Do you remember Daddy Warbucks?

Do you remember Daddy Warbucks from the Little Orphan Annie comic strip (not the more recent musical)? Cartoonist Harold Gray presented him as a foil for his political, free market views, first appearing on September 27, 1924. He had made his fortune from World War I, thus the name Warbucks. He became the benefactor for Little Orphan Annie and Gray presented him in a benevolent way. Though without intending to, Harold Gray may have exposed the ironic inconsistency in which his care for Annie came off as penance for making his fortune off of the suffering, death, and destruction of war. This occurred to me again this week with President Trump’s complaint about those who profiteer from US involvement in an endless sequence of wars, with some at least oblique allusion to President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about the military industrial complex. I certainly wouldn’t presume to be able to read President Trump’s mind, and as a Christian pacifist I am sure my perspective deviates from his and most of the country. Yet, I do sense a connection in the concern that wars that are presented to the public as defense of the country are driven by the profit motive if not greed of those who amass fortunes from military spending. Those who pay the highest price are the young people who serve with all noble good intentions, and their families as well as those who have honorably devoted themselves to lifelong military careers. My musings are not intended to express an opinion about the upcoming presidential election, but only to prompt sober reflection on tangled and obscure motivations for some of the most consequential actions of nations.