Honolulu Weekly

The screams of Air Force jets over Waikiki had barely faded when the hype for next month’s appearance of the Navy’s Blue Angels started.

A Honolulu Star-Bulletin headline last week called the Navy jets’ scheduled appearance an ‘angelic return.’ In my view, that’s a fitting image only if angels of death deserve the adjective ‘angelic.’

While military and a cooperative corporate media pitch the thrill of high-speed flying and the wonders of American technology, there’s a huge disconnect between the sanitized images we’re being spoon fed and the appearance of the real world counterparts of these jets delivering the death and destruction they are so ably designed to produce.

Those Air Force F-16s known as ‘Fighting Falcons’ and Navy F-18 ‘Hornets’ are heavily engaged in the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. reliance on air attacks has been criticized for causing unnecessary civilian casualties and, in the process, contributing to the deepening quagmire by making ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the local populations hard or impossible.

These air shows are domestic military propaganda at its best, eagerly lapped up by the corporate media and doled out for public consumption. No overt pitch for military values and perspectives is necessary, simply that uncritical glee expressed repeatedly about the thrill of big machines going real fast.

A little moral imagination leads to the bigger issues beyond the high-speed circus, our acceptance of war as an instrument of foreign policy and, with it, the civilians killed and injured, the millions of displaced people, the refugees trapped without refuge. While there is substantial disagreement over the order of magnitude of civilian casualties in Iraq, for example, one recent large-scale survey by Johns Hopkins University put the figure at well over 600,000 as of late 2006.

The realities of war. That’s really the flip side of the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels, the side that we’re discouraged from attending to. After all, these jets really have no other purpose than war. They don’t carry cargo, they have no utility for transportation. There aren’t any civilian uses of what they have to offer.

And beyond their roles in the U.S. arsenals, these jets are on the leading edge of America’s arms bazaar, a major part of the politically complicated and controversial weapons trade in which we have the dubious distinction of leading the world, exporting more weapons by far than any other country. The F-16 jets such as those flown by the Thunderbirds are now being built mostly for export to places like Chile (28), Egypt (220), Greece (131, with 30 on order), Israel (243), Pakistan (34, with 44 on order), Turkey (246), etc.

These exports often disrupt regional stability or feed ongoing tensions, as is the case with F-16 exports to Pakistan and Chile, and in other cases have fueled ongoing conflicts.

What all this means is that when I look at these jets flying in their precision formations, I’m aware that they’re much more than beautiful examples of the technology-human interface.

I have a good friend who spent years as a Navy pilot flying jets off of aircraft carriers. We don’t necessarily agree 100 percent on such issues. But I’m sure he would agree that, at a minimum, we should teach our children (and, by implication, ourselves) about these aircraft in the manner that you might teach ‘responsible’ gun ownership. They are beautiful, they can be exciting, but they are very dangerous to handle and require an appreciation, if not a full understanding, of their larger context. These are not like race cars, they are weapons. Their main purpose is to kill in time of war, and their use, even if and when considered ‘necessary,’ is a sign of the failure of other important policies. They challenge us to always be aware of the responsibility that goes with the possession of such awesome tools of destruction.

So enjoy the Blue Angels when they’re here to do their show next month, if you choose, but remember, in another part of the world, it’s another day and they are flying in anger, with intent to kill.

Read more stories by Ian Lind at [iLind.net].