LOSING A MORAL COMPASS TO FOREVER WARS
Philly Music!
Recently saw Trash Boy's show at PhilaMOCA. It was their first big show since the pandemic and my first indoor show since March 2020. Trash Boy is still Trash Boy and it was great to see them on stage again. They even had a surprise for everybody, a new band member! Just a few songs into the show, they played "Jesus Loves Fighter Jets".
I picked this song to feature with this writeup because it certainly resonates with what's been on people's minds over the last month, as it relates to both Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Why do we fight wars? As the song says, for our own protection and security. And, slippery slope, society has broadened the concept of "security" to include a nebulous fear of others including refugees.
In the frenzy after 9/11, Bush took us into Afghanistan and Iraq. Obama, even after assuring us he would be a man of peace, expanded our involvement into more than double the number of Bush's wars. Trump and Biden have started to pull us out, although the logistics could have been going better. Our increasing involvement with wars is a slippery slope; they've become too regular; we don't give them a second throught. Would Jesus condone this many wars, this many fighter jets, or, in these wars' parlance, this many drones? ... In just the past few days we learned of ten innocent civilians, including seven children, who were killed in one of our drone attacks, while the intended target appears to have been unharmed. Saturday's "Guardian" reports "Three days after a US drone obliterated a car in a Kabul street, General Mark Milley, shrugged off reports of civilian casualties, insisting it was a “righteous strike”." (1) Say what? Righteousness and bombing are connected even at our highest levels of government.
I'm a Christian, and I would say "NO", Jesus would not love fighter jets or righteous strikes on children and other innocent civilians.
Wars have become so de rigueur in our world today, that our leaders don't even seem to break a sweat in trying to justify them or convince us of their moraility. The discussion or even the concept of a "just war" now seems almost quaint; the threshold to start one is very high, but Congress infamously gave all presidents a "blank check" back in 2001, so no one even uses that term any more. The security state keeps us in a state of such perpetual fear of each other and of everybody else in the world, that we just know that these measures must be acceptable, must be moral.
This song is maybe a satire (or not) about losing a moral compass and trying to create God in our own image, trying to create a God who will sanction war and killing, a God that will keep our fences high and others away, and mirror exactly what's in our psyche. Worshipping the God we created brings us self-justificstion for what we already believed.
The song itself is on the band's excellent sophomore album, "Who Will Take the Trash Out When We're Gone?", which was released in 2019. Unfortunately, the pandemic started soon after. During the past year and a half the band did a livestream concert for Bernie in the primaries as well as a live recordng session at WXPN.
Here is "Jesus Loves Fighter Jets" :::
To hear more tracks from this great album, and get links to everything else Trash Boy, here is the click ::: Who Wil Take the Trash Out When We're Gone (CLICKHERE).
Warning! Pics on this page are Fake News!. Pics don't show the new band member who just joined. Top pic is from WXPN's site, and bottom pic is from band's Facebook page.
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NOV 2 2021 UPDATEIn addition to the intersection of religion and war-making, check out my next post for an author's look about bad corporate players involved in the war machine.
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NOV 28 2021 UPDATE Next look at how a work of fiction touches on religious zealotry and war profiteers being involved in the war machine.
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Footnote: (1) The Guardian, Sep 18 2021.
