The Pop Art Of War

 Famously, there was a sign that sat on President Harry Truman's desk. It read: The Buck Stops Here. In his farewell address, Harry addressed this historic decoration, reminding us that,  "The President, whoever he is, has to decide. He can't pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That's his job."

This is coming from the man who decided to drop not one but two atomic weapons on Japanese cities to hasten the end of World War II. More than two hundred thousand people died as a result of this action. Most of these were civilians. Many still argue that if the United States had lost the war, Truman and his advisors would have been put on trial as war criminals. Even with the Potsdam Declaration, there was no way for Japan to have anticipated just how overwhelming the power of a nuclear weapon would be. J. Robert Oppenheimer did. Upon witnessing the first detonation of his invention, he quoted the Bhagavad Gita:  "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Until his death, Harry Truman defended his decision, as the sign on his desk suggested. Oppenheimer became a staunch advocate for the control of weapons calling for international transparency and oversight. 

That didn't happen. 

Eighty years later, the occupant of what is left of the White House does not have a sign on his desk suggesting that all his decisions are final. This would not allow him to swing and swerve to avoid committing to any one choice or plan. Instead, he has a button, which allows him to summon a Diet Coke whenever he so desires. When it comes to military decisions, he is quick to laud those moments that he feels expand his already inflated self-image. Or, as in the case of the second use of an air strike to finish off the survivors of an initial attack on a suspected drug running boat, he chose along with his Attack Dog to throw the blame on the Admiral who carried out the order. “I didn’t know about the second strike. I didn’t know anything about the people. I wasn’t involved, and I knew they took out a boat, but I would say this, they had a strike," declared the Diet Coke drinker. Initially, Pete the Pit Bull asserted, “I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat, we knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented.” That account has since been changed to,  “As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do, so I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs, so I moved on to my next meeting.” Leaving Navy Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley squarely in the path of the accountability bus. 

It should be noted that aside from the consumption of Diet Coke there is another stark contrast between these incidents: One occurred during a declared war. The operation that destroyed a suspected drug boat and the follow-up that killed the survivors clinging to the burning wreckage occurred during a distraction created to keep the public from noticing that the Epstein Files remain unreleased. 

Why the Buck is that?