Newton's Laws Applied to the American Body Politic

Drawn back ceaselessly on a tide of inertia...where was I? Recently viewed the film, "Gonzo," about the life and fractious times of Hunter S. Thompson, innovative journalist, model for Duke in "Doonesbury," gun enthusiast, titanic drinker and drug-taker, chronicler of the death of the American Dream. He drank a quart of Wild Turkey a day just to keep his parts oiled, and that was before he mellowed out with hash, grass and God knows what else, as detailed in dizzying vividness in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, perhaps his trademark book.

Despite his air of world-weary (and hungover) cynicism, he did become a staunch supporter and completely subjective flack when it came to the candidacy of George McGovern in 1972. He believed in him, genuinely, admiringly. I did too, actually. It says a lot about the currency of my own ideas on America that McGovern was utterly pummeled by a gangster and war criminal, Richard M. Nixon, truly one of the despicable characters in American political history. McGovern carried the state of Massachusetts; that's it. The two-bit crook and Commie-baiter won everything else.

The movie makes a pretty good case, as seen through the jaundiced and often delirious prose of Hunter S. Thompson, that the American dream flicked it in about 1968. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, on the heels of the Tet Offensive, followed by the riots in Chicago, the secret, criminal bombing of Cambodia, Four Dead in Ohio, and the flattening of George McGovern. That's an awful lot of negative mojo. When the Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan murdered Bobby Kennedy, the country was only 17 years past the great speech of Dwight D. Eisenhower warning of the perils of the military-industrial complex. McGovern listened to him; he wanted to end the business of "old men sitting in rooms dreaming up wars for young men to die in," and he wanted to make massive cuts in defense spending and use the resources saved to implement universal health care and improve the social safety net. As a genuine war hero, a pilot of B-25s who flew the full complement of his bombing missions during World War II, McGovern had the unassailable credibility to challenge the MIC. A Democratic operative interviewed for the movie said it simply: "With that platform in this country, all I can say is: Good luck."

So now forty years later, we see that the U.S. is bound up inextricably, immovably, by Newton's First Law of Motion: I. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

America is stuck in a militarized state of uniform motion it cannot alter. The motion of the country is toward war and more war, defense spending and more defense spending, security measure piled on top of security measure. At a moment when the nation's chief climatologist, James Hansen, is warning us that the next few years will be make-or-break for climate tipping points; when the seas are becoming too acidic to support coral reefs or the bottom of the marine food chain; when bees and bats are mysteriously disappearing from the ecosphere for reasons the mainstream government and media are not even curious about, we spend our time thinking about the influence of Iran on Iraq's internal affairs, and whether our security might be enhanced by yet another preemptive war.

So go back to Newton's Law and notice how he describes the force which changes the motion vector: external. I think in our case what will finally break the back of the military-industrial stranglehold on the nation is that largest of all external forces, Reality itself, soon to visit a force arrow near you.