Johnstown's Merchants of Death ponder the future

Dennis Roddy interviews our leading local war profiteers. With John Murtha gone, the military contractors of Johnstown hopefully accept reassurance that the direct fruits of imperial adventurism will continue to fall their way. Even with his surprisingly (and usefully) critical take on the imperialist war of aggression in Iraq, which he adopted towards the end of a lifetime of hawkish militarism, Murtha in the final analysis was the leading legislative tribune of the military-industrial complex.

And its local branch was happy that he was one of their own. So, it must be said, were most of the workers who depend on the jobs created by military industries. In Western Pennsylvania, only the bleakest towns in the Mon Valley can match Johnstown in terms of sheer Rust Belt decay. Someone could probably patent a vaccine for despair by just walking Johnstown's neighborhood streets or contemplating its rotting storefronts for a day; after doing that, you could safely visit Detroit without getting the barely-resistable urge to slit your wrists. It is understandable that any kind of investment and job creation is going to look good to the people who actually have to live there; too bad the whole thing is based on mass death from Fallujah to Kandar to Barrancabermeja, Mindanao and beyond. It doesn't take an actual nuclear war to reduce much of our population to the functional equivalent of the roaming packs of cannibals in a Cormac McCarthy novel, the one they made into a movie that they filmed in Braddock, which was set in a post-apocalyptic future which the actually-existing Mon Valley represents well enough.

It doesn't have to be this way, of course. If the government drops many millions of dollars to create jobs in industries based on destruction, it can also invest in constructive work building schools, health care facilities, completely revamped and environmentally-friendly public transportation systems, and affordable housing. But that kind of massive social spending and reinvestment would soon infringe on the profits of private industry, which as we all know is so much more efficient than public spending (more efficient, that is, in putting money in the pockets of a few). And if private industry starts losing profits, they might just start pulling out of our communities until they look like post-apocalyptic wastelands. You know. Sort of like the way they do now.