Has Van Jones Lost His Mind, Or Are Sane People Missing the Point?
By David Swanson
http://davidswanson.org/node/5462
A rational and moral person might think of the recent U.S. raid in Yemen this way. Here's one small incident out of a
war consisting primarily of a massive bombing campaign that has slaughtered innocents by the thousands and is
threatening to lead to the starvation of hundreds of thousands. In this one incident some 30 people were murdered, some
10 of them women and children, one of them the 8-year-old sister of a 16-year-old American boy whom President Obama had
earlier murdered just after having murdered his father. There wasn't some Very Important Thing accomplished, such as
learning the cell phone number of someone suspiciously Muslim or whatever, that an immoral hack could try to claim
justified this incident. This was mass murder.
In the course of this mass murder, one American taking part in it was killed.
The first paragraph above is of virtually no interest to the U.S. media. The second paragraph above is of intense and
passionate interest. But there is a very different point that this interest misses. Much of the media coverage suggests
that the One American being killed was a very negative thing for Donald Trump. I'd suggest that it was a very negative
thing for the man killed and his family and loved ones, but not necessarily a bad thing for Donald Trump or Lockheed
Martin. Here's why.
When Van Jones appeared to lose his mind and declare Trump some sort of deity because of his Very Solemn treatment of
the death of the One Person Who Mattered, Van Jones was following a long tradition of treatment of the sacred
sacrificing of lives to the God of War, the feeding of troops to the Holy Flag. Only lives that matter can be used in
this ritual. Only lives that have been lost and that mattered can be used to justify hurling more lives after them.
President Polk knew this when he got U.S. troops killed in Mexico. So did those war propagandists who “remembered the
Maine.” The mast of the Maine still stands at the Naval Academy in Annapolis as a monument to the fundamental rite of
lying about dead people who mattered, in order to remove all constraints on behavior.
As Richard Barnet explains, in the context of Vietnam:
“The sacrifice of American lives is a crucial step in the ritual of commitment. Thus William P. Bundy stressed in
working papers the importance of ‘spilling American blood’ not only to whip up the public to support a war that could
touch their emotions in no other way, but also to trap the President.”[i]
Who was William P. Bundy? He was in the CIA and became an advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He was exactly the
kind of bureaucrat who succeeds in Washington, D.C. In fact he was considered a “dove” by the standards of those in
power, people like his brother McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to Kennedy and Johnson, or William Bundy’s
father-in-law Dean Acheson, Secretary of State for Truman. The war makers do what they do, because only aggressive war
makers advance through the ranks and keep their jobs as high-level advisors in our government. While resisting
militarism is a good way to derail your career, no one seems to have ever heard of a D.C. bureaucrat or CNN news reader
being sidelined for excessive warmongering. Pro-war counsel may be rejected, but is always considered respectable and
important -- even proposals to murder Americans directly, like Operation Northwoods or Dick Cheney's scheme for Iran.
How can being responsible for getting People Who Matter killed trap a president into killing lots more of them?
This is not about logic. You have to stop thinking, and start observing the behavior of Van Jones' audience. When People
Who Matter have been killed, it becomes important to kill more of the Enemy even -- or perhaps necessarily -- through
means that also kill many more of the People Who Matter. The flag's appetite has awakened.
This is not the only way in which the U.S. media is treating this Death That Matters. Some commentators are even
suggesting that it was a life lost in vain. Not in mass murder, but in vain. We should be aware, however, that the
insanity Van Jones is tapping into is a powerful current with a long records of horror and destruction behind it.
[i] Stavins et alia, Washington Plans an Aggressive War, p. 206.
ends