(no subject)
John Kerry stuck his foot in his mouth. He doesn’t do it nearly as much as, say, the president, but he does it and, well, he did it. Big time. And while I really wish he wouldn’t have waited until one week before the election to give Karl Rove something to masturbate to, it’s kind of tragic that he’s taking such a smearing. I suppose, though, that desperate times call for desperate measures and when you’re a president with nothing to lose, you can go after a guy who enlisted to fight in a war you didn’t want anything to do with.
This is, of course, old news. The Bush administration was in quite a pickle three years ago, trying to figure out how to beat a guy who fought in a war the President himself weaseled out of. Fortunately for them, Kerry wasn’t a John F. Kennedy or a George H.W. Bush. He wasn’t a “war hero” -- he didn’t pull an injured guy through the water with his teeth or win the Distinguished Flying Cross. Even more fortunately for them, he came back from Vietnam and decided to share what he’d seen with the guys who make decisions and said a lot of shocking and brutally honest things that ended up being painted as disgracing his fellow soldiers. He spoke about what the war had done to his friends and to himself; he talked about the way good, well-meaning kids had been overcome by barbarism how some up raping and killing innocent people. He didn’t lie; but apparently telling the truth wasn’t the honorable thing. He also wasn’t the only one who ever testified at those hearings; but he’s the only one who ended up running for President.
And now he tried to make a joke about how our stupid President never cared for homework and has now gotten the country he somehow ended up in charge of stuck in a never-ending mess in Iraq. It was a bad joke and he didn’t tell it right and now he’s given the chickenhawks more fodder for the John Kerry/The Democrats Hate(s) Our Troops Show. That was stupid, dude.
Lost in this is another voice in the wilderness -- that of Kevin Tillman brother of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals linebacker who after September 11, 2001 turned down a three-year, $3.6 million contract to enlist in the Marines and fight for his country. Kevin himself turned down a shot to play major league baseball to do the same. And everyone knows how it turned out. Pat was deployed to the Middle East and then redeployed to Afghanistan where on April 22, 2004 he took three bullets to the head from members of his own unit. U.S. Army Special Command originally said Pat died in hostile fire and later, when the facts were more clear, took their sweet time correcting themselves.
It turns out, according to his brother and best friend, that Pat’s attitude about the war changed somewhere along the way. Reports from those close to him (including his mother) suggest that he had asked a friend to arrange for him to meet with Noam Chomsky when he returned from Afghanistan. Other friends say he encouraged them to vote against George Bush in the 2004 election.
And Kevin? Well, he’s taking a lot of heat. Responses to his article have included accusations that his brother would be disappointed in him, that his brother was a hypocrite and (wouldn’t you know) that he’s disgracing his fellow soldiers by saying what’s on his mind and trying to expose the reality of war. The bottom line is that we really don’t want to know. We want to imagine that everyone soldier is a hero, and that every one of them fights every day with a clear objective and a full-throated and whole-hearted belief that what they’re doing is 100% correct.
But the world doesn’t work that way. Many, many men (and women) enlist for lack of a better