Like a hammer looks at a nail

And so yet another anniversary of the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki pass with all the usual stories, justifications, recriminations and memorials.

Yet what continually amazes me is the fact that Americans in general cannot see the horror behind the decision President Harry Truman made to incinerate the two cities, nor will America look into its soul and ask why we have a love affair with militarism.

And so is it any surprise that after all this time and all that we know, that the leading Democratic candidates are unwilling to take the nuclear option off the table in dealing with Iran and even Barack Obama, who should know better, speaks of invading Pakistan?

It's easy to trot out the usual explanations: America has always been at war or planning war since gaining its independence and war is rather profitable for the county as a whole. After all, we don't call it the national security state for nothing. A larger percentage of our civilian population, far more than any nation on earth, can trace their livelihood to the propagation of the warfare state.

So war is what we do because it works well for us, even if we don't always “win.”

But there's more to it of course. The sad reality, which Americans run screaming from, is we actually like being at war. Like Chris Hedges wrote, it gives us a purpose; it makes average Americans feel like they are doing something noble and necessary. General George S. Patton spoke admiringly of the basic American martial spirit and encouraged it in his troops.

And the history we teach our school children is basically a recitation of America hopping from one glorious patriotic war to another. Wars that are hard to wrap in glory, such as the brutal stomping of the Filipino insurrection, are glossed over or, more often, ignored.

War not only works for us, it gives us a meaning for our very existence as a people.

But still there's more. When the U.S. bombed Serbian targets in the Balkans it was pointed out, with some incredulity, that America was bombing white people for the first time since the Germans in 1945 (and the Germans were a historical exception in America's wars).

This is not a light point. American external wars have generally been conducted against people of colour and, in fact, contained a great deal of racist invective to inspire the troops. The aforementioned Filipino insurrection featured a racist ditty set to a popular tune (“Damn, damn, damn the Filipinos, cross-eyed kakiack ladrones”), to Admiral William Halsey's exhortations in World War II to “kill more Japs” (“you can help defeat the yellow if you do your job well”).

And we know that American troops routinely refer to the Iraqis as “hajjis” and worse as they go about their business of protecting the empire's oil.

The question the world has is why don't Americans see this in themselves?

The answer is, they do, and they largely don't care. Ask our aboriginal population about that. Ask the descendants of slavery about their “40 acres and a mule.”

Today, for example, in many audiences, any attempt to decry the use of the atomic bomb is met with violent rejoinder. I recall witnessing a classroom erupting in fury at Cleveland State University when a professor suggested the bombs weren't necessary.

We now know, of course, that they weren't. Recently unclassified reports show that Truman knew the Japanese were ready to surrender if the emperor could keep his throne (which he did anyway). Even General Dwight D. Eisenhower opposed the bombing saying, “The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing ... I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

Truman wanted to send the Soviets a message. And he did on the backs of thousands of incinerated Japanese schoolchildren who were on their way that fateful morning.

No matter. The fall back, yet publicly unspoken, position among many Americans is that the only losses were yellow people, 10,000 of whom were not worth the life of one red-blooded Caucasian American GI.

And, after all, look at what we did to the people of Dresden.

Indeed another completely unnecessary slaughter of a defenseless population to prove a geopolitical point. But they were white after all which, in some people's minds, makes America an equal opportunity slaughterer. The only problem with that defense of Dresden was that the idea to incinerate that city came primarily from the British who had revenge fantasies of their own and the Americans went along for the ride.

Again, no matter. During the initial stages of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I heard again and again the omelet analogy used to justify laying waste to Iraq's infrastructure (“gotta break a few eggs”).

The main reason for much of the cavalier attitude of average Americans toward war is the fact that for the vast majority of us, war is something we either experience vicariously through movies, television, video games, and, on rare occasion, books. Also, the death, destruction, pestilence and misery of war is something that, since 1865, has happened to “other people, over there.”

That is, of course, what made the events of Sept. 11, 2001 so significant and, ultimately, so dangerous. Nothing is more fearsome than the martial spirit of the average American aroused and the attack on home soil was enough to unleash an unconscionable military overreaction in the minds of average people.

Of course, they weren't going to war; they were exhorted to go shopping — the government would unleash the dogs of war on our behalf while we could sit in front of CNN on television watching the justifiable fruits of our vengeance. And, truth be told, many still feel the same way.

So when you still hear Americans talk about turning Iran into a glass parking lot, the sentiment is rooted in over a hundred years of looking at the world the way a hammer looks at a nail.

When a people feel they are literally born to rule the world, when they see other people's resources as their birthright, when they can use racial and nationalistic justifications for the slaughter of “the other” and when those people take a perverse pride in the hatred other nations and people have for them because of these beliefs, you have, as a result, the expected by-products of 200 years of U.S. history.

Can anything change? Sadly, knowing my people as I do, as long as someone else's children in far away lands, of which we know nothing, cry for their dead parents amidst their shattered homes, I see no transformation in sight.

One could make the case that if the American people could experience the horrors that the average Iraqi now experiences as a result of our invasion, that hearts and minds might change.

I don't buy it. Instead, most Americans, if war ever did visit our neighborhoods, would cry for even greater vengeance. This is why I fear that the nuclear genie we escaped unbottling during the Cold War is getting ready for his curtain call now.

The ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki roam the earth sadly watching our talking heads discuss nuclear yields and radiation footprints in attacks on Iranian nuclear reactors the way one talks about baseball scores.

One can only hope that somewhere, burrowed deep in the highest reaches of our military/governmental structure are rational, reasonable men and women, biding their time, watching and waiting nervously when the fate of humankind may require them to countermand orders to launch Armageddon.

At least we can only hope so.

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