The American aircraft carrier was built to terrify other nations. The USS Abraham Lincoln has instead become something far more revealing: a floating monument to an empire powerful enough to bomb half the world, yet too arrogant, overstretched and politically diseased to care properly for the people it sends to do the bombing. The symbolism is almost vulgar in its perfection. A nuclear-powered supercarrier — one of the most sophisticated instruments of organized violence ever constructed — prowls the waters near Iran, launching aircraft and advertising Washington’s capacity to reach virtually anywhere on Earth.

Below deck, meanwhile, sailors endure exhaustion, psychological strain, deteriorating conditions and the torment of a deployment whose end repeatedly disappears over the horizon.

Below deck, meanwhile, sailors endure exhaustion, psychological strain, deteriorating conditions and the torment of a deployment whose end repeatedly disappears over the horizon.

Behold American primacy: exquisite machinery, limitless ambition, exhausted human beings. The contradiction is not incidental. It is the empire in miniature. Aircraft carriers are floating political theology. They proclaim that America is everywhere; that oceans are highways of command; that no country is sufficiently distant to escape Washington’s attention. Presidents display them as steel embodiments of “credibility.” Generals shuffle them between regions like casino chips. Think-tank strategists move them across maps while never having to smell the machinery, miss the birthdays or contemplate the psychological wreckage below deck.

And therein lies the obscenity.

The American ruling elite........

© Middle East Monitor