Support our Troops

By sending other people's children to save your own ass!

Over at This Modern World there are two excellent posts ("Support the Troops," and "From the Mailbag") about the hypocrisy of 'supporting the troops' as long as the troops are a faceless idealized mass comprised of no one you know.

The gall of this particular woman, speaking from within her flag-draped halls, drooling over the sight of a uniform, really gets to me.

It was a large home in a well-to-do suburb north of the city. Two American flags adorned the yard. The prospect's mom greeted him wearing an American flag T-shirt.

"I want you to know we support you," she gushed.

Rivera soon reached the limits of her support.

"Military service isn't for our son. It isn't for our kind of people," she told him.

Her kind of people? And exactly what kind of people are her kind of people?

As someone with a family member (my brother-in-law) in the army right now, and scheduled to go to Afghanistan sometime next year, this sort of thing really gets to me. When you see those be-magneted cars (and Tom is right on the money pointing out how insincerely impermanent a magnet is...)you have to wonder. How is that supporting the troops, and, say, Cindy Sheehan trying to get Bush to answer for his deliberate misdirection not supporting the troops?

How is putting a magnet on your car more supportive of the people being sent to die than demanding the government not send them to die for no good reason?

It seems to me the right in this country has a much harder time supporting the troops than the left. If you take supporting the troops to mean more than just saying that phrase. For instance, halfway through Fahrenheit 9/11 I was struck by the fact that this was the most 'pro-troop' piece of media I had seen since the war started.

The best parts of that film illustrated what's going on with the military in this country. The people who are the most screwed by the American way of life are the ones going to defend it, either out of a hope of making a difference (as the boy in the letter to Tom Tomorrow felt,) or because economic realities leave them little choice in terms of a career (as the kids of Flint, MI discovered in Fahrenheit 9/11).

They do it so the flag-wearing suburbanite women of the America can shoo away military recruiters while muttering 'not for my kind of people' under her breath.

Well, she's right. The military is not for coward, hypocrite assholes like her kind of people.