Pollywogs!

I read this recently and after having it percolate a couple days came up with the following, a simple adaption where I swapped out certain words for certain other words…

George Bush, at the behest of the PNAC, heaves the proverbial brick through the window of a baker’s shop in starting a war with Iraq and inviting Terrorists to join in the fray – Bring Them On.  The public gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the burning buildings, Shock and Awe, and the lack of WMD being deployed against the troops. After a while the public feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some, including Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, Halliburton and everyone else awarded no-contest contracts. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does the Iraq war cost?  Three hundred billion? That current total is quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the industrial military manufacturing corporations? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The billionaires have more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The war will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick started the war, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.

Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some fat rich old white man. The glazier war profiteer will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the public will be out the three hundred billion that could have been spent on universal health care (and vastly expanded student aid, and reduced taxes, and improved infrastructure, and…).  Because they have had to replace a window fix Iraq, they will have to go without the college grant they were counting on (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a broken Iraq and three hundred billion dollars he now has merely a broken Iraq.  If we think of the public as a part of a global community, the world has lost the positive new things that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.

The war profiteer's gain of business, in short, is merely the public's loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The public was thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the United States footing the bill and the war profiteers. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the public. They forgot precisely because they will not now enter the scene. They will see the new Iraq in the next decade or two. They will never see the extra 'suit' or other bauble that three hundred billion could have provided, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye…