The usually obtuse Hermann Goering , coined the phrase, “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat,” when he was, well, buttering up Dem Deutschen Volke for the blitzkrieg he and his Nazi pals were planning for Europe in 1936.
Guns or butter is an apt phrase for the situation we now face in the US, but as usual our exceptional country doesn’t want to choose. We want our cake and eat it too.
So, with an annual Pentagon budget of $680 billion, three endless wars, over a million foreclosures and massive unemployment, merrily we roll along towards the cliff, American lemming style.
If you remember the opening of “Rebel without a cause” two guys are playing chicken by racing their cars towards a cliff. One of the guys is James Dean so you know he’s not going to die (at least until his Porsche crashes a year later).
However, the other guy’s sleeve gets caught in the door handle and he goes over the cliff. We’re the other guy now, and James Dean later. Fiscal death is just down the road apiece while Congress is checking the rearview mirror. We’re not Greece but we’re not Switzerland either. We have to choose.
The pudgy Goering, who never saw a strudel he could resist, really meant that both the guns and the butter were for the top Nazis. “Ich war Die zwarte!” he kept shouting from the dock at Nuremburg. “I was the Second!” (after Hitler), the kind of thing Donald Rumsfeld would bark if we had such trials today. We don’t, and we won’t.
The answer is in the lyrics of a song from the 1940’s.
“If you don’t spend, you bank,
If it ain’t Bing, it’s Frank,
Gotta be this or that”
A buttered scone for me, please.
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