Day for Veterans!
Just a thought for veteran's day:
"The soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid. Among people who are proof against the suggestions of romantic fiction, there can no longer be any question of the fact that military service produces moral imbecility, ferocity, and cowardice, and that the defense of nations must be undertaken by the civil enterprise of men enjoying all the rights and liberties of citizenship, and trained by the exacting discipline of democratic freedom and responsibility. For permanent work the soldier is worse than useless, such efficiency as he has is the result of dehumanization and disablement. His whole training tends to make him a weakling."
-- George Bernard Shaw
When asked to support the troops, I invariably recall what I like to call Wittgenstein's Playskool. You remember the moment in Die Philosophische Untersuchungen when, asked to teach a child a game, Wittgenstein teaches the child to shoot craps. "No, no!" comes the response. "Not that kind of game, Ludwig!"
Well, that's just how I feel about supporting the troops, and I should know from troops. I've lived on both an Army base and an Army post (the fact that I know the difference between the two--and you don't--lends all sorts of credence to my reflections). Until yours-truly bucked tradition by going to college instead of into the military, my family had mixed it up in two centuries worth of American bloodshed: from great-great-etc.-grandpa Colonel Angus MacDonald, who put off paying his taxes (and got some sweet payback for the family massacre at Glencoe in 1692) by hacking the shit out of some 18th-century Limeys, all the way to my father, who served two tours in the First Air Cavalry in the Vietnam of 1968-69.
I myself stared down a Russian trooper as my family drove into East Berlin in 1983, having our documents checked and re-checked as we went slowly through Checkpoint Charlie. He was a heavily armed teenager, though, and he didn't seem so threatened by my twelve-year-old bellicosity. I assume he was a Marxist, and he seemed mostly sad that history hadn't progressed quickly enough for him to be dating my teenaged sister rather than standing in the bitter cold wearing a very retro uniform while a zitty shithead from Oregon gave him the patriotic stinkeye.
But that's another story, and my point is simply that Americans attach all sorts of moral and political authority to the statements of military parents, and I reckon I deserve a little bit of that authority in reverse. And if supporting the troops means sending them a beer or a pack of smokes or my used porn, or nationalizing the oil industry to make sure that they don't have to join the military as a way to keep off welfare only to find that they still need foodstamps to feed their families, well, okay.
But what about the guys kicking people to death in basements in Kabul? What about the guys raping fourteen year olds in prisons in Baghdad? For that matter, what about the people who follow orders to drop cluster bombs on the heads of people going about their business?
This is an honest question: Why are you a bad apple if you rape and sodomize a little kid in a prison cell, kick somebody to death in a tent (have you thought about how many times you actually have to kick somebody in the legs until they die? I'll bet it's a lot), or pose for a Polaroid next to a few corpses, when you'd get a fat sloppy hero's blowjob and a Hickory Farms gift basket if you had simply burned those same people to death with white phosphorus or destroyed their sewer system so their kids died of dysentary? I really want to know.
Not those kinds of troops, Ludwig!
So here's a shot and a beer and a porn mag and a pack of smokes for the poor sons-and-daughters-of-bitches who are doing the dirty work so that you don't have to take the bus to work. At least, here's a shout out to the ones who are doing their best not to commit atrocities. And here's one to you, and the broader your definition of atrocity is, the louder the shout.
p.s. Next time: if we found out that one of the people who was killed in the World Trade Center was a child rapist or marijuana smoker, would we still describe that person as an "innocent" victim?
"The soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid. Among people who are proof against the suggestions of romantic fiction, there can no longer be any question of the fact that military service produces moral imbecility, ferocity, and cowardice, and that the defense of nations must be undertaken by the civil enterprise of men enjoying all the rights and liberties of citizenship, and trained by the exacting discipline of democratic freedom and responsibility. For permanent work the soldier is worse than useless, such efficiency as he has is the result of dehumanization and disablement. His whole training tends to make him a weakling."
-- George Bernard Shaw
When asked to support the troops, I invariably recall what I like to call Wittgenstein's Playskool. You remember the moment in Die Philosophische Untersuchungen when, asked to teach a child a game, Wittgenstein teaches the child to shoot craps. "No, no!" comes the response. "Not that kind of game, Ludwig!"
Well, that's just how I feel about supporting the troops, and I should know from troops. I've lived on both an Army base and an Army post (the fact that I know the difference between the two--and you don't--lends all sorts of credence to my reflections). Until yours-truly bucked tradition by going to college instead of into the military, my family had mixed it up in two centuries worth of American bloodshed: from great-great-etc.-grandpa Colonel Angus MacDonald, who put off paying his taxes (and got some sweet payback for the family massacre at Glencoe in 1692) by hacking the shit out of some 18th-century Limeys, all the way to my father, who served two tours in the First Air Cavalry in the Vietnam of 1968-69.
I myself stared down a Russian trooper as my family drove into East Berlin in 1983, having our documents checked and re-checked as we went slowly through Checkpoint Charlie. He was a heavily armed teenager, though, and he didn't seem so threatened by my twelve-year-old bellicosity. I assume he was a Marxist, and he seemed mostly sad that history hadn't progressed quickly enough for him to be dating my teenaged sister rather than standing in the bitter cold wearing a very retro uniform while a zitty shithead from Oregon gave him the patriotic stinkeye.
