In the '60s protestors would chant "Bring the War Home." In our time the War has just walked in all on its own. You can't separate our global aggressive, interventionist, acquisitive foreign policy from the "Police Gone Wild" at home. Where's the border? Who's policing it, if there is one? What goes around comes around, and look at what we're sending around.
Whatever the real power of Presidents, in whatever context viewed, they do set tones. For instance, it was only days after Reagan took office that comedians were telling ethnic jokes again on TV. And celebrating that at last they could do this material.
What we've got now took off with King George the Insane Buffoon and his riding the terror to open up war war war in all directions of the globe. and for generations to come. For, as his advisers and pals had insisted in their Project for the New American Century, we'll only be safe when the entire world is in tow to the US; all potential enemies crushed; all possible centers of one-day opposition in chaos or responsive to our suggestions.
To do that, we'd have to be dominant in the land, the air, the sea, space, cyberspace, biology, information, data-collecting, weapon design and delivery… and then apply that to every nation and population.
Full-Scale Dominance.
In plain English, absolute paranoia, complete with delusions of grandeur.
There's an old song:
Paranoia strikes deep
into your life it will creep
it comes when you're always afraid
step out of line, the man comes
and takes you away.
(Of course, this was a song by white guys, and the wrong-hued citizen doesn't even have to step out of line to end up with an ambulance taking them away.)
Anyway, there's no borders for Full-Scale Dominance. That's why, in addition to the heinous acts we hear about, there's the rise in massive force response to even trivial violations of the law. Hell, suspicion of violations can have you and your family with guns at your head held by SWAT-type teams that just broke down your door; innocent or not.
That's the psycho/spiritual aspect I'm talking about. Remember when some Bush apparatchik, or was it Bush Srs?, who said something much like 'every now and then you have to pick up a nation and throw it against the wall just to show people not to mess with you'?
To the power-crazed and paranoid, the arbitrary use of power is its own end. Just as the idea in foreign matters is to make everyone comply, everywhere, because we say so, the same applies domestically. In the Höméløhnd (is that term creepy or what?), we're being conditioned, with the Cyber-Stalking, the random brutality, the massive over-response, to accept arbitrary authority.
Can't separate 'foreign' and 'domestic' really. You can to get into the nitty-gritty of an artificially-limited range of operations, but in the mind and spirit… what goes around comes around.
The material aspect is part of the loop, or more accurately, a downward spiral of the breaking of civil society's basic rules if it is function as a democracy. We not only squander what we need to spend at home on destroying lives and things abroad; we fuel discontent at home, which itself is an invitation, and a justification, for increased over-reaction. Militarized over-reaction.
Military abroad. Military at home.
Going back to Project for the New American Century, the signers were leading neo-Cons. But it's a mistake to ignore that they were providing voice to the vision for large swathes of intelligence, military, and police types: mostly extreme right-wingers; often racists; still with jobs and things to accomplish in their establishments.
I think it revealing of the core sickness of this section of policy-shapers and enactors that we have this quote from their Signal publication.
And advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool. (wiki
In other words, the potential for genocide or at least the threat of genocide against any of our enemies. But from a genetic (which is intrinsically racist) view-point. That's the type of mindset embedded in our policy makers.
Full.Scale.Dominance.
Has not gone away. And the goal at home looks to be of a piece with the goal abroad.