Nowhere Men

British actress Helen Mirren is in a new movie, Eye in the Sky. She plays a colonel in some branch of the United Kingdom's military who is faced with an ethical and moral dilemma about ordering a drone strike. It is billed as a "thriller." In other words, it is a commercial production intended to make money by thrilling people. It is thrilling when big name actors are faced with ethical dilemmas.

Not so much for the thousands of people who have been killed and injured by drone strikes.

Mirren talked about the movie on the Charlie Rose Show last week, and said that since making the movie she has been told that many present and former authorizers of drone strikes agonize over ethical questions in exactly the same way as portrayed in the movie.

This of course doesn't match the historical record, which shows that U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan in one five-month period killed the wrong people 90% of the time. I suppose the people in these countries should be happy that so much agonizing over the ethics of these strikes took place. It could have been 100%.

But the movie is a thriller. Teeming hordes are supposed to flock to theaters to watch actors struggle with ethical and legal questions that in real life matter little, if at all. The movie serves its purpose. The good guys win again, as they (we) always do. Like Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper before it, Eye in the Sky serves the propaganda needs of the Deep State, in this case a depiction of its British adjunct.

So it goes. The Deep State trudges on, making all its nowhere plans for nobody. The "leftist" approach to the Deep State is to whine and cringe in fear, giving it more power than it would have otherwise. I take a different approach. Let's look at what the future holds for the almighty Deep State.

The Deep State, or alternatively the National Security State, is just a collection of men. That there are many thousands of men in the Deep State doesn't make it any less or more than a plural of men. They have power, for sure, but it is the power of the bully. They can spy, kidnap, torture, start wars, bomb, assassinate, destroy, conceal and deceive with seeming impunity. They can prop themselves up with heroic movies and TV shows. But they all have feet of clay, all are fallible human beings with egos and weaknesses. They are all mortal, and time is not their friend. We are in an era where the industrial mandate of civilization has reached the point of self-destruction. The technical behemoth does not have the wherewithal to solve the problems it has created. The Deep State can by its very nature only make things worse.

So, rock on Deep State. See where it gets you. I can tell you in advance. Nowhere, man.
______________________________________________________

Here's a song.

Here's an update on the long folly of the Deep State.