Boeing, that probably exceeds that of Amazon.
I no Boeing cheerleader (they have scores of paid PR flacks to do that) and I am indifferent to the Blue Angels, but in a town full of Aerospace employees and a region full of both active duty and retired military, the whine about their annual air show seems churlish and self-righteous – like the people who whine about the Seattle pride Parade.
I suspect that if the jets air dropped gift baskets of Narcan, condoms, and used copies of Kendi books Charles might be less grumpy about them.
Well argued, but … they’re just too damn loud, Charles.
Of all the things going on in Seattle every single day, people choose to be upset over some air planes they are in town for a week.
@9 We are in two proxy wars (Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Islamist States) that are fast depleting defensive weapons stockpiles, with a near-peer conflict on the horizon with economic juggernaut China. The militarism is warranted.
When I encounter people excited about the Blue Angels, it is because the jets represent a high level of engineering, not militarism. I have never heard another human being go on about the kill capacity the machines represent – just the engineering. It’s mainly entertainment for science/engineering nerds, not military types.
I agree, Jeebus999 dear. I don’t think the Blue Angels jets are even combat-capable. They’re mostly show ponies for PR purposes.
That said, if we needed them in some sort of military engagement (and we’d have to be pretty desperate, given our ridiculous inventory of war machines) I’m sure they can be retrofitted.