* Manning Up

Faith in Mindless Technology:

Our Unmanning

It is time for our government to man-up and tell us the truth.  And the truth is that it has been lying to us for fifty years, since Eisenhower left office in 1960 warning us about the "military-industrial complex' which originally read in his speech as the "Congressional-military-industrial complex" until it was censored by whoever it is who dares purge presidential prose of potential political problems.

It lied about Viet Nam from the Lyndon Johnson twisitng of the Gulf of Tonkin resoloution to the Henry Kissinger  "declare victory and withdraw." It lied to us about Watergate; about Iran Contra; about weapons of mass destruction; and now about secret surveillance systems.

It is disgraceful to impugn Bradley Manning's character for trying to provide us with documents which reveal the truth with such barbs as:  personal notoriety; confusion over sexual identity; immaturity. 

All these pejoratives have been thrown about to demoralize  and humiliate him  --- in addition to solitary confinement and the underwear ordeal.  

Unlike Macbeth, there was no "I am unmanned" uttered by Bradley Manning.

It hasn't worked. 

Who of us would accept the consequences without a whimper which Manning is about to have imposed upon him by a military judge (a possible 116 years in prison)?

If there is anyone who has proved himself a man here it is this slight young uniformed idealist who has tried to alert us that our faith in the mindless technology which allows Asiana airplane pilots to come into a runway too slowly, or a train engineer in Spain to approach a curve too fast, is the same technology which mindlessly scans (and records !)  every mouse click and very cellphone digit of every American every minute of every day.


Our unquestioned faith in god-the-machine has made  us all Macbeths. 

We are unmanned.