Letters to the Editor
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Re: Barnet should enlist
Barnett has Cystic Fibrosis.
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@IngSoc
How can anyone be sure after drinking that stuff? Essence of Purity=Peace On Earth.
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All of their toes
Recalling the video clip of Karl Rove working with the re-elect Nixon campaign, I'm sure Karl managed to evade service and keep all of his toes, too.
Nearly every bloody one of these knuckle-dragging war mongers evaded "the call" in their day, just as their young minions do today.
Indeed, I knew a slew of young men and women who signed up immediately following 9/11. It was a remarkably unifying event in it's way, and everyone wanted to DO something. That included those of us who were not inclined to join the military. Of course, all of those kids thought they would be part of a righteous struggle with those who had perpetrated such abomination. They thought we would at least TRY to attack al Qaeda with the full force and weight of the nation.
Instead, they got sucked into the bait and switch tactics of a craven crowd loaded with romantic notions about the ripping of flesh and bone. They can pretend because most of them never saw the real thing and haven't enough capacity to imagine what it must be like in reality.
Sickening.
There was an opportunity to utilize the spirit that rose with the smoke and dust at the WTC. What a surprise, the PNAC blew it like it was a tissue intended for their personal use.
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If I might be permitted to build on Ondelette's post
To blindly serve a cause without first critically analyzing the justness of that cause (from all angles) or the consequences of pursuing that cause on innocent lives...isn't that what we so blithely accuse a terrorist of doing?
The Weekly Standard war-cheerleaders, and others of their ilk, clearly feel that the "other side" has an un-ending supply of those who are willing to die for their cause. This premise is what drives this never-ending war on terror. Their concern, it seems, is that the U.S. may run out of those who are willing to die before "the terrorists" do. This war on terror is ultimately framed as a war of attrition. Let's just hope that the line-up of fresh-faced, crew-cut, strapping young American lads isn't shorter than the line-up of bearded, towel- or turban-wearing, (bomb)strapping young terror recruits.
The longest line-up wins. Or, put another way, whoever is willing the sacrifice the largest numbers of the 9/11 generation wins.
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The War Movie Generation
How striking it is that the sort of writing that Dean Barnett gives us adopts such a pose of tough-mindedness and clarity about how the world "really is" while all the time invoking images which are all but entirely based on notions springing from watching or reading rather than doing. While Jonah Goldberg may have some experience of high school bullies "pants-ing" him in the cafeteria, I'm confident he has no experience outside of the occasional Hollywood movie about being "a new sheriff in a really bad town." When Dean Barnett speaks of the American experience during World War II, I suspect his thoughts are far, far less of civil defense drills, gasoline rationing, car-pooling, scrap metal drives and victory gardens than they are of John Wayne on the Sands of Iwo Jima or Ronald Reagan in This Is The Army.
No matter how necessary any war may be, warfare for those who actually participate is never ennobling. The genius of Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe characters (http://www.linesandcolors.com/images/2005-09/mauldin_250.jpg) were that they reflected the reality of unpretentious men just trying to survive a dreadful form of existence. I strongly suspect the vivid imaginings of the noble experience of fighting WWII by the Dean Barnetts and Jonah Goldbergs of the world rarely encompass the reality of the untold legions of undiagnosed post traumatic stress disorder cases that resulted in post-war broken lives and suicide. It was no accident that the anti-anxiety drug Miltown became such a huge seller when it was launched in 1955. Even the vast majority of combat veterans who survive relatively unscathed, both psychologically and physically, don't so much look back nostalgically at the nobility of what they were doing but the bonding that occurs when people share a terrifying experience.
For so many on the right, John Wayne was and is the iconic embodiment of the fighting man. At the same time, there is ample evidence to suggest that Wayne's exaggerated patriotism up to the end of his life was a continuing reaction to his own sense of guilt over not having served during the Second World War. It's interesting to note that in the presidential campaign of 1972, the actual, if undramatic, Navy service of Richard Nixon during WWII was nowhere in evidence. By contrast, John Wayne was everywhere supporting our presence in Vietnam and being a hero of the Republican Party whose membership utterly reviled the antiwar stance of George McGovern. Yet, it was Senator McGovern who, along with a crew of nine other men, flew thirty-five combat missions in the B-24 Liberator which was often referred to as the "flying coffin" by those who served in the Army Air Force.
In the campaign of 2004, we had the heroic fighting man figure of George W. Bush cinematically thudding down ala Top Gun onto the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Striding across the flight deck with his helmet tucked under his arm, President Bush didn't allude to his time spent at the Officer's Clubs of the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. However, his proxies in the ironically named Swift Boat Veterans For Truth were rabidly eager to try to disparage any aspect of Senator John Kerry's experiences of having actually been in a small patrol boat in a river with people actively trying to kill him and his crew.
It appears that the Republican Party has a morbid disapproval of those who are insufficiently free to use military power. The two genuine military figures in the GOP presidential pantheon both distressingly fail to uphold current Administration standards of patriotism. Dwight Eisenhower ominously warned of "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex" such as that demonstrated by our current, highly privatized, war in Iraq. Even more distressingly, Theodore Roosevelt would never make it onto Fox News Sunday with statements like these:
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole... Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
Plainly, given the current popularity of the ever-coy Fred Thompson, who has played military officers in movies, the readers of The Weekly Standard are less interested in real heroics than playing the idolater to heroic and noble images.