There’s only one thing the SOTU has ever accomplished. War.
Call it spectacle, call it superstructure, call it whatever you want, but I did not watch the State of the Union. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever watched the State of the Union, at least not as an adult, and never intentionally.
The reason why anyone would subject themselves to the speech has always mystified me. Like the Academy Awards or any sport’s All-Star game it’s purpose is less about the audience than the participants. Avatars of all three branches of American government are present to play their appointed roles, but regardless their political affiliation those roles are essentially the same. To give legitimacy to the government and its imperial policy in a ceremony filled with pomp and circumstance. To dress the typical machinations of the ruling classes as some sort of address to the people, or at least the representatives of the people within government. To make believe that listening to a speech, responding to a speech, interrupting a speech, making faces during a speech, or even (as unavoidable takes filter in) the manner of one’s clapping during a speech is somehow doing meaningful politics.
Like many of the constitutionally mandated traditions within the American civic religion it started as a bureaucratic status report. The President detailed his favored policies for the year’s congress to his fellow aristocrats within the ruling class far from the eyes of the filthy rabble. As time has gone on, it has transformed into a grotesque microcosm of American politics with all the posturing and empty gestures that entails. An opportunity for pushing policy propaganda of one variety or another, the State of the Union (and the opposition’s response), is primarily a platform with which to lie.
In fact, it’s quite possibly the largest platform for pushing war and American imperialism that’s ever existed, and its history bears that out. After all, Woodrow Wilson was the first since George Washington to deliver the SOTU in person. It’s also where he advanced the cause of manufacturing consent for the entry of the US into WWI when the country had no appetite for it,
“The intolerable wrongs done and planned against us by the sinister masters of Germany have long since become too grossly obvious and odious to every true American to need to be rehearsed.”
In 1952 at the height of the Korean War, Harry Truman used it to threaten the Soviet Union with duplicitous calls for peace, escalating the Cold War,
“If the Soviet leaders were to accept this proposal, it would lighten the burden of armaments, and permit the resources of the earth to be devoted to the good of mankind. But until the Soviet Union accepts a sound disarmament proposal, and joins in peaceful settlements, we have no choice except to build up our defenses.”
In 1962 JFK used it to justify the coming escalation in Vietnam, spouting off that,
“The systematic aggression now bleeding that country is not a ‘war of liberation’ for Viet-Nam is already free. It is a war of attempted subjugation, and it will be resisted.”
In 1985 Reagan used the address to bolster his genocidal policy of starting, backing, and funding dirty wars in Latin America and around the world, outlining what came to be known as the Reagan Doctrine,
“We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives, on every continent from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.”
And who can forget the infamous 2002 SOTU where George Bush delivered the David Frum penned lines justifying the nascent war on terror, and naming the neocons preferred targets, priming the country for forever war,
“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”
Which a year later led to the SOTU serving as justification and blatant to the point of absurdity propaganda a little over one month from the beginning of the Iraq War, which we know now, was already planned, and happening regardless. It culminated with the now infamous ‘16 words’,
“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
And while I may not have watched tonight’s, I knew that if I checked the transcript, I’d once again see what remains the defining feature of the SOTU. Maintenance of our imperial foreign policy,
“Two weeks ago, the United States officially recognized the legitimate government of Venezuela, and its new interim president, Juan Guaido. We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom, and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair”
All of these are just a smattering of the vileness that is the State of Union. A speech and tradition that came of age not as a feature of a functioning democracy where leaders directly address the people, but one of justifying and strengthening Empire. Domestic policy has always been of secondary concern, as it’s dependent upon the internal political machinations of party politics. Rarely, if ever, has a SOTU served to abely advance any domestic policy in a meaningful way. The only achievements the speech has ever made has been in advancing the cause of war, the cause of empire, and the continued subjugation of people around the globe.
After all, the only thing Donald and Mitch and Chuck and Nancy and all the ghouls they preside over totally agree on is blood.
Jean Krill is is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His writing navigates the many disparate visions of a radically better future.