Food for thought...

One of my students from last semester posted something interesting on Facebook:

"If a jet is shot down, then how can they consider it a plane crash?"

Good question.  The answer is both simple, and complex.

The simple answer: language shapes perception.  If they keep calling it a crash on the news channels and evening news, then people will eventually forget that a jet carrying passengers--including American civilians--on the way to an AIDS conference was purposely shot down by a ground-to-air missile.

The complex answer is to the unstated, but assumed, question of why are they doing this?

Why, indeed. 

Language does control perception.  "Plane crash" is much less threatening than "jet shot down."  Plane crashes happen all the time: it's an accident.  A tragedy.  Pilot error, or mechanical stress.  A missile hitting a passenger jet, on the other hand, is a deliberate act of war. 

And it's a war we're not capable of starting, much less fighting and winning. 

Part of that is because of the way spending has tipped.  Since Vietnam and Johnson's tenure as POTUS, national spending has gone from being majority what was listed in the U.S. Constitution as federal responsibilities (infrastructure and defense) to more than half being spent on welfare programs, both corporate and individual.  Without a major shift in mentality from "gimme, gimme, gimme" to "Oh shit, we all gonna die," we will not be able to free up the funding to pay for what's needed to stomp those fuckers flat. 

So, our illustrious leaders tell the media to shift perceptions.  "Plane crash," indeed.

The other issue is with the "stomp the fuckers flat." 

We haven't done that since August of 1945.  There has not been a single use of overwhelming force going in and making the other side concede that they have been decisively defeated since we fucked Japan with a sandpaper condom without lube.  There is no political will to win, and honestly hasn't been since then.

Not even after 9/11/01.  Otherwise, we would have gone in with overwhelming force and destroyed any semblance of culture and/or government everywhere in every Islamofascist-controlled country, and taken over for the next ten generations.  Since we didn't do that, we have lost.  And they're forcing us to bleed ourselves to death.

We are overextended.  Thanks to the policies put in place by Truman (full credit, here: I understand why he didn't want to push too hard, and have to use nukes again) that prevented full victory in Korea.  That set the precedent for the flat-out loss in Vietnam.  And for what's going on in the Middle East, now that the POTUS has decided that the job there is done (it isn't, and won't be, until every Muslim over the age of two is dead). 

With the lack of funding for the military (which is mandated by the U.S. Constitution) because of the welfare funding for everything else (which is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution), we cannot simply field more units.  Without the political will to win, we can't stomp the old fuckers flat before we move on to stomp these new fuckers flat. 

And so...we have the media working their asses off to slant our perceptions, and cover the asses of their political masters.