That - in case you're forgotten - is the flag of the U.S., being flown upside down and under the flag of Mexico on the campus of a high school in Montebello, CA; and as far as I have been able to determine, not one "American" lifted a finger in its defense.
April 19, 2007:
“Truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” --Max Planck, Physicist
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” --George Orwell
“Hell is truth seen too late. --Thomas Hobbes, Writer
Ladies, perhaps you ought cover your ears and avert your eyes – leave the room, even. What I’m about to say will be difficult for me, a gentleman with deep respect for the fair sex, otherwise.
There. Now, gentlemen, let’s get a few things straight:
Every time I say anything in response to one of those “Support Our Troops” articles, I draw a veritable barrage of foul-mouthed and scatological invective, bellowing and bloviating bullshit nonsense that brands precisely and incontrovertibly the individuals who so respond. “What you are,” observed Emerson, “thunders so loudly that I can’t hear what you say to the contrary.” I, gentlemen, am a man and quoting my grandfather, another man, know you wouldn't make a pimple on a man's ass. 'Kay?
More, a number of you asseverate with apparent dead-certain confidence that the subject entitles you to ignore the truth. You say so. As several have put it, “My country, right or wrong.”
Swell. As someone else - Samuel Johnson, I think – long ago observed, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
I might also observe that as a U.S. Senator once wrote, the first casualty when war comes is the truth.
“My country, right or wrong,” of course, is exactly how Germans defended themselves against the truth after World War Two. The “German Excuse” was heard again and again at Nuremburg, from the lowest of the low of war criminals. So let me set those of you who so proudly trumpet your paltry patriotism in German Excuse form that it has never been either a matter for pride nor an excuse, and it will never be.
As I said in an earlier essay here in discussing torture, anyone who tortures another human being is a monster, one I will not suffer to live in my world. Nothing but the fact that he is a torturer matters. Nothing. And, yes, to “Mel in Michigan,” if I were to come upon an “American Soldier” in the act of “torturing an Arab,” I would, indeed, shoot that soldier. I would do it with satisfaction, and I would shoot the miscreant son of a bitch in the brain stem, the shot that kills instantaneously - that the better to have no more to do with him. He is, for one thing and in the very first place, NOT an “American Soldier.” He is a criminal rogue, having set himself apart from and dishonored the nation he serves and all it stands for, the uniform he wears. and everyone else who wears it.
That last goes for anyone who orders or condones torture, up to and including the president of the United States. Remember that I said “were I to come upon” the individual in the act of torturing someone. Few crimes rank lower on the scale of things despicable in my book – or, for that matter, that of human kind. Next, and to deal with another of the arguments hurled from the petty and pusillanimous patriot wing of our political discourse, the end never justifies the means. Never – never, never, NEVER!
Where the President of the United States in his condonation, even ordering, of torture is concerned, I will content myself with doing everything in my power to see that he is first impeached, then brought to justice. That our president is a war criminal is a fact made evident from his own statements and behavior. That he claims by virtue of his office to be empowered to torture people – to say nothing of prosecute an illegal war – is not justification under any law including that which he publicly flaunts by virtue of political power rather than legal right. Were he anyone else, his best defense under these circumstances would be that of diminished capacity or insanity. Facts, gentleman – not opinion.
Having said all that, I’ll also say that I have earned the right to say what I say here about soldiers and about our attack upon and occupation of Iraq. I know, too, that I am justified on those same grounds when I wonder how the hell the likes of my recent detractors - to say nothing of the list of right-wing radio and television wannabes already posted here - all of whom betray by their ignorance of things military, tactical, and strategic that they have never so much as worn the uniform of their country, much less faced a lethal weapon on her behalf.
Where the hell do you wimp wannabes come off?!
Calm down a little, Hal. Okay! Next comes the question – if another marshmallow male metrosexual uses the word “issue,” I’ll barf – of “support.” How in the hideous hell do you dare say that support for the president who is sending them back for second and third tours in the hell-hole he and his Bush League Administration have made in Iraq, who has caused Air Force personnel to begin training for use in ground combat and two dozen more things as mentally meandering and mindless, is support for our troops?
With support from people like you, who the hell needs enemies?!
I’m still shaking my head inwardly at the stupefying chutzpah of your soul mate, Sean Hannity the other night when he berated Al Gore demanding to know why the latter wasn’t “practicing what he preaches” where global warming and pollution of the atmosphere are concerned. “Well, Mr. Hannity,” I asked the television screen, “when do you ship out for combat in Iraq?”
