Word: warrior
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...Only in the Middle East would a nation's most notorious warrior become -- all too enthusiastically, it seems -- Minister of Housing. Ariel Sharon has an apparent mandate to treat zoning as the conduct of war by other means. He is busily creating "new facts," in the form of Jewish settlements, on the West Bank. Saddam too is in the new-facts business with his systematic obliteration of Kuwaiti nationhood...
...lesser offices too we apply the standards of a warrior culture. Female candidates are routinely advised to overcome the handicap of their gender by talking "tough." Thus, for example, Dianne Feinstein has embraced capital punishment, while Colorado senatorial candidate Josie Heath has found it necessary to announce that although she is the mother of an 18-year-old son, she is prepared to vote for war. Male candidates in some of the fall contests are finding their military records under scrutiny. No one expects them, as elected officials in a civilian government, to pick up a spear or a sling...
...collective fantasies center on mayhem, cruelty and violent death. Loving images of the human body -- especially of bodies seeking pleasure or expressing love -- inspire us with the urge to censor. Our preference is for warrior themes: the lone fighting man, bandoliers across his naked chest, mowing down lesser men in gusts of automatic-weapon fire. Only a real war seems to revive our interest in real events. With the Iraqi crisis, the networks report, ratings for news shows rose again -- even higher than they were for Panama...
...primitive warrior culture, our warrior elite takes pride of place. Social crises multiply numbingly -- homelessness, illiteracy, epidemic disease -- and our leaders tell us solemnly that nothing can be done. There is no money. We are poor, not rich, a debtor nation. Meanwhile, nearly a third of the federal budget flows, even in moments of peace, to the warriors and their weaponmakers. When those priorities are questioned, some new "crisis" dutifully arises to serve as another occasion for armed and often unilateral intervention...
...with Operation Desert Shield, our leaders are reduced to begging foreign powers for the means to support our warrior class. It does not seem to occur to us that the other great northern powers -- Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union -- might not have found the stakes so high or the crisis quite so threatening. It has not penetrated our imagination that in a world where the powerful, industrialized nation-states are at last at peace, there might be other ways to face down a pint-size Third World warrior state than with massive force of arms. Nor have we begun...