Kara and I just got back from Across the Universe. This is a musical-film not too unlike Moulin Rouge in concept. It is the story of the turbulent 60’s (race riots, Vietnam war, drug culture, etc.) told through the songs of the Beatles. In one ad I saw the tag line was “In the lyrics of the world’s best known songs lies a story that has never been told… until now.” A fitting description. Across the Universe takes incredibly popular even ubiquitous Beatles songs that can seem sentimental to us young folk and puts them back in the uncertain times from where they came. So much more than a music video could, this film embodies the Beatles music, letting the lyrics rise from the people who sang these songs as if they were their own stories.

I haven’t been blogging much of late, but for good reason. Earlier this month I joined the staff at Allentown Presbyterian Church just a few miles down the road from our home in Princeton. Life has been busy as I’ve been getting ready for the upcoming year and learning as much as I can as fast as I can while we still have our amazing youth director, who founded the youth ministry 10 years ago around. She and her husband are taking a year to live in Africa starting next year and there’s a lot of “passing the baton” in these past weeks. I’ll keep blogging, but at least for a while it might be a lot slower than it has been.

I saw this commercial the other day and laughed my head off. This sums up years of draft day frustration. Yes - Chad, Jeff and Sammer - I am calling you out.

Iraq for Sale is a documentary about the corporations that have been given contracts to do work formerly done by the military, and how a corporation’s first priority to make as much profit as possible is in direct conflict with what is good for the American military and the American taxpayer.

I first heard about this phenomenon (specifically Blackwater’s role in Iraq) on NPR sometime last year, so I was very interested when I found this documentary. Blackwater is a corporation that offers specialized military forces. They are not part of the US military, they are a private firm that can be hired to perform military-like duties. The US military out-sources a lot of work to firms like Blackwater, CACI and KBR (a division of Halliburton). These firms do a number of jobs such as providing security to top level officials, washing soldiers laundry and even interrogating prisoners at places like Abu Ghraib.

Some of these corporations are getting attention because information has come out showing that they’ve been ripping off the government, for example KBR was charging $95 to do a load of laundry for soldiers in Iraq. Stuff like that. These corporations are getting contracts to do things the military used to do itself and then they, like all corporations, proceed to maximize profit. You can imagine that a lot of patriotic folks are unjustifiably upset about how these corporations are putting profit over serving the military and about the cost to the American taxpayer for the incredible waste. My own anger over the issue has less to do with how this affects my taxes. What upsets me is the incredible profit war provides some corporations. This is only exponentially so in an administration so committed to the “free market” that they out-source intelligence gathering and interrogation to a private corporation. Of course this shields most of what happens in such operations from any kind of criminal prosecution. If a soldier harms an Iraqi civilian they can be court martialed. If a Blackwater employee kills an Iraqi civilian they cannot be brought to trial.

This marriage between military-corporations and the US government is a particularly horrible one. When war breaks out these corporations stand to make HUGE profits, and when the government uses these corporations there is an added “safety layer” from investigation and prosecution. These corporations are staffed by surprise… former government and military officials. This marriage only serves to make war an incredibly lucrative business to be in and consequently much more frequent.

Have mercy on us Jesus. Your ways are love and peace, but our ways are greed and violence. You are THE truth, but we are a people of deception and lies.