Antidotes to Addictions

by
Gordon Coggins

The burdened soul, unable to bear what it perceives as reality, turns to some behaviour which soothes and comforts. We call it going on vacation. If the “vacation” is unduly frequent, however, we may call it “a problem.” If the problem behaviour becomes destructive or counterproductive, then it is probably addiction. The word is certainly being thrown around a lot lately, what with joggers addicted to “runner’s high”, or North Americans addicted to oil, or my cousin George addicted to food. On the economic front, too, there seems to be an addiction to “growth.” And some, otherwise normal citizens are unmistakably addicted to shopping. Think, too, of those who get twitchy if they miss their daily eight hours of TV. Finally, there is Joel Andreas’ “illustrated exposé,” Addicted to War (rev. 2003).1

This book is subversive. General Electric, or the Pentagon, or perhaps the Canadian Council of Chief Executives should be buying up all copies of it, as the Church of England in the mid-sixteenth century bought up copies of William Tyndale’s English translations of the Bible. (Their purchases gave Tyndale funds to bring out an illustrated edition of his next book of the Bible.)

This book is subversive. It gives a listing of American foreign military campaigns since the War of Independence. For example, “Between 1898 and 1934, the Marines invaded Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 5 times, Honduras 7 times, the Dominican Republic 4 times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico 3 times and Columbia 4 times,” in addition to China, Russia and North Africa; and “during the Cold War, Washington intervened militarily in foreign countries more than 200 times.”

This book is subversive. One of its conventions is that anything in quotation marks is a real quotation. For example: 1991 Henry Kissinger “Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.” 1894 Senator Orville Platt: “I firmly believe that when any territory outside the present territorial limits of the United States becomes necessary for our defense or essential for our commercial development we ought to lose no time in acquiring it.” 1945 Pres. Harry Truman: “We pray that God might guide us to use [the bomb] in His ways and for His purposes.”

General Smedley Butler of the US Marines is quoted extensively. Butler was recruited by anti-democratic elements in the 1930’s to raise a force of 450,000 ex-soldiers to take over Washington and depose Franklin D. Roosevelt. He declined to complete the assignment. “I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service…. And during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.”

This book is subversive because it is funny. Interviewer: “Just how many lives can these new high-tech weapons save, Colonel?” After a summary of US attacks on Cuba, we are given the American President on the telephone getting “serious” about terrorism, “Listen Jeb, You’re going to have to cough up the terrorists or we start bombing Miami tomorrow!”

This book is subversive because it gives only simple statistics: the US “defense” budget amounts to a million dollars a minute.

Above all Addicted to War is subversive because it is in comic book form! That is correct, in comic book form. That means it is within the reading capacity of at least half the American population. Even those addicted to TV might get partway through it; the segments are way shorter than the 30-second limit for episodes in soap operas. Of course, unlike TV, the print medium does allow the reader to pause to grasp what is meant. So its 70-odd pages might take a little longer to read than a couple of hours of TV.

Lest the naïve reader might see it as a celebration of 200 years of glory – in the style of the late-night war movie – a well-supported subordinate theme makes it clear that when the elite go to war, it is the ordinary people who pay the fare, in taxes, lives lost, security shattered. Actually Andreas’ elite do not personally go to war; they stay home and chortle all the way to the bank. Their sons say, “My daddy told me I could serve my country better by going to law school.” Addicted to War is definitely subversive stuff. Its last panel is captioned, “Kick out the war junkies!”

But there are other addictions associated with militarism. How revealing it was shortly after 9/11 to hear the US President giving people his answer to the question, what can I do to serve my country? He said – to put it in the simplest terms – shop. Don’t let a little thing like the WTC collapse interfere with your responsibilities as consumers.

Fortunately for the economy, shopping addiction is widespread. It would, in fact, be an economic catastrophe if everyone curbed their shopping and attempted instead to pay down their mortgages. Less stuff and less debt: now that could be a very enticing goal. But if all that money were drawn out of the real economy and poured back into the already over-stuffed financial sector, what would the result be? Probably, for a very short time, it would puff up the stock market. What else could the banks do with the money but buy securities? They could, of course, try to take on more and more risky loans. But reality, and deep depression, would soon set in.

The “laws” of our economic system are strange indeed, when a general action as benign and seemingly sensible as reducing one’s debt and curtailing the flow of new “stuff” to be dumped into backyard storage sheds and public landfills, would bring on economic collapse. Like the addiction to war, that bears some thinking on.

Maybe we need to replace our private debt-based monetary system, with a public non-debt system, with the Bank of Canada fulfilling its statutory mandate to “regulate credit and currency in the best interests of the economic life of the nation, to control and protect the external value of the national monetary unit and to mitigate by its influence fluctuations in the general level of production, trade, prices and employment, so far as may be possible within the scope of monetary action, and generally to promote the economic and financial welfare of Canada.” (Preamble to the Bank of Canada Act). That might well mitigate the destructive effects of our addiction to “growth.”

1. Andreas, Joel (2002, 2003). Addicted to War: Why the US Can’t Kick Militarism.