Addict Nation (37 page)

Obsessive cleanliness may also be a manifestation of deep-rooted feelings of guilt, shame, and a fear-based need to control our narrowly defined environment in an increasingly frightening and outof-control universe. I may not be able to exert any influence over this crazy, scary world, but—dammit—I can impose order on my closet.

“Partially it is about control. Control over an intimate, close environment. Control gives me some sort of pay off emotionally.”

—Anonymous cleaning addict

Emotionally Sober Cleanliness Is About Letting Go

Emotionally sober cleanliness is about surrendering to life on life’s terms, germs and all, and trusting the universe enough to believe that certain tiny creatures—including bugs—were put here by nature for very good reason. If you do find a bug or a spider in your house, why not try your very best to remove it to the outdoors and let it go on its merry way?

When it comes to personal hygiene, emotionally sober cleanliness is an acknowledgment that we are meant to coexist with microbes that are invisible to the human eye and that everything that we encounter by surprise is not our enemy. Emotionally sober cleanliness is about accepting our bodies and trying to keep ourselves clean and pure internally.

A little self-analysis might also help get to the root cause of a cleaning binge. I know when I get the urge to clean unnecessarily, it’s often because I’m avoiding something I’m supposed to do, like a writing assignment. Or perhaps I’m trying to “dust away” a resentment. We tell ourselves that by cleaning vigorously, we can rid ourselves of something unwanted. It’s like purging. But by throwing it out, are we really getting rid of it? Sobriety is not about dumping something unwanted. It’s about processing it.

Garbage, dirt, and waste are never really eliminated. They are only moved from one part of our world to another. Why not embrace the whole world as ours to protect and keep clean? This will inspire us to become concerned about much more than just what happens within the narrow confines of our bathrooms and backyards.

There’s a saying in recovery: You can save your face or you can save your ass. One might also say, you can scour your home or you can save the planet.

Chapter Eleven
THE MONGERS: Addicted to War

T
here’s a reason I’ve saved the worst for last. While every addict is supremely self-destructive, our nation’s addiction to war could—one day—get us all killed. All addiction is progressive. So it stands to reason that our current addiction to war—if allowed to spiral—will invariably lead us into some kind of cataclysmic conflict that could literally wipe millions of people off the face of the earth in a matter of moments. The United States has already proved that one nuclear bomb can destroy a city in a hot second.

The world’s first atomic attacks were America’s bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki some sixty-five years ago. Those two bombs, named Little Boy and Fat Man, turned into massive radioactive fireballs that killed about 200,000 human beings in explosions so violent they literally vaporized people, although many died slow, agonizing deaths from burns and radiation.
¹

Right now, the world has more than 22,000 nuclear warheads, some of which are reportedly thousands of times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus far, the United States is the only country in history to have used nuclear weapons in warfare.
²
Given that, Americans have a responsibility to take a serious look at whether our modern systems for waging war—and our recent justifications for going to war—have a track record of rationality or whether it’s become addictive behavior.

This Is a Patriotic Exercise

We owe it to ourselves—citizens, voters, and taxpayers—and to our children to expose and examine the issue of “war addiction.” We have an obligation to America’s courageous and well-intentioned soldiers to do due diligence on our rationale for sending them into life-threatening situations. The men and women of our armed forces, who’ve made so many personal sacrifices to serve our country, should only be asked to risk their lives for an absolutely necessary cause, not a seductive delusion. We can honor our war heroes, maintain the security of our nation, and still examine the addictive component in war. I say this because war addicts, otherwise known as warmongers, are the first to question someone else’s patriotism when it conflicts with their grandiose designs for war.

To understand how the concept of addiction applies to our relationship with war, let’s revisit how we define addiction. It’s an overpowering craving to indulge in a given behavior, followed by bingeing, which is justified through rationalization, followed by remorse, which eventually wears off, allowing the craving to return stronger than ever. Our nation’s war cycles fit these criteria. We justified the Vietnam War with the rationalization of the domino theory, binged on war, felt a tremendous remorse, created the antiwar movement, made a commitment to peace, and then—over a few decades—forgot every lesson we learned. It’s the same pattern of the drunk who gets arrested, feels remorseful, vows to stay sober, remains sober for a few weeks, and then—when the embarrassment has finally worn off—goes out and gets drunk all over again. Addiction is a disease of amnesia.

“Hopefully it reaches a breaking point where you recognize that you’ve got a problem. You hit rock bottom where you recognize that you’ve got a problem . . . you recognize that you’ve got an addiction and that it is destroying you. And when you finally are willing to come to terms with that, then you do something about it.”

—Charles F. “Chic” Dambach, president
and CEO of the Alliance for Peacebuilding

Addictions can rarely be traced to one single cause. I became an alcoholic because of a genetic predisposition (my dad was an alcoholic), environmental exposure (I saw him drink to excess and regarded that as normal), and emotional and psychological reasons (I was using alcohol to check out and suppress childhood traumas). Similarly, there are many factors that lead to our collective war addiction.

