Totaler Krieg

Can we take glamour out of war?

First a very funny college story. In my second semester in my Jr. year in 1980 I had chosen to write a paper on this theme. My decision arose for a number of reasons including Apocalypse Now and Dispatches by Michael Herr that the film was based on. I was 23. I was deeply depressed. I had lost my job and my home and my girl friend after a divorce. I remained in school living with my parents. The full catastrophe. So I embraced the 50 page paper. And smoking too much weed and chatting with my closest friend I helped make a video spliced antiwar tape, a music video in fact, using footage from Vietnam backed by Vietnam era music. MTV came one year late. I was unable to finish that paper. I took my incomplete. I dropped out in 1982 for a few years thinking that if college was a vocation it was very stupid. After about two or three years I thought maybe law school so I returned for a dual degree in English and Political Science and a minor in Philosophy. I never finished that paper. I studied myth, folktales, history and psychology and even occult and spiritualism looking for answers. I ultimately decided the etymology told truth. 1715, glamer, Scottish, "magic, enchantment" (especially in phrase to cast the glamour), a variant of Scottish gramarye "magic, enchantment, spell," said to be an alteration of English grammar (q.v.) in a specialized use of that word's medieval sense of "any sort of scholarship, especially occult learning," the latter sense attested from c. 1500 in English but said to have been more common in Medieval Latin.

It was popularized in English by the writings of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). The sense of "magical beauty, alluring charm" is recorded by 1840. As that quality of attractiveness especially associated with Hollywood, high-fashion, celebrity, etc., by 1939.

Jamieson's 1825 supplement to his "Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language" has glamour-gift "the power of enchantment; metaph. applied to female fascination." Jamieson's original edition (1808) looked to Old Norse for the source of the word. Zoëga's Old Icelandic dictionary has glám-sýni "illusion," probably from the same root as gleam.

The Bottom Line: America’s military-industrial complex has been expanding from the Capital Beltway to Silicon Valley. America’s military-industrial complex has been rapidly expanding from the Capital Beltway to Silicon Valley. Although much of the Pentagon’s budget is spent on conventional weapons systems, the Defense Department has increasingly sought to adopt AI-enabled systems. Big tech companies, venture capital, and private equity firms benefit from multi-billion dollar Defense contracts, and smaller defense tech startups that “move fast and break things” also receive increased Defense funding. This report illustrates how a growing portion of the Defense Department’s spending is going to large, well-known tech firms, including some of the most highly valued corporations in the world.

Given the often-classified nature of large defense and intelligence contracts, a lack of transparency makes it difficult to discern the true amount of U.S. spending diverted to Big Tech. Yet, research reveals that the amount is substantial, and growing. According to the nonprofit research organization Tech Inquiry, three of the world’s biggest tech corporations were awarded approximately $28 billion from 2018 to 2022, including Microsoft ($13.5 billion), Amazon ($10.2 billion), and Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company ($4.3 billion). This paper found that the top five contracts to major tech firms between 2019 and 2022 had contract ceilings totaling at least $53 billion combined. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/SiliconValley

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