So, “Mel in Michigan” and the rest, when are you signing up? If you’re so all-fired determined to “support our troops,” why aren’t you in uniform?” Or does your “support” just run to loud-mouthing anyone who doesn’t support your hero, George the Seventh. You remind me for all the world of all those flag-waving, “united we stand,” patriots in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, the same people who can be counted on to thunder so indignantly whenever the flag-burning issue comes up. As I rode my bike around town in those days, I came upon flag after flag having been blown from cars to be left lying in the gutter. I saw it happen several times, matter of fact. Not once did any of these flag-waving, flag-loving patriots stop to rescue “Old Glory” from the gutter, and not once did I see anyone searching for a flag they had discovered losing.
That’s not all, either. Repeatedly after 9-11, from Corpus Christi, Texas to San Diego, California, I watched “Americans” walk right by without picking up flags they saw lying on the ground or in the gutter. Twice, I watched a flag flutter from a passing car to land on the street, that while passersby looked, watched, and then kept walking. Patriots, my red, white, and blue ass!
The truth is that you just talk, isn’t it?! You wouldn’t actually so much as bend over and pick up a flag lying in the gutter because it might soil your lily-white fingers, dirty your manicure, or cause disarray of your beauty-parlor hairdo. The only shots you fire are the ones you can take verbally and from the safety of anonymity and distance, and the only missiles you launch are those you launch in the form of e-mail.
Who the hell do you think you’re kidding?! You got your military training by DVD, TV, or the local movie theater, dincha . . .?
The plain fact is, you haven’t got the balls to really support anybody – let alone troops in combat. NO? Then do what will really does do our troops in Iraq some good. Demand, start writing letters – that, I notice is something you do with real patriotic fervor – to U.S. Congressmen, Senators, the President, and anyone else you can think of (the media, too – they’re in on this), that the nation and its president do everything necessary to win (and, unlike anyone else to date including yourselves, readers here will remember, I have stated exactly what that means) or withdraw.
That’s it. War, more perhaps than any other endeavor (and, perhaps, another reason you obviously don’t qualify to comment concerning it), is a moral question. No one has the right to declare, prosecute, or support a war he doesn’t intend to win. More, to be moral, war must at very least be prosecuted in a manner most likely to end it as soon as possible. This “war” – under our system of law, a war must be declared and supported by the public – is by international law, and by every moral code and system observed and professed by civilization since the middle ages, categorically, point by point, article by article, wrong!
As I’ve already, too, stated here, if you don’t have the cojones killing requires, don’t get in a war.
More and finally, and even for those like you who seem to know utterly nothing of ethics or moral honor, the attack upon Iraq was – and is - incredibly stupid, both as a tactical and strategic matter and as common sense. In the latter consideration, it is obviously so. What kind of fool, having received anonymous threats over the phone or by computer, and having had his car sabotaged by yet another unknown someone, would use that for a reason to begin shooting at a neighbor, his family, or his house because he’d learned that the neighbor was suspected of abusing his wife and kids?
Even if the caller identified himself as the member of a local - or distant, for that matter – group, and evidence was found suggesting that someone from that group had sabotaged the car, how would discovery that the neighbor sympathized or agreed with the suspect group justify an armed attack on the neighbor’s house? That’s insane, and - even granted that this is a nation’s behavior, and as Nietzsche once observed, “Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule” – it is still nuts.
There is, in point of sober fact, no possible way to logically, morally, or historically justify the United States’ attack on Iraq. None! Try, in that regard, to imagine defending yourself in a court of law – try, in other words, to find an attorney who would advise an attempt to make an affirmative defense – once you had attacked your neighbor under the circumstances I’ve just described.
Neither is any of this a matter of opinion. Truth isn’t decided by politics and politically. Inasmuch as it cannot be denied – having been argued and promulgated almost daily since it began - that this war was undertaken intending at very least to do what history stubbornly reveals must be equivalent to altering significantly the religious faith of twenty-two million Moslems, Operation Iraqi Freedom was an idiot’s blunder, a Charge of the Light Brigade that may yet prove to be a Little Bighorn.
And no historian has ever been deemed to have condemned by his report of those incidents the soldiers who participated. While history definitely – most definitely - decries the stupidity of those who issued the order to charge, “Never ours the reason why, only ours to do or die,” in no way contemns the men who did so. In Laos, 1968, there was a word for you guys – “downtowner.” In ‘Nam, throughout the fighting, there was another, this one an acronym. “REMF.” Google it!
Somebody go get the ladies. If I have to be among a bunch of pussies, at least they ought to be pretty.
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