Reality is profit drinking.

Regarding the Decorated General

This was fairly typical thinking during the 30's. A specialty of the Methodist church which must have considered the general a strange bedfellow. It and some like organizations sponsored a high school oratorical contest in Indianapolis, a center of isolationism. There must have been fifty contestants from each of the six or so high schools. How about that, I won. The pitch of my speech which I at least half way believed at the time was that WWI was pretty much sponsored by and primarily for the benefit of the du Pont company, the country's largest ammunition maker. And they did make bundles. So much so that they bought control of General Motors.
But I got to know the company pretty well. The first case I worked on after law school (1950) was the du Pont-General Motors case, an antitrust case in which the government successfully argued that du Pont must sell its GM shares. Our firm, famous as Dean Acheson's firm, defended du Pont. I got to know du Pont pretty well and wrote what they called a "definitive memo" , "Does du Pont control GM?" Think I wiggled, it obviously did on some things but never across the board. Sad the government won. I think that if du Pont had remained a major stockholder it would have sensed what the Japanese were doing to GM and would have straightened GM out. All the top GM men I met, and I interviewed a lot, were sort of mesmerized by GM's then power and totally unable to fathom that a train wreck was coming.

But back to du Pont. In spite of being an ammunition maker they were totally opposed to war and vigorously objected to our tentative pre-Pearl Harbor efforts to enter the war. For du Pont and I think any business war is quite limiting. Sure you can make lots of ammunition or if you are a banker make lots of loans, but it's all a one string thing. The strictures of war such that you can't grow your business in new and more profitable ways. Du Pont could not have commercialized nylon and probably couldn't even have developed it during wartime. Ammunition is profitable but nylon, wow! Bankers can't put together big profitable international deals during war time. So, although I have no doubt about the general's sincerity I think he's all wet on the reasons for war.

That's not to say that I think our wars are always for pure and holy purposes. A lot of people think that we are in Iraq today to protect our sources for oil. And depending on your viewpoint, that may not be the purest possible reason.

Bill Moore

Bill has a point there, however, I am reminded how so many of my friends conduct their personal affairs at work, the sure thing of a paycheck giving them license to further their stature at the expense of hands that feeds them. Like having a benefactor who pays you to email your friends, government contracts are the gravy train slop is funneled off, to fuel the dark careers of nylon, because it can. By the time each breakthrough is tested, it’s been investigated extensively in secret. Van Morrison plays on the radio and I wonder how much acid he heated in his neural junctions to see God the way he did. If he’d never played music, and instead, had fitted pipes ... chances are he’d be what?