America: Arms Dealer to the Stars!

And then along
comes one of those stories that makes you cringe down to your very
core, that makes you see our semi-fine nation and the world around it
through a bleak and unforgiving lens indeed. No matter how hard you try
and how you spin the story and flip it around and try to forcibly shape
it into something less slightly nauseating, all you can do is realize
that sometimes ugliness and violence win the day, the year, the planet.

So it is that a new report has just emerged, announcing with a
sort of drab and bitter capitalistic glee that America is once again the number one weapons dealer in the world.
It's true: We sell more guns, more major weaponry, tanks and rocket
launchers, fighters and Gatling guns and all sorts of brutal devices
specifically designed to destroy human life and induce fear and dread
and all manner of sadistic horror, than any other developed nation on
the planet. By a long shot.

But that's not all. Despite the bleak economy, despite what you
might expect to be a major downturn in such transactions, sales of
American-made guns and weapons of mass annihilation worldwide are
actually way up. As far as U.S.-made weapons are concerned, it
appears to be a boom time for war and death and conflict. Isn't that
fun to swallow with your hopes and dreams for a peaceful and calmly
evolving future?

So far ahead in weapons sales to the world are we, it's not
even a contest. We own the game. According to the nonpartisan
Congressional Research Service, while overall weapons sales were indeed
down due to global economic blight, sales of U.S. weaponry rose more
than 50 percent in a single year, totaling about $37 billion, up from
$25 billion the year before.

Translation: the U.S. now owns a whopping 68 percent of the
arms games worldwide. We're just like Wal-Mart, if Wal-Mart sold
Browning M2s and Stingers and flamethrowers. Isn't that reassuring?

Sure, you can water it down a bit, maybe propose to your
exhausted soul that we only sell said weapons to our friendly,
peace-seeking allies so they may protect themselves from various
evildoers and swarthy terrorists whom we also detest and wish death and
hate upon, or you could tell yourself that most of said weaponry is
really for defense and for shielding babies and puppies and virgins
from the darker nature of man.

You can even go so far as to suggest that our arms deals are
not promoting war, per se, but actually promoting peace, in that
inverse, bad-is-good, multiple-wrongs-make-a-right sort of way. It's
the classic, ridiculous NRA argument: if everyone owns a few thousand
warheads, no one will shoot anyone simply because they don't want to
get shot themselves. It's pathetic nonsense, but hey, whatever gets you
through, right?

Sad fact is, capitalism trumps all rational arguments, all
notions that we are out only to promote good in the world, and we will
sell weapons to just about anyone anywhere short of Al Qaeda itself.
Guerrillas? Dictators? Drug lords? If they somehow serve our global
agenda, hell yes. We sell billions in arms to our pals in the UAE and
Saudi Arabia, for example, regimes second only in oppression and
totalitarianism to the Taliban. We buy their oil, we turn around and
sell them fighter jets and grenades and sniper rifles. It's a win-win,
where everybody loses.

Of course, it's all nothing new. America has always been the
world's foremost arms dealer. Who can forget one of the classic
hypocrisies of all time, Bush's pathetic wail that we must stop the
development of weapons of mass destruction in countries we do not like,
when of course the United States owns more WMD than any developed
nation on the planet? We argue it's all about intent, all about
protecting our vital interests. Which may be partly true. The other
truth is, it's also all about profit, ethics and morals bedamned.

I can't help but recall that cute little scene in Iron Man,
when Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark character, a cocky, heartless arms
dealer, finally realizes the horrible human consequences of his trade,
what sort of mayhem and death he has helped promote, and decides to
turn his life around and fight for justice and help save the world.

Isn't that a charming little cartoon fable? Isn't that just
ridiculous, ultraviolent fantasy? Don't we nevertheless love to rub
such childish ideological balm all over ourselves and think that's really
what America is all about, that selling death to oppressive regimes is
merely a necessary evil and, gosh golly, if we could, we'd put a stop
to all such sales tomorrow in favor of ensuring a peaceful and utopian
future? Sure we do. In many ways, such a mass delusion is the only way
we can really get out of bed in the morning.

I'm not exactly certain how you counterbalance such bleak
data. I'm not sure where to look for an equally powerful story to
battle the dour fact that we are, at heart, a rather ruthless
capitalist military juggernaut that will gladly sell a sharpening stone
to an axe murderer if it serves our purposes and makes Lockheed Martin
a tidy profit.

Where do you look for proof that $37 billion in weapons sales
does not, in fact, exert a simply massive downward thrust on the desire
to imagine humanity is moving in an ultimately positive, hopeful,
nonviolent direction? The green movement? Solar power? Hybrid cars? As
if.

Maybe you don't look at all. Maybe there is no such story, no
way to offset the fact that war and violence are a major engine of
capitalism, and always will be. Maybe you only swallow it whole, hope
it doesn't tear a permanent gash in your spirit, and eagerly await Iron Man 2.