The Reality of the Military Industrial Complex

It dawned on me today, that perhaps I have not made it clear that Fayetteville, North Carolina, my home town, is a military town.  Not only is it a military town, now it is the host city for what has become the world's largest military base.  Perhaps we should call this metropolitan (if you can call it that) area Fort Bragg.  Fayetteville really is and probably always has been the commercial support system for the post.  They are changing that.  Since BRAC decided this was the place for Ground Forces Command, because a general wanted to be able to walk out of his office and see his charges, Fort Bragg has become a system of and for its self.  Like Mark Regensburger pointed out in his published refute to an opinion of mine that was published in the Fayetteville Observer, I never implied that Fort Bragg was an orange grove, a pine tree forest, or a sanctuary for the woodpecker, although two of those examples apply.  If you read the charter information about the formation of Fort Bragg, its geography was a major factor in it becoming a training ground for the United States Army.  Agrarian it is not, but once it was open to everyone.  This was before 9/11, before veteran army member Timothy McVey bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building with a huge rental truck filled with diesel fuel and fertilizer, and before cops began murdering African American men indiscriminately.  Fort Bragg was casual perhaps because the nation was tired of war.  We were at war for ten years in Viet Nam, and many people died for no reason.  American soldiers were labeled baby burners.  The country had a brief respite from the war machine until the Persian Gulf and Americas attempt to secure oil in the Middle East.  We haven't stopped this pillaging, and it is why America's fighting men are dying senselessly in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It is both oil and poppies, because large drug companies control both the prescription and illicit drug trades.  The rumor was the FBI flooded Hollywood with cocaine, because who else except well paid stars could afford recreational drugs?  In the flick American Made where Tom Cruise plays on of the first pilots who flew drugs into our country, I only could ask myself whence was the buy money coming?  Who had all of those millions in cash to be able to buy the drugs he was smuggling?  Good question I think.  The word was soldiers of all ranks were smuggling hard drugs into Fort Bragg in dead soldiers' coffins.  Now the base is buttoned up like a granny's gown, and DAK Americas, the former Roman Haas plant is owned by a Mexican conglomerate.  I am not making this stuff up.  I used to drive straight across the base to get to Pinehurst to play the piano in the hotel, right past the Special Operations facility.  When I drove back after midnight I would get strafed with attitude from low flying aircraft.  Sometimes I would see a night jump.  They were not concerned about a pianist.  We attended concerts at the stadium on July 4th, ate brunch at the Officer's Club, and otherwise had free reign of our taxpayers property.  Perhaps Professor Regensburger is not familiar with this era in Fayetteville history.  Certainly it was not agrarian, but it was not ominous and foreboding.  There were no attack helicopter ranges.  Pope Field was still Pope Air Force Base, and we would go to airshows right on the tarmac.  If is unarguable that Fort Bragg no longer is this way.  It also is unarguable that four returning veterans murdered their wives while stationed at Fort Bragg.  As much as the Pentagon, the DOD, or the Commander and Chief try, people want to get as far away from Fort Bragg as they can.  To me it is a bit like the Longaburger Basket company.  They want you to live on the compound.  Inhabitants of Fayetteville are familiar with the 82nd Airborne.  We are familiar with the Golden Knights.  We are familiar with an army that once was steeped in patriotism, pageantry, and good spirit.  Daniel Toven, in his brief stay at Fort Bragg, carried on this tradition with his Ground Forces Band.  We were privy to expertly performed music of all kinds in Festival Park all year long.  I really came to love this army band.  Now they have been dissolved and a small contingency merged with the already existent 82nd Airborne Band.  No longer do we have these concerts, and since the base is secure we are not free to frequent their performances for their own families.  We are accustomed to heavily loaded low flying C-130 transport planes filled with fighting machinery.  They are unmistakeable, because they fly in a que directly over Cross Creek Mall.  Today Fort Bragg is both covert and a covert.  They are loading munition trains underground.  People used to ask, "Where is all that dirt coming from?"  While Fort Bragg may not be NORAD, its proximity to Washington, DC is cherry.  Additionally the political process has relieved Charleston, South Carolina of its once naval responsibilities.  The hauling of heavy equipment via rail was one of the prerequisites mentioned when BRAC made their decision.  This burden was transferred from the Charleston Naval Station to Fort Bragg.  We live in a democratic republic, not a communist regime.  America's taxpayer dollars pay for the excess of Washington, DC, and as of late everyone who is an elected official seems to forget their job.  They are being paid to serve us.  The booty is so rich, so clandestine, and so tempting, they must take the fruit, and so they do.  Donald Trump is no different.  The deficit has escalated during his presidency.  No one in Washington seems to understand that each and every employee, elected official, or cabinet member has a job.  The entire charter of America, its government and systems, purposely has been discarded.  We are on a fast boat to communism.  The coronavirus merely is a tool to implement this vision.  "Stay in your homes!"  "Cancel cultural events!"  Control the masses.  I can't believe what I am seeing.  Our president wants to rule America like Kim governs North Korea, and everything he says or does leads to this philosophy.  Not unlike Adolph Hitler he has mesmerized and whitewashed his followers into submission.  The people you see at his rallies behind him at the podium are paid employees which travel with him on chartered buses.  I cannot look at him.  The change at Fort Bragg has come with this president.  A change in corporate America has come with this president.  How is it possible that CSX posted first quarter earnings of 834 million dollars in 2019?  That is in three months time.  Three months.  The answer is STRACNET, the Strategic Rail Corridor Network.  I am not going to take the time to research their protocol.  I know Hunter Harrison was hired as a ringer and then died.  His successor vowed to continue his rail policy, Precision Railroading.  I know CSX was found guilty of bullying their employees not to file for workers compensation.  It is a mafia.  Rudy disassembled the Italian mob and handed the reins over to a folks of his choice including himself.  So appropriate.  "We can't let those dago guineas control the rackets!"  The dapper Don died in jail and the new mob went to Ukraine with Rudy as their consigliere.  Trump is their Pope.  All of this politics aside and back to reality, or a semblence of sanity in American history, politics along with most other American aesthetics now are defunct.  America is a mass of addicted, self-aborbed, androgynous, androids staring blankly into the abyss of their iPhones.  The idea that one must become autonomous, self thinking, saavy, questioning, and plural is far beyond our current educational system.  It is marginal.  It is base line.  It is ineffective.  The current state of recent Americans is exactly what was desired by those in charge.  I have a lot to mourn,  the death of friends, family, and now the death of a nation and its heritage.  It is crumbling all around me.  We do not know what an artist is.  We do not know what politics is.  We do not know anything about what America is.  We are being transformed into nothingness only with the Greek gods pettily bickering over what's for dinner.  Once I enjoyed politics, because it gave you an identity.  You stood for something.  You had ideals.  You made decisions.  You disagreed.  Now we are fodder, and we are fodder so corporate America may do as they please.  Corporate regulation has been disassembed like the Office of Noise Abatement in the ERA, and arch enemies have taken control.  How can any Trump supporter not understand that it is the human race's responsibility to care for the earth?  Only childish trust accounts could be so foolish, a silver spoon in their mouths from birth.  It is time to wake up and become an adult.