War Wrings Ides of March, March, March, the Boyz 'R Tramping.

Although the US has invoked War as its simile for the fight against  a microbe, we have yet to ask ourselves precisely what that means.

Even as the virus was making its invisible deadly progression throughout the States, the US government's center of planning, The Pentagon, was still dutifully spending its Trump bonanza on Military World War-gaming US military prowess in the field. Unfortunately, that field was in Wuhan in October 2019. 

Likewise, even now, as China is still being blamed, it has occurred to no one that as recently as March 11, pundits and politicians alike, none more so than our illustrious President, were all downplaying the severity of this influenza: "It's just a cold", "Big deal it's only the flu", "2000 people were in car accidents in Florida this morning, and no one is saying we should stop driving" (well, actually LOTS of people are saying exactly that, we simply prefer to ignore them ... not to mention that we now have Safety Glass in automobiles specifically because precautions against a horribly painful and unnecessary death seemed to be indicated by the number of fatal crashes taking place. We have subsequently seen fit to provide autos with not only safety belts and airbags, but have a national campaign, one that is still ongoing thanks to MADD, to eliminate the perceived god-given right to drive while impaired by alcoholic intoxication. Every single one of these measures taken to combat a known threat to Americans' lives has been enormously successful in doing exactly that. And every single one of them was fought tooth and nail by the very industry it abetted as being too financially onerous, even for the spectacularly profitable Automotive industry, the most lucrative, outside of Defense contracting, on the planet).

Ergo the "It's all China's fault" is revealed for the absurdity it is, as exactly why China would take any action against a microbe that "is just a cold virus", or at most, "is no big deal; it's only the flu", is never explained.

You can't hold these two theories simultaneously: You can't blame China for not taking action against a virus going viral when the very people they would have been protecting, the West, held any action they themselves should take as being unnecessary for the simple fact that, despite the evidence to the contrary that was staring them in the face (Italy was by then a already a basket case), it was just the same virus that caused the common cold. Nothing to see here, even as the Chinese kept insisting that, "Yes, THERE IS!"

China had gone overboard to alert the world to what was going on, not just about the severity of the virulence, but the elevated number of bad outcomes and the collapse of a number of those taken ill ... they shut down the country, for god's sake. Yet the West maintained, right up until the first New Yorker took sick, its stony-faced denial of reality, clutching its tattered rag of implausible deniability to maintain its staunch stance of remaining as implacable and impenetrable to the truth as any totalitarian regime. 

That's what Disaster Capitalism does: waits until "INCOMING!" arrives and only then taking action, usually in the form of a power grab, justified by the fact that, "Nobody could have seen it coming".

So that now firms from Goldman Sachs to Boeing turn the phrase "I'm from the government and I'm here to help", that Reagan scoffed at so much, into "I'm from the private sector and I'm here to help myself to the tsunami of public monies that really belongs to me."

Thus the need to liken it to War, as War is the one enterprise in this anything-but-free enterprise system that you can depend on Americans to wholeheartedly, no questions asked as to who gets the cash or how it's to be spent, support and dutifully open their by-now-battered public purse for.

But like the argument  that China is to blame for not taking more strenuous action to contain a virus that the USA insisted even as its onset was upon it (who cares about old folks dying on the West coast? We're in NEW YORK CITY!) that "People die from the flu every year", so why would anyone take any precautions against its spread?, there is a major disconnect in following our usual paradigm of likening our response to it to War.

That disconnect being that the US mentality during the entirety of this century is that Wars are fought, not to win, but to keep the justification for the mind-boggling costs of maintaining our military industrial ... oh wait, we have now convinced ourselves that the economy is "Post-Industrial" ... so it's now basically just the burgeoning Military Complex (never figured that would happen, Ike, did you?) as we have rejiggered our economy to funnel its output into not only the endlessly rapacious construction of the armamentaria of nuclear Overkill, but into waging Forever Wars.

"We are not in the business of Nation building or reconstruction "

Yeah; no kidding.

The problem with all these Wars is that the USA has had bad outcomes in every one of them it has engaged in (OK, there was Reagan's Granada, Bush's Panama, Clinton's Kosovo, but I meant against a country that actually has the means to defend itself) since I was born in 1952. By then the Military Industrial Complex against which Ike warned us of at the end of his term (how convenient) was already firmly in place (a major part of which was the Interstate Highway System, a product of the DOD which came into being during Ike's tenure). To name a few, there was:

War on Poverty: abysmal failure. There are more homeless now than at any time in our country's history, while the economy is at "full employment", boasting a GDP in excess of $20 Trillion for a population of a mere 350 million in a world where the other 7 billion people on the planet must scrabble over the remaining $67 Trillion of global GDP (2019 total GDP was $87 Trillion); and then using a substantial part of that GDP to incarcerate more human beings than all the rest of the world's countries combined and spending trillions more on a coalition of the willing in the countries of our "enemies", while spending scant amount of attention or dollars on any planning or implementing of disaster relief/prevention in our own.

War on Drugs: Waged against the only drug affordable, even then, by the underclass, Marijuana. By classifying it, despite the fact that it never was nor ever will be, a narcotic, and spending an untold (literally) fortune on combating it, only to start funding farmers in the South to grow it, farmers who lost their tobacco subsidy (That's right, a deadly addictive drug that, all during the USA's War on Drugs, the US government was subsidizing; despite the fact that all those in the vicinity of smokers were being forced to inhale their toxic gases. The DEA has and continues in many states, been waging a War against a drug they have spent generations insisting is harmful, yet never proven such, all the while claiming, as it still does to this day, it has no medicinal effect, despite the tonnage of data documenting that such a stance is not only mean-spirited, but inaccurate). Then came the self-inflicted opioid epidemic that decimated communities across the country in far greater numbers than have been affected by the current pandemic, all while the DEA's funding to fight the use of marijuana increased steadily.

Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen  ...

None of these "engagements" have resulted in a good outcome. Contrarily, several bad outcomes have sometimes occurred in the same country. They have turned swaths of the planet into a living hell. It's as though the Gaza Strip were the USA's ideal of Democracy in Action, America has imposed conditions on one country after another that far more resemble life under Israeli occupation than anything remotely resembling the "Freedom" we insisted was the road to prosperity (they forgot to tell them Whose prosperity ... hint: Ours), but that has only paved the road to ruin for millions who never asked for it.

And now we're being expected to hail the likening of the fight against a microbe as being on par with a War footing as being a desirable thing?

First, one is left to wonder, "How can a Nation that has been waging serial wars for what amounts to this entire century not already be on a War footing?"

And secondly, perhaps if we as a country didn't believe it necessary to lard the military with trillions of dollars to prepare for the eventuality of waging military engagements on three fronts simultaneously, all for the arrogant goal of Full Spectrum Domination of every nation on the planet, and instead, oh so timidly, suggested that perhaps, Mister armchair General (Now I know why they're called "Officers", their entire career is spent in the office), that we spend a smidgen of that tidal wave of unaccounted-for trillions on planning for the far more likely eventuality of a pandemic (similar to what California did under Arnold Schwarzenegger, to provide for just such a crisis: amassing both ventilators and respirators in sufficient quantities, but which effort has since been squandered under successive Democratic administrations). 

Therefore, at least from a semantics point of view, by likening the struggle against the Corona virus to our Forever Wars, we are basically signing up to be waging it for the rest of our lives; we will never be free of it, and it will drain every last cent the economy can furnish to prolong it and its attendant death and despoliation. Because it's good for the economy, which by and by, everything else having been brought to its knees, it has become increasingly clear, it had damn well better be.