How to win the war on “war on…”

The “War on…”

Drugs, Hunger, Crime, Poverty, Terror, COVID, Homelessness, Illiteracy, Science, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and so on.

A legitimate war on, has, in advance of its initiation, presents to the American voters not only the charges that compelled the war, but also the specific, achievable outcomes which would constitute its victory, and a similarly articulated unwinding, postwar plan. Any war that is not this, is therefore of the other type.

I distinguish the legitimate war on from its doppelganger, the illegitimate “war on…” by these measures:

In written form I stigmatize the illegitimate and put it in the handcuffs of quotation marks and an ellipsis. It is a “war on…”

In spoken form, to make the listener aware of which side of the homonym I have put face up, I exaggerate the pause between words and drag the last syllable so that it’s said like a game show clue.

Each “war on…” is an Industrial Complex that begins in the same romantic wishful tones a young couple contemplates their future family. The conception is finely crafted, precision engineered, made in the workshops of think tanks, PR agents, lobbyists and bureaucrats-in-waiting.

In expensively monotonous meeting rooms, the “War on…” is previewed on powerpoint slides. Attendees, themselves the progeny of wistful “war on…”, reminisce about how long their parents have known each other and no-one wants to be the last one clapping and each, on their journey home, recites all those same positive affirmations that they all learned from all those same business management books.

Every “war on…” has its shot heard round the world, the meticulously planned surprise birthday party moment in which it goes from the public’s back of mind to its frontal lobe.

The first significant encounter is shock and awe, an image of suffering. But it will also be scienceful, creatively using imperfect information to distort the space between the observer’s mind and reality.

Within days of the visual assault will be solicitous soliloquies, some political ointment that will improve the situation of the victims in a sharply contrasted, pharma commercial type of way and yet also promises retribution on the wrongdoers.

A “War on…” needs twisty worded well rehearsed obscurantism from tweedy professors and cool kid adjunct teacher types who aspire to think tank glamour gigs. Media has a roster of academic vouchers who can speak with miscredentailed authority on every subject as though recruiting for a multi level marketing company. They are eager to fill up every inch of informational real estate with plastic words, jargony scientificisms and a garish vernacular that will inspire the lower ranks of amateur punditry.

Experts, cloaked in pomp and zebra skins, use the confusion effect to escape Socratic predators. On the offense, their linguistic combat skills imperceptibly shift whatever objectives commenced the “war on…” to something vaporous and out of reach. From this lead, people are re-imprinted to cheer each strike of the hammer in whack-a-mole “war on…” problem solving.

Adherents wash their experts in the myrrh of plausible deniability “if only he had known then what he knows now” and then rinse themselves in the wastewater, “If only I had known then what I know now” and with biblical forgiveness, they make victims turn the other cheek.

Journalists and the ilk are given exclusive red carpet access to those “experts” and will ask them profoundly tongue-in-cheek questions and receive answers in kind. If ever it might happen, what passes for a debate amongst experts can be listened to in silence.

Tiktok, the malcontent’s soapbox, purple haired bully pulpit, is a laboratory where powder-kegs are fomented. A “war on…” transphobia, on people who vote wrong, a “war on…” people who decline nebulous vaccines for nebulous viruses, a “war on…” people who won’t war on people. A “war on…” the personal enemies of people with “personal truths”. Societies become minefields that can always accommodate one more improvised explosive device buried just beneath its surface.

Seriocomic Denunciation Industrial Complex ensemble casts like The View are a rainbow of Nurse Ratcheds, they are a panel of outsourced inner voices, sipping ritually from their barbituated coffee mugs. Viewers needing instructions to improve their social aura, juxtapose themselves into the TV stars overburdened chairs and allow themselves to become agents of the cultural script purchased in The View’s post-bellum bordello, and viewers take comfort that whatever trigger they are made to pull, it is not their fault, they were merely following orders.

Every “War on…” is affixed to the Disney’fied World War 2 false memory machine. It is spoken of posthumously as a monument to the ‘sacrifices’ that were needed to win and that America won because we were “with us.” And every “war on…” requires that an evil abstract allegory be employed, it has to be some familiar sounding wrong, “Jim Crow” is convenient for this purpose, it is used like a drape to give target issues all of the same dimensions and contours.

A “war on…” does not have an expiration date and Democracy’s apparatchiks will never end a “war on…” because it is against cocktail party etiquette.

To end these monstrosities requires a war on “war on…”

But can a war on “War on…” be won?

The end.