There are three branches of the U.S. government represented by the White House, the Capitol Hill, and the Pentagon.  That's how I would have started SVES' 6th grade classes in Social Studies in the last decade were I brave enough to describe reality as I saw it.  The textbook used the idealized Lincoln characterization of a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people", constitutionally structured with three branches of the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.

 

"Tell that to the Marines," I said to my two Honolulu nephews who beamed because they were both trained to be gung-ho Marines with the U.S. Navy!  To maintain their branch of the Armed Forces with their military cohorts, we allocate more than fifty percent of the national budget; considerably more than the cost of the social nets we have in place for the marginalized and the elderly.

 

Spying Big Brother overseeing every aspect of our lives depicted in Orwell's novel 1984 has become altogether too real.  No amount of mimicking President Ike's warning to beware of a powerful "military-industrial complex" can get us off the deja vu that we've been through this dystopian path before.  The cost of a drone built by the mighty feats of engineering of defense contractors commercialized our native propensity to distrust the stranger, to the happy smirk of our stock markets.  The liberal amongst us, at least, intends only to manage those who hold the oil in their land, which evidently belongs to US!  

 

General Keith Alexander recently defended NSA's massive spying efforts before members of the US Congress on the aftermath of Snowden's revelation of the extent of our snooping since we went on war footage against terror, and the audacity of his claim that the enterprise made the nation safe from terrorists indicates that the reality of the Ministry of Truth, the core of disinformation, has become operational.  On the other hand, we do live in terror since we woke up to the number of loose guns legally held in our neighborhoods, and the number of killings since Sandy Hook reveal what we've tried to deny, or, at least, hide in the Columbine incident: we are a trigger happy nation determined at the slightest provocation against our comfort and pleasure to resort to violence!

 

The military and the police have legitimate places in the functioning of a society.  A disciplined military in the art of war can assume the role of protecting humanity from the gruesome effect of exploded extinction.  We might heed Sun Tzu's admonition that the point of war preparation is to avoid war!  Increasingly becoming obsolete, as the competition among nation-states is under judgment by the reality that we all occupy the same planet and the economic structures that regulate our finances need not blur the distinction between greed and profit, it has become obvious that the job of the military is to insure the survival of our specie with some semblance of humanity and sanity.

 

Still, Police work cannot deteriorate into a laboratory branch where the latest in restraining gizmos, biological, mechanical, and digital, are tried out on members of society.  Our police departments have been harshly observed to be dumping ground of former military personnel whose major skill is following orders, unable to fit on roles in the productive trades and industries of the land that requires critical intelligence. 

 

Three years ago, I journeyed to Dandong by the Yalu River through the iron mill town of Benzi (think Pittsburg of the 70s) where most of the ironworks, from gates to sewage manholes, are made, and the skies stay smoggy all day!  At the train station, ready to be hauled on rolling platforms, were 50-some anti-Sherman tanks reminiscent of old war footage from Rommel's rat-of-the-desert days in North Africa.  Photos of them now accompany accounts of the Uyghur region protests around Taklimakan desert.  The solo protester in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989 is iconic in protest land.  The tanks are now stationed not too far from the Square as the latest Uyghur terrorist act of an exploding SUV at the gate of the Forbidden City where Mao's portrait reigns tightens security measures in the city's primal visitors' destination.

 

In our region, sabre rattling has become the high profile function of Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in frequent pronouncements.  While it is understandable that Japan gets off the "apologizing" stance it was forced to assume since WWII military debacle, Abe need not be a mouthpiece of US military vigilance that still considers South Korea a branch of the Defense Department, and Japan's Domestic Defense Forces its organized vigilantes in Far East Asia under the US Marine boot.  Geologists clearly recognize the Senkaku/Daoyu islands as part of the Taiwan island group rather than the Ryukyus, and since we recognize Taiwan to be part of China, ergo, Daoyu is a part of Taiwan rather than Japan.  But then, politics trump rationality any day.

 

For foreign policy wonks, the aforementioned makes sense but the transfer in 1970 of the Taiwan islands from a US weather station to Japan's sovereignty, with the ardent protest of Zhou Enlai and China, had the added but unheralded datum: there is oil in them ocean shelves.  That spins another tale.

 

Oil Exploration 101, anyone?