Quiet as ever yesterday; going to Acme was the high point of the day. I have a dozen or so Life magazines from the forties and pulled them out to read.
I was--again--struck with the "all in this together" tone that ran through the ones during WW II. Many of the articles concerned the war and and a number of ads emphasized the fact that there were shortages because of
"the war effort." From a pacifist point of view, I'm not sure whether this is good or not. Is it better to be oblivious as we are now concerning the slaughter we're sponsoring around the world? That allows the hawks to pretty much call the shots. On the other hand, when war seems more a joint venture involving most of the population, maybe our insane nationalism is solidified and more of us will hold out for "victory." Not sure about this; I only know it was a different era--and a different country.
Related to that huge change of focus in my lifetime, here's another quote from Chris Floyd in his "Empire Burlesque":
"...the government has spent more on saving the rich from the consequences of their greed than it spent in winning World War II: more than $4 trillion so far, with much more to come. This astonishing theft – the largest gobbling of public loot by a rapacious elite in the history of the world – will only further cement the powerful in their entrenchments on the commanding heights of society. The nation may rot beneath them, may be roiled by storms of blowback; but that is not their concern, it is no defeat for them. You can lose; they do not. This is not to say that our elites don't tell themselves any number of flattering, self-justifying fairy tales about the boundless nobility and righteousness of their intentions. They can do this because they identify the interests of the system of elite rule (and the comfort, power and privilege they personally receive from the system) with the common good of the nation, or the world, as a whole. This allows them to pursue truly monstrous policies without regarding themselves as monsters. It allows them to order actions, such as the escalation of the destructive, destablizing conflict in Afghanistan, which they know, with absolute certainty, will needlessly murder innocent women, children and men -- and still talk earnestly and sincerely about their hopes for peace, their concern for humanity, their deep, abiding faith in a loving God. But again, as we have said over and over here, what matters are not the rhetorical justifications of power or the stated intentions of power -- or the charisma, likeability or compelling story of the wielders of power; what matters are the operations of power, its actual effects on the human beings on the receiving end of its machinations. Like love, power is what it does, not what it says." (Emphasis added.)