In this morning's AM, Nathalie Graham encouraged Seattle to "fucking fight the Blue Angels," and pointed to "a group of environmentalists and pacifists [who] are organizing against the Blue Angels." And exactly what's wrong with the "[second-oldest] formal aerobatic team in the world?" Graham: "[It's] a show of military power [that] burns 68,000 gallons of jet fuel and burns 650 metric tons of carbon dioxide." But getting rid of the Blue Angels will only hide the fact that our society is a military empire. There is a good reason why the US's defense spending is still, by far, the largest in the world. This is not simply a waste of money—though that reading, which has its intellectual birth in The Grundrisse and is developed by Rosa Luxemburg. has economic value and cannot be easily dismissed. But it's the raw power to hurt and kill that makes the excessive (even obscene) consumption Americans enjoy possible: cheap goods at Walmart and Amazon, access to the resources needed to lock consumers into automobile debt, and way too low prices at the pump (even in Washington State).
In the way we should not sweep the homeless from the streets, we should not scrub the Blue Angels from our skies. The suffering our rich society deliberately throws onto its streets does not go away when it's out of sight. And yet, this is what many left-leaning voters want: the consequences of the unreal inflation of housing prices, the absence of social housing, and the rejection of rent controls made invisible.
Dozens of protestors rallied Tuesday afternoon at the steps of Seattle City Hall. The newfound coalition, ‘Services Not Sweeps’ is calling on the Mayor’s Office to ban encampment sweeps in extreme weatherhttps://t.co/s4pkOOGI0P
— MyNorthwest 🌲 (@Mynorthwest) August 3, 2023
The removal of the Blue Angels will only increase the size of Seattle's famous liberal bubble. But it will not in any way impact American militarism. We will have peaceful skies in early August while we are still in the heart of the empire, still supporting the armed forces in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Egypt, El Salvador, and elsewhere. Submarines with nuclear weapons will still be a ferry ride away from downtown. The last thing we should have is a mind whose sky is eternally clear of the Blue Angels, the Navy that supports this spectacle over South Seattle and Lake Washington and represents the generals and policy hawks who are pushing for war with China. When you are putting gas into your car and the sudden roar of the jets shatters your nerves, do not separate what you are doing from what just flew over you. The latter makes the former possible.Â
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And this is indeed the understanding we find in the opening sequence for Amazon's TV series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan. (It stars John Krasinski and Wendell Pierce—the former is a very vocal Democrat.) We see, among other things, a rowing team coupled with a fired bullet; a well-worn (and therefore cherished) baseball coupled with a just-to-explode grenade; a bedside digital clock with the digital timer on a bomb; a cargo ship (sneakers, microwave ovens, laptops, flatscreen TVs) crossing the ocean with an officer's strips and bars; a dog tag with a license plate. The sequence is ideology in a state of perfection, which means: It's actually telling the truth. This is how the system functions. This is the empire as it is: the baseball park in Seattle, the army base in Tacoma; the cruise ships on the Sound, the nuclear submarines beneath the Sound; homes on San Juan Islands, the battleships serviced in Everett. Â
A weaker ideology, and there is no such thing as no ideology (I simply call it culture, others call it propaganda), results from a sky without the Blue Angels. We may or may not like the truth of their noise and the empire they represent and impose, but this is where you live, this is how you eat, and this is the traffic jam you often find yourself in. And hating Trump, as most in Seattle do, doesn't change this fact. In the way change is not likely if we do not see the homeless, change is not likely if we do not see that our form of consumption is not outside but very much inside of the empire.Â
The Blue Angels are here and I feel like I'm finally ~*home*~https://t.co/NgYN8M9gGh
— Megan Seling (@mseling) August 3, 2023
Note: I will address Megan Seling's identification of the Blue Angels with what has come to be called "Seattle soul" in another post.