Lost: An Allegory for the Military-Industrial Complex
Today I read Chalmers Johnson’s article, Going Bankrupt: Why the Debt Crisis Is America’s Greatest Threat on alternet.org. His main idea is that the military-industrial complex is going to catch up with America imminently unless we rapidly enact several measures:
If you’re clueless about the “Keynesian jobs program,” don’t worry. Johnson coined the term and spends much of the article explaining it. For an in depth study of the military-industrial complex and how America has been stuck in it since Columbus landed, see Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of The United States.
It’s pretty clear that this complex is a problem and that American’s should understand it, so I began to ponder how I could address it my own work as a theatre artist. Since documentarians have done well at addressing the historical and factual elements of the complex (see The Fog of War for one of the best examples), I thought that theatre would do best by utilizing an allegorical approach. Suddenly, I realized that a very popular allegory already exists in Lost.
The survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 become so preoccupied with defending themselves against The Others that they lose sight of their primary objective: to get off the island. This condition sounds eerily similar to the condition ascribed to The US by two key quotes in Johnson’s article:
-Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
and:
From 1946 to 1969, the United States government spent over $1,000 billion on the military, more than half of this under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — the period during which the [Pentagon-dominated] state management was established as a formal institution. This sum of staggering size (try to visualize a billion of something) does not express the cost of the military establishment to the nation as a whole. The true cost is measured by what has been foregone, by the accumulated deterioration in many facets of life by the inability to alleviate human wretchedness of long duration.
-Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War
Looking at Lost through this lens makes it suddenly much more interesting. Maybe I’ll pay attention to the new season after all.