Ode to Outrage
We turned down a book today written by a 25-yr-old female soldier whose arm was blown off in an IED attack in Baghdad. Decided it wasn't newsy enough, nor well-written enough to backlist well. Times have changed.
I grew up with Vietnam on the tube; my parents didn't let us watch, but it was hard to miss it. Mine is the generation for whom war is like a movie, and all the full-color images on the 24-hr-news channels only look to me like remakes on the b&w version. The more I see, the harder it is to shock me; the deadening of my sensitivities alarms me.
And so it is with soldier tales. Vietnam vets stood awkwardly in front of my summer history class at Yale and talked about what the experience had meant to them. (I remember those vets especially because they looked like every 50-year-old man, and I had a flash--I really felt, for the first time, what it meant for an event to define a generation. But it wasn't MY generation; I couldn't feel what they felt.)
There is something about the Afghanistan/Iraq vets that reminds me of those men--only now there are women, since the advent of insurgent warfare (Revolutionary War, anyone?) makes the issue of women in frontline combat obsolete. Women warriors--that's new for us. A year ago I watched mothers in khaki kissing their babies goodbye, and I wept. Now I don't. How quickly it becomes old.
The Founding Fathers expected the citizenry to have first-hand experience with military service. That first-hand experience--that's what keeps us sensitive to the reality: the brutality, the cost. Not to say that I support the draft, because I'd whisk my kids out of here so fast their heads would spin. But I see the real value of it in terms of sensitizing a populace.
Instead, we're a people slowly going to sleep--a people breathing in such a climate of corruption and violence that we've stopped reacting to it. What would it take, in these terms, for a revolution?
When you think, in contemporary measure, of what Watergate really was--the relative scale of the crime that brought down Nixon... Who could've imagined those would be the good old days?
posted by I n g e r @ Thursday, August 03, 2006
10 Comments:
We're focused on important stuff, like Brangelina, Britney's baby-seat omissions, and Mel's drunken rants.
Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, is perfectly focused.
"And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
When Mel Gilbson's DUI arrest is headline news, when our soldiers and innocent citizens are being killed all over the world, there is something wrong with this society.
Personally, I think that the only way this country is going to wake up again, will be for us to be attacked on our home turf again. It has been five years since 9/11 and though they will never forget it, people are sleeping again.
Mary
and those of us that ARE outraged, and speak out continually... are labelled, and dismissed as... moonbats? wingnuts? liberal elite?
because we are opposed to an illegal war?
quick~change the subject! did you hear lance bass is gay?!! amazing.
...sighing again.
Panem at circensem. The rest is not people's business.
I have thought often over the last few years of the times when "we" were the terrorists, the insurgents, the rebels...
We have celebrations for those times, memorials, national parks, monuments. Yet when I refer to W. as George the 2nd, nobody gets it!
alan
I feel you on this. The strange part for me is how normal this is.
this easy for me to say, because i do not have children, but i did have students to whom i proposed the following idea, and they seemed to hate it as much as i imagined their parents would: compulsory service. for everybody. and i when i say everybody, i mean everybody. no exemptions for those in college, no opting into the reserves, no buying your way out. cripples would have to be exempted from basic, but they would go, too, provided they could read and write.
i say that only because i had a friend in high school who was yale-bound, or would have been, had not his stint in the army convinced him to become a clergyman instead, immeadiately, instead of waiting for the degree. he was very smart, and good at languages, and was sent to the language center. i wanted to go, too, because i was smart, and good at languages, and i thought it would put me to work as an interpreter straight away, instead of getting a useless language degree which would take me years anyhow,and because i'd read the republic seven times. i interviewed with a recruiter, who was anxious to have me until we began the health history, and was told they wouldn't have me.
i am not a patriot. i am not fond of the military. i do not think being a soldier would be fun. i do not like getting up early. but i do not think on duty lightly. i wanted to serve somehow. i wound up teaching instead. for money at universities, and for free at a school that lets immigrants' kids leave high school with an associate's degree, thereby leaving them with two less years of loans.
american dissidents was my most popular course, but when i mentioned compulsory service, everybody brayed.
did i really want to see my students sent to war, they asked me? of course not, i said. but they'd just read the declaration of independence, and i asked them whether or not they thought it was true. yes, it was true, otherwise the language wouldn't have been ripped off by so many other countries. and then i asked them why, if all men are created equal, why the responsibility to defend the country invented with that piece of paper, should fall disporportionately to those who enjoyed the protections that paper promised the least? namely, the poor and the coloured? it had not always been so. lots of ivy leaguers served in wwii, and lots of others who would never have been ivy leaguers got there with the gi bill. why should students in top notch schools be exempted now? were their lives worth more than someone who was not in school? either they were or they weren't.
no one had balls enough to say, yes, my life is worth more. this was the only response i got:
it says here, said one smart ass, whom i loved very dearly, that joining the army didn't seem the most prudent way to effect the students' Safety and Happiness. probably not, i said. but the paper also insisted that citizens provide new Guards for their future security in the face of Despotism. and since we were (and are) at war because of a chickenhawk despot who wasn't even properly elected (and it isn't accidental that this stupid and useless war was brought on by chickenhawks), then citizens ought to make it their business to stay out of stupid and useless wars by forcing the question to those who wage them: IS THIS WAR IMPORTANT ENOUGH FOR YOU TO SEND YOU AND YOURS? IF IT ISN'T, THEN NOBODY GOES.
congressmen have a way of getting their children out of the service. but how would they behave if they didn't? (i also told my students that i couldn't pretend to tell them because it has never actually happened. not entirely)?
tunes change very quickly when you ask a person to put his money, or his children, where his mouth is.
i wish there were, but i don't know that there is a better way to keep us out of an unnecessary war than by exacting the dearest price there is?
i only hope i still mean it if and when the time comes.
(p.s. i know full well that compulsory service hasn't kept israel out of any wars, but it seems to have done the trick throughout the better part of europe).
Yep, I agree. There's more, too:
When the public becomes so distanced from military service they become more vulnerable to propaganda fed to them about war. They become less able to judge information they receive--less able to weigh decisions made in their names by leaders. They're more easily manipulated, more easily fooled. Combine that with the three-minute analyses of complex military strategy they're fed by network military experts and you get what we've got: armchair citizens. Remote-control citizens.
the comments in here are almost as good as the post itself...i love the people who love you, inger...
"who could've imagined that those would be the good old days?"
indeed...
peace...
i prefer the lysistrata method, which i have said before.
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