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SOLDIERS OF MISFORTUNE:
CONTRIVANCE VS. REALITY IN THE U.S. MILITARY
by Jessica Murray
October 2003
The
USA has never excepted itself from the timeworn tradition whereby a nation
uses its poor people to fight its wars. When country calls, the underemployed
and underpaid flood into the front lines, while young folks with connections
to power and money tend to be busy doing other things. In dictatorships
as well as in putative democracies, the fact that foot-soldiers are disproportionately
drawn from the working and indigent classes is almost universally accepted
as an uncondoned reality. Hardly anybody talks about it except socialists
and sociologists. The media discusses the make-up of the military almost
not at all, pandering instead to a vague, unexamined consensual presumption
that we who share the same landmass are more or less equally likely to
die in its name.
Politicians invariably use the royal we when extolling the sacrifices
made by recruits and their families, yet in all of both houses of Congress,
there are only two lawmakers who have children in the military.
One cannot help but feel that the implications of this statistic are not
fully appreciated by blue-collar supporters of the war party. Were it
not for the collective fantasy that all Americans live and die democratically,
surely the privileged policymakers who stand in front of the cameras and
bloviate about the heroism of "our sons and daughters"
would be denounced as hypocrites of the most tasteless and tactless sort.
One imagines members of military families in the audience nudging each
other
and quoting the old joke where Tonto says to the Lone Ranger, "What
do you mean we, white man?"
It is a law of group psychology that members of an underclass tend to
identify with their oppressors. Here we have the reverse: the oppressors
are pretending to identify with the underclass. It almost goes without
saying that none of the scions of the corporate aristocracy who comprise
Bush's inner circle has served a day in the armed forces. That George
("Bring-'em-on") Bush was himself a no-show during the
Viet Nam war is no secret; his stint going AWOL from the cushiest imaginable
military duty in 1972 is the stuff of late-night comedy monologues. In
what is perhaps the only point of agreement in an increasingly polarized
war debate, everyone seems to understand that the architects of the dirty,
bloody conflict in Iraq have no intention of getting dirty and bloody
themselves.
Occasionally, the big guys at the top and the little guys at the bottom
do meet up, sort of. Bush left Washington for a quick visit to California
this past summer (at least it was speculated to be Bush, behind a dark
window of one of the limos that passed near the crowd). Outside the hotel
where his gazillion-dollar-a-plate fundraising luncheon was to take place,
there were lots of everyday folks lining the streets, standing politely
behind the secret service barricades, holding little flags in their hands
and carrying babies upon their shoulders with little flags in their
hands. Smiling and applauding, many among the faithful seemed genuinely
moved to be in the quasi-presence of their commander-in-chief. A majority
of them seemed to be from the segment of the population most likely to
supply its young as cannon fodder in the greatest numbers.
This is a profound irony of demographic politics, one which has not gotten
as much attention as it would seem to warrant. Why is there not more of
a public outcry, among Bush's non-wealthy supporters, in reaction to the
ravine of difference between what he says and what he does? It is a disparity
which grows more enormous daily, right along with the numbers of billions
Bechtel is making from reconstruction and the numbers of body bags shipped
back from the desert. What barricades of the mind keep so many Americans
from noticing a credibility gap as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon?
Credulity and faith are separated by a thin line, especially when the
stakes are as high as they are in war; and political speechwriters no
less than Madison Avenue trend-crafters know that the psychology of persuasion
works upon emotion, not upon logic. Once a good salesman has identified
his customer's crucial emotional button, he need only match it with the
right phrase or image, and push it again and again.
The language used by the government and the media to talk about the military
is very telling. Consider the slogan support the troops, with which
war promoters have hit the mother lode. It is a phrase whose denotation
has been completely replaced with a tailored set of connotations. Associated
in the vernacular with patriotism and empathy, the phrase has become so
emotionally freighted that it seems to pre-empt normal linguistic brain
function. Common sense would suggest that if one wanted to actually support
a life-imperiled young soldier in a sweltering desert, one would help
him out of his battle gear, pay him handsomely and send him home. But
buzz phrases like this one, piously and repeatedly deployed, are not intended
to convey literal meaning, but to imply, in some cases, the very opposite
of what the words express. Support the troops has been pimped by
the propagandists into meaning support the administration's war.
From the designers of today's "war on terrorism", we hear catchphrases
appropriated from a simpler, more innocent era -- or at least a more ignorant
one. Chief among these is the call to defend democracy, evoking
a Cold War refrain that made little sense then, and makes none at all
now. World War II imagery is also making a comeback with Washington spinmeisters,
who are doubtless hoping that any comparison with the relative moral clarity
of the last "just war" -- when it was at least obvious who the
enemy was and why we were fighting them-- will soften public perception
of the chaotic sink-hole that is Iraq.
