Politics & Power Quote by Bruce Jackson

Call it a war and the paperwork starts marching. Bruce Jackson is less interested in whether AIDS, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, or terrorism can be “defeated” than in what the war metaphor does inside a modern state: it converts messy, long-haul social problems into administrable emergencies. The line about “budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead” is the tell. He’s pointing to the way governments manufacture reality through infrastructure. Once an issue has a line item and a seal, it acquires the hard, bureaucratic texture of truth, even if the underlying problem resists any battlefield ending.

The intent is a critique of political language as a tool for institutional growth. “War” is rhetorical jet fuel: it justifies speed, exceptional powers, and a moral sorting of people into allies and enemies. It’s easier to fund a war than to fund care; easier to criminalize than to rebuild. Jackson’s list is also an indictment of promiscuous militarization: everything becomes a front, everyone becomes a potential combatant, and success becomes measurable in spending and activity rather than outcomes.

The subtext is cynical but procedural: bureaucracies don’t merely respond to reality; they stabilize a story about reality. Letterhead is a punchline with teeth. It’s the smallest symbol of permanence, the proof that a metaphor has been instantiated into an institution. In context, it reads as a public servant’s inside observation: policy doesn’t just solve problems; it also creates self-sustaining machines that need the problem - or at least the war frame - to stay legible, fundable, and “real.”