Waking up to an explosion, your home on fire.  Men with guns running, crouched like crabs, firing bursts of bullets.  As you shake your head a man grabs your mother from behind and expertly cuts her throat.  The car other members of your family are trying to flee in is hit by a shoulder launched explosive, becoming a fire ball.  You run, imagining how you are going to be killed.

Or a quiet, airless morning, no explosions, no gunfire.  No food.  Flies.  Dying children who expire without a murmur.   Hyenas and vultures casually dining together, no snarling and posing, there’s enough carrion for everyone, with left overs to drag home.

Or a person at a console, pressing a button and pumping a fist watching the screen as the targeted city is vaporized under a dramatic canopy of fire.

We lament all these hellish things even as we sigh at the inevitability of them, debate the correctness of employing them.  Homo sapiens are sometimes monsters, we reason, and sometimes there’s nothing for it but to use every weapon available to destroy these evil creatures.    Obama, who, in fairness to him, I must say I hate mostly for not being anywhere near as great a president as he was a candidate, did his share of this reasoning.  

He yielded to military advisors who agreed it was best not to put American “boots on the ground” but to instead use a top secret targeted killing program to assassinate suspected terrorist enemies with missiles launched from remote controlled pilotless aircraft called drones.  Not to do so, or stopping the program, he likely didn’t need to be reminded, would make him look weak.  The numbers of civilians killed would not be revealed.  All dead males of military age, in a generous range from young teenager to middle aged, are presumed to be enemies killed in action, or EKIA.  Fair is fair.  They could very well be!

Many are horrified when they learn that authoritarian governments use Death Squads to terrorize the opposition.   One photo of a pile of slaughtered nuns, their humanitarian mission cut short, is usually enough to get the world press howling.   The armies of freedom will sometimes march against such regimes, provided the regime is not allied with a huge business concern who has a say in the deployment of the armies of freedom.   Most authoritarian governments enjoy such alliances.   The armies of freedom have supported many such monsters over the years.   I realize I’m not going out on a moral limb saying any of these things.  Are you going to argue that Death Squads are cool?

Now the world shudders over videos of workers in a Syrian town desperately trying to save dying babies by hosing them off, in an attempt to wash away the irreversibly murderous nerve gas a power-crazed dictator attacked his own citizens with.  Dead children are carried off and respectfully laid out by stoic rescue workers.  

The current president of the United States, an angry and impulsive man, instantly does what the reflective, calculating Obama, who was lambasted as a weak and indecisive leader for refraining from massive retaliatory killing, did not do.  With the horrific images of the nerve gas attack against civilians, and the dead children, fresh in everyone’s mind, our decisive new leader does not hesitate or ask Congress or flinch in any way, he immediately orders two destroyers to launch more than fifty tomahawk missiles at Syria, presumably hitting some strategic asset of the Syrian dictator’s, the very air base he says the gas attack was launched from.  

Our president glares meaningfully at the camera as he announces he doesn’t need anyone to tell him what the right thing to do is.  After all, this is not some drone-launched missile fired by the well-meaning army of freedom that inadvertently kills a wedding party, severely maiming the few survivors, this is a targeted, proportional response to a regime using poison gas against it’s own children.

I don’t want to jump on this president, who gets so little love from most Americans, who is routinely mocked and ridiculed by every late night comedian.  I am writing this simply to underscore how routine such state violence is, and how little we concern ourselves with it, even abstractly.  

If there is a better way, we reason, there is nothing we can do about it anyway.  Powerful forces, often at the command of raging psychopaths, are regularly unleashed to slaughter anybody who stands in the way of valuable natural resources or anything else the powerful forces want.  Innocence or guilt has little to do with who will live and who will die.  This world is not a meritocracy, after all, nobody but those closest to you gives a rat’s tutu about how moral, kind, empathetic you are.

The guy who is launching the missiles, named after the close fighting weapon of the people slaughtered by the armies of freedom, certainly doesn’t give a shit.  It enrages him that a dictator would kill babies in such an inhuman way and he takes decisive action.  