Rumsfeld et al are refusing to release the numbers of injured G.I.s in
this war, nor do they seem to want the public to know who, exactly, is
fighting. Hard facts and figures might convey a realistic picture of today's
military, and the White House prefers to convey a soft and fuzzy picture.
The seasoned old rallying cry "support the troops" is meant
to suggest a full-draft platoon of middle-class soldiers -- maybe not
your son, specifically, but definitely the boy-next-door -- marching off
to fight some distinctly foreign foe; i.e. idealistic young white boys
up against a foe of a different race. To this end, news stories tend to
be illustrated with pictures of Anglo soldiers far more frequently than
the statistics would suggest, given that forty per cent of soldiers in
today's volunteer army are African American, and a significant proportion
of the rest are Spanish-speaking aliens. (In one of the more bizarre developments
of the post-Sept.11 military, the Pentagon has mounted a recruiting campaign
aimed at illegal residents, promising them that joining the army will
speed up their access to a green card. In a cruel synchronicity, Ashcroft's
stringent new citizenship rules are making it prohibitively difficult
for young immigrants to find civilian work; with the result that thousands
of young people are being funneled into signing up with their selectively-adoptive
Uncle Sam as a deadly employer of last resort.)
Meanwhile,
dollars-and-cents support for the troops is actually being taken away.
Flicking away a tear for his brave soldiers with one hand, Bush has been
trying to cut their pay with the other. And in a side note that would be
farcical if it weren't so tragic, when the wounded come home they are
likely to get a cold shoulder from the Veterans' Administration. As a
fall-back strategy, the VA has been labeling as officially undiagnosable
the most virulent of the various postwar maladies brought on by the Pentagon's
latest munitions ("Gulf War Syndrome" is now widely believed
to be code for depleted uranium poisoning), thus abdicating responsibility
both for treating and for causing an unconscionable radiological scourge
which, if admitted, would constitute a war crime.
Yet millions of Americans view the army as an all-but-infallible institution
set up to safeguard everything they hold dear, including the lives of
their sons and daughters. Aided by a round-the-clock flood of corporate-media
disinformation, the popular perception of the military seems to be resolutely
cleaving to the contrivance rather than to the reality.
The contrivance is perhaps best exemplified by the Jessica Lynch story,
a ludicrously transparent bit of Pentagon mythmaking which began as an
outsized photo-op and was transformed by an opportunistic media into a
fatuous TV drama, despite the fact that the story was exposed as being
a fabrication from start to finish.
The reality, of course, is that a small number of severely demented men
are sending young people from our nation's socioeconomic fringes all over
the world for the purpose, as Eddie Izzard has so succinctly put it, of
stealing countries. What is happening in Iraq is a rather bald
case of colonialism, though the post-modern packaging seems to have fooled
many observers in this country (Americans may be more familiar with colonialism
in its classical trappings, as portrayed in Masterpiece Theatre dramas
featuring British commanders taking their tea while pitting one indigenous
tribe against another in the name of the Queen). Instead of seeing our
own generals as upper-class invaders who are pitting our own people-of-color
against those of other countries, the American public as a whole prefers
the official version of our national intentions: the one in which we are
the generous exporters of a fine, upstanding political system which we
are introducing to various benighted countries, one by one, via the (armed)
services of a broad spectrum of American youth.
"My son's over there risking his life for our freedom," a GI's
mother was quoted in the newspaper as saying the other day. It is a simple-sounding
and deeply-felt pronouncement, masking a bevy of rationalizations as complex
and torturously layered as baklava. What is particularly heartbreaking
to this writer is the realization that if I were that woman, I too would
probably go to the ends of human logic and beyond, into mad surrealism,
in order to suspend disbelief. If I were a mother who knew that any day
I might suffer the most intolerable loss in human experience -- the death
of a child -- I think there would be strict limits upon how much reality
I could stand. With my son far away in a landscape exploding with snipers
and bombs, I would be teetering along a very thin edge, just bearing up
day to day. I doubt if I would be in the mood to discuss dissenting opinions
as to the course upon which the president, and by extension my son, and
by extension I myself, had decided to embark. I imagine I would find unwelcome
any viewpoint which could be construed as suggesting that my precious
child was just a pawn in some unspeakably cynical and unjust campaign.
To take even the smallest step along that line of inquiry might lead to
answers too grotesque to take in.
I do believe I might instead reach for one of the little flags that were
being handed out, and then stand in line for the parade. I would probably
hang on every word coming from the well-dressed man behind the podium.
I would attend with terrible gratitude to this person of power and authority
saying that he cares about my boy; that my boy's life is important, and
is part of something important; that all this horror has some kind of
meaning.
As if my sanity depended upon it, I would strain to hear between the lines
the message that if the unimaginable happened, it would not have happened
in vain.
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