The most obvious component is our military-industrial complex. Ironically, while those who bandy the phrase are—today—usually considered lefties, it was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who coined the term in his farewell address to the nation in 1961, a speech that has served as a haunting prophecy:

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
³

For the military, the industries that profit from war, and the politicians who are influenced to support war, the stakes are higher than ever. War is getting more and more expensive and, therefore, more and more profitable. By the summer of 2010, the Iraq/Afghanistan wars had cost American taxpayers more than $1 trillion, making those wars, combined, the second costliest conflict in American history, right behind World War II. And that’s adjusted for inflation.
⁴

If you look at it in terms of cost
per soldier
, Iraq/Afghanistan takes the prize as
the most expensive conflict ever
—even when adjusted for inflation. It cost about $132,000 to house, clothe, equip, transport, and engage a soldier in Vietnam for a year. It costs more than a million dollars a year to keep a soldier fighting in Afghanistan, according to a report in the
New York Times
.
⁵

High-tech weapons and aircraft are a big part of the escalating cost. To give you a taste of the money at stake in keeping our war machine at full throttle, there’s currently a project in development to make one jet that, with variables, could be used by the Marine Corps, the Navy, and the Air Force. It’s called the Joint Strike Fighter plane, also known as the F-35 Lightning II. The military plans to buy almost 2,500 of these planes for about $323 billion dollars!
⁶
This is now on track to become the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons project. The main contractor is the nation’s largest defense contractor, working in partnership with another defense behemoth. But, as with every addict’s grandiose plans, the project has run into trouble. Production costs have reportedly doubled. PBS spoke to defense analyst Winslow Wheeler, who said, “The cost on this thing is out of control, but they’re pretending it’s affordable . . . We have another five years of, you know, testing and development to go. We have only begun to learn about the problems. And so by the time this thing is done, it will be a record-breaker in terms of nightmares in costs, scheduling, performance.”
⁷

Just as an exercise, what would all that money buy aside from 2,500 fighter jets? Let’s see. Some estimates are $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth.
⁸
Okay, so that still leaves us about $290 billion. Oh, I know. We could end world hunger. The cost of ending world hunger has been price-tagged at about $195 billion a year.
⁹
So for the cost of over 2,500 fighter jets, we could end world hunger for a year, provide a year of primary education for every child on earth, and still have almost $100 billion left over. Hmmm.

“Our conflict seems to me to be symbiotically tied to our economic system. We need it in order to really create messes that can then be addressed through more production and more consumption. So there is a way in which our lifestyle compels us to be addicted to war.”

—Laura Roskos, Ph.D., co-president of U.S. section of the
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

Did the military contractor get this mind-boggling deal on the strength of its technology alone? Could it have anything to do with this defense contractor having one of the most powerful lobbying arms in Congress? This same contractor is known to spend over a million dollars a month lobbying politicians.
¹⁰

Our military-industrial complex needs war to stay profitable. These bureaucracies have taken on a life of their own and have become self-perpetuating. It helps that war is a fabulous distraction. When we are constantly kept in fear, with multicolored terror alerts, we are too distracted to challenge what our government is doing. Many people are also afraid to speak out for fear of being accused of being unpatriotic.

“The reason why we spend such a significant part of our resources in this country on armaments is because there is a deep fear, and that fear is continually played upon, and we really haven’t tapped our own courage to be able to challenge the fear.”

—Dennis Kucinich, Congressman (D-OH)
and sponsor of the Department of Peace Act (HR 808)

This is what you might call the macro aspect of our cultural addiction to war. There is also the micro aspect, why war is appealing to certain individuals and groups of individuals. Whatever the drug, we use it addictively if we’re using it to escape, stuff painful feelings, or compensate for insecurities. That also applies to war.

War as the Ultimate Expression of Power

From Alexander the Great to Napoleon, history is filled with leaders who physically led their soldiers into battle. Conversely, today, the “leaders” who are the most insistent on the need to send others to their deaths have not experienced any battlefield action themselves. This would describe most of the so-called neoconservatives who were itching to invade Iraq and whose opinions held such sway in the Bush White House after 9/11.
¹¹
Because there’s such a clear pattern of hawkish men who’ve sidestepped military service angling for war, it suggests these men are subconsciously trying to experience vicariously what they’d gone out of their way to miss in practice. In war, as in sex, some fantasies that are degrading when acted out can seem fun when they are simply flights of fancy. What would Sigmund Freud say about these guys and their latent machismo? Could these mongers subconsciously be trying to overcompensate for their sense of inadequacy and guilt in having escaped—thanks to their privileged backgrounds—one of man’s most daunting and timeless rites of passage? Are they perhaps telling themselves—in some dark corner of their psyche—
Well, I am
doing my manly duty now, by maneuvering us into a war
. Or are they just “getting off ” on the ultimate high: power. Are warmongers drunk with power?

In contrast, Dwight Eisenhower, the heroic World War II general who became president, famously said, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
¹²

War addiction is not limited to any one party or narrow ideology. The United States has been at war for almost a quarter of its roughly 230-year history, waging war during one out of every five years of its existence.
¹³
War is no longer an aberration, but something Americans have come to expect.

On the Global Peace Index, which uses a set criteria to evaluate the peacefulness of nations around the world, the United States ranks eighty-fifth among nations, far below our immediate neighbor to the north Canada, which ranks fourteenth and behind the United Kingdom, which is in thirty-first place.
¹⁴

“From a psychodynamic point of view, this is primal. I believe that Freud was right: no matter what people criticize about him. There are two instincts that are primal in humankind: Eros and Thanatos. One is the desire for life, which includes love and procreation and relationship, and the other is the desire for Thanatos, which is aggression and includes war.”