Thirty-six children are said to have died in the poison gas attack.  Yesterday our ambassador to the UN asked rhetorically “how many more children have to die before Russia cares?”  We note here that according to one source over 700 children have been killed by US and Coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since August 2014.  The recent SEAL raid in Yemen killed a bunch of children, at least one of whom, a pretty little girl, was allowed to writhe in agony, untreated, for hours before she finally died of the American bullet in her spine. 

In fairness to our current president, why should he care what his critics have to say about his unauthorized use of millions of dollars worth of deadly missiles against an unabashedly evil regime?  What are you going to fucking do about it anyway, big shot?

Because Americans live, increasingly, in echo chambers where our own views are endlessly confirmed– and there is no overestimating the power of the confirmation bias– the same term can quickly become a weapon for each side.   During the recent presidential election much was made of “Fake News”.  Both sides used calculated untruth and incendiary stories composed largely of bullshit to stir their troops,  though the right seemed to use it more, and to more galvanizing effect.

I saw a stat right after the 2016 election, fake news skewed something like 2:1 right, but that’s still a lot of outright bullshit from the left side.  I couldn’t find the original cite for the statistic, but here’s the Grey Skank and Steve Bannon/Robert Mercer’s own Breitbart on the well-known phenomenon.   I must say, both accounts read well and appear to be, without more research that most news consumers don’t have time to do, plausible.  Let us assume for our purposes today, and to avoid the typical distracting argument, that the left and right were equally guilty of lying during one of the ugliest campaigns in our history.

My point is that Mr. Trump and his people, who set new standards for untruth during the campaign and since (hah, so much for my fairness caveat directly above) , introducing us to “alternative facts” and so forth, quickly co-opted the term “fake news” to increase skepticism toward the corporate mass media.  One should be very skeptical of corporate media driven entirely by advertising dollars and the bottom line of shareholder profits and enormous compensation packages for its executives.  But look how quickly the term “fake news” was pointed back at the exposers of right wing ‘fake news’ and neutralized.   Who owns fake news now, bitches?   Two wrongs do make a right, yo.

Now the same has happened to the term “The Deep State”.   This description of the powerful forces that profit mightily from our globalized “Free Market” and the endless wars we are now embarked on, has been captured by the right.  To the right the Deep State is the liberal-biased intelligence community, fanatically determined to bring the new president down. Trump’s people now openly deplore the “Deep State” and everyone is right to deplore it.

A former long-time Republican government budget analyst, Mike Lofgren, spoke to Bill Moyers a few years back about the Deep State.  The permanent shadow government is not a new thing, the interests it represents go back to our original one percent, the Founding Fathers, but it’s entrenched and protected in ways we couldn’t have imagined generations ago.  Lofgren described The Deep State as ‘a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections.’  

Lofgren set out the workings of our current deep state*, now organized largely around, and justified by, the so-called War on Terror, that bold war against fear itself.  It operates by deregulation, privatization, deindustrialization, financialization of the economy, Wall Street as the only casino in town, widening wealth disparity,  permanent war, surveillance state, etc.  It all takes on the air of the inevitable, a massive conspiracy, but its only deliberate design is to maximize profits for our wealthiest citizens. 

Like the deal-makers in the administration we have now.   Exxon-Mobil was the first company to research the effects of carbon on our planet’s climate.  They made alarming discoveries, decades ago, about what became known as Global Warming and later was re-branded as the less alarming Climate Change.  Exxon scientists learned that carbon emissions, like the ones from burning millions of barrels of fossil fuel, were indeed making the world a less habitable place for human and other life.  

Then Exxon spent decades funding Climate Change Skepticism. To their credit, and against a mountain of evidence from most reputable climate scientists, they created a sizable block of Climate Change Skeptics including, apparently, our current president.

Exxon knew the lucrative product they were selling was choking the earth to death, but they were making too much money to stop.  You know the old dilemma.  It’s easy to be critical, but don’t forget, Exxon is about the most profitable corporation in the history of the world.  Now their CEO is our nation’s Secretary of State.  How’s that for transparency in government?   You’ve got to love these guys we’ve got now.   They will not let the Deep State get any deeper, despite all the fake news to the contrary.

*   Lofgren describes the Deep State as “the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism and the militarization of foreign policy, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure that has given us the most unequal society in almost a century, and the political dysfunction that has paralyzed day-to-day governance.”