Real Surrealism

You may have read an August 7, 2008 report in the Californian (Remote-control warriors suffer war stress, too) regarding Predator drone operators at March Field. In case you did not, the article describes the daily life of these operators. They remotely fly Predator drones over Iraq and Afghanistan. Their daily mission is to pilot their drones and fire the Predator’s weaponry to kill people that have been assigned them as targets. The Predator’s cameras are so accurate that they can distinguish between a man and a woman and image a person sitting on a bench. At the end of their shift they go home to their families, take the kids to a soccer game and carry on as a normal family. Or do they? Some of these soldiers say they can handle the daily job to kill and their family relations by keeping them separate. At what price? Others seek the help of psychiatrists caringly provided by the military.

What struck me was how thoroughly we are prepared to submit our humanity to the capabilities of the technology we develop. One of the last things we consider in applying new technology is the psychological and sociological effects that technology is likely to have on our humanity. The bizarre lifestyle that the military has chosen to impose on our soldiers occurs because the military regards human beings as no more than a necessary accessory to the machines it develops.

We have now created a family life where the wage earner goes to work to deliberately kill people and having done so, returns home to be a loving parent and family participant and, presumably, a good citizen. This flies in the face of everything we know about human beings. What does he tell his children he does for a living? What does he do on the day children visit their parent’s work place or his children have an assignment to describe their parent’s job? The amount of lying and deception that must lie between the father and his children must be monumental. To say the least this is an extremely unhealthy environment in which to raise a family. The fact that the military finds it necessary to provide psychiatric help for this occupation should speak volumes about the potential for disaster. Surrealism took much of its contents from dreams. What we are doing here is converting those dreams into nightmares personal and social.

This whole sick phenomenon is a result of U. S. militarism and the technological dominator we have allowed the military to become. The U. S. military has a research and development budget of enormous proportions. DARPA regularly publishes research and development grant solicitations for the increasing integration of machine-human interface projects. We will see this intensify, I believe, in the near future as the military shifts its focus from battlefield to slum, which they view as the battlefield of the rather immediate future as a result of their experience in Iraq. This means warfare conducted in an arena crowded with human beings. Think about it! The conceptual enormity of this refocusing by the world’s most powerful military has yet to be remotely appreciated by the American citizenry, much less humanity in general. One can be assured that whatever technology is developed for this kind of battlefield will be applied by the powers that be to the American people. We have already seen the degree to which the police have been militarized in the response to protesters at the recent political conventions by Darth Vader-clad ranks of drill-marched police officers. The swat team is another police tactic that will be a vehicle for introducing military-developed technology into police control of American citizens. What ever happened to community-based policing? Additionally, we have seen the willingness of the current powers that be to introduce private commercial armies for the control of citizenry in New Orleans. The American passion for the military as the solution to global problems will be the death of its own democracy.

Robert Newhard