But that's another story, and my point is simply that Americans attach all sorts of moral and political authority to the statements of military parents, and I reckon I deserve a little bit of that authority in reverse. And if supporting the troops means sending them a beer or a pack of smokes or my used porn, or nationalizing the oil industry to make sure that they don't have to join the military as a way to keep off welfare only to find that they still need foodstamps to feed their families, well, okay.
But what about the guys kicking people to death in basements in Kabul? What about the guys raping fourteen year olds in prisons in Baghdad? For that matter, what about the people who follow orders to drop cluster bombs on the heads of people going about their business?
This is an honest question: Why are you a bad apple if you rape and sodomize a little kid in a prison cell, kick somebody to death in a tent (have you thought about how many times you actually have to kick somebody in the legs until they die? I'll bet it's a lot), or pose for a Polaroid next to a few corpses, when you'd get a fat sloppy hero's blowjob and a Hickory Farms gift basket if you had simply burned those same people to death with white phosphorus or destroyed their sewer system so their kids died of dysentary? I really want to know.
Not those kinds of troops, Ludwig!
So here's a shot and a beer and a porn mag and a pack of smokes for the poor sons-and-daughters-of-bitches who are doing the dirty work so that you don't have to take the bus to work. At least, here's a shout out to the ones who are doing their best not to commit atrocities. And here's one to you, and the broader your definition of atrocity is, the louder the shout.
p.s. Next time: if we found out that one of the people who was killed in the World Trade Center was a child rapist or marijuana smoker, would we still describe that person as an "innocent" victim?
posted by Swill to Power at 11:57 AM
7 Comments:
If child molesters died in the Trade Tower collapse, would that not be an instance of "moral luck"?
Your first point, though, seems to slide off of W's argument; the gist of that paragraph (is it para 69?) is about the genetic priority of definition. Teach them a game; no, not that game; when you said "teach a game," what were you thinking?
When we say "support out troops," I think most people already think "those who are engaged in lawful warfare, i.e. following legal orders, no matter how nasty the end result. People know war involves killing, but when sanctioned by the State, under promulgated rules, it is a necessary violence.
The W moment is more in the meaning of "support," I'd suggest. What the f does support mean? A dumbass magnet on my Hummer?
The NY Times has an op/ed piece today on Vietnam vets and Irag war vets: will the latter suffer their return as did the former? No one came to airport to pickup this guy's dad on his return from Vietnam. How sad. (Yeah, it is pretty sad that his family were assholes.)
No one drafted the military personnel in Iraq. Granted, they may have been constructively drafted by social conditions, e.g., poverty, blah blah, but they signed up. I, for one, consciously didn't sign up, in part because I didn't trust the US Government to use my skill set appropriately. And my family's loaded and could do other things. If I'd been poor, I probably would've, because I had a nasty temper and a nice wide self-destructive streak running down my back.
But, when someone says "Support our Troops!" and I respond "You idiots made a mistake! Don't repeat it if given the opportunity!" the erstwhile patriot says "Not that support!"
And, I think you'd have to kick someone on the inside of the thighs to kill them, induce some kind of massive hemorrhage in the femoral artery through blunt force. Some kind of compound fracture of the femur might do it.
http://www.jtrauma.com/pt/re/jtrauma/abstract.00005373-199511000-00035.htm;jsessionid=D0b9sV3LMPXfjOi1irhpmKWsfhTD91MiicnQvr7KtJVIB2z1QfVY!-1536751125!-949856145!9001!-1
You're right in a way that makes me right. Which is to say that most people do think of war conducted by "lawful" means, which is simply a way of 1) mystifying state violence as "necessary," (it's not), and then 2) taking the fallacious next step and declaring a putative necessity to be a moral good.
Not W's "what were you thinking," but W's "you're not actually thinking at all."
So the inversion of genetic priority keeps looping down the rabbit hole and there's a cluster bomb in the hole that's killed children.
But you're not going to get all high and mighty and say you'd never use violence, right? Just be honest about it.
You're right that my assumptions are stupid--many people don't question the necessity of violence. "What else are we supposed to do? They attacked us!" As if an attack justifies armed response, makes it correct.
Seems to me that saying "false dilemma" just once would have done much
to clear away a lot of what passes for thinking in this country when it
comes to violence.
I believe it was during Lytton Strachey's interrogation for being a
conscientious objector that he was asked, "But what if a German soldier
was attempting to rape your sister?" His response: "I would endeavor to
put myself between them, sir." Which is drastically different than "I
would firebomb the city that the soldier's cousins lived in."
Type "depleted uranium birth defects" into www.images.google.com for an
example of what happens when one doesn't recognize a false dilemma.
But think what pussies the de Medicis would take us for, worrying about such things. I do what I do because I like to do it and I can do it. More gold paint on the orphans!
You can go Big Brother on "false dilemma"; all you need to describe the majority of thinking in this country is "false."
Euge! Your scintillating rhetoric forces the right hand of Uncle Sam to caress the anus of _ratio_ whilst the left is made to stir his rapidly curdling cocktail of blood.
See you in GITMO.
Gitmo, gitmo. What's the name of that fucking Gremlin?
Post a Comment
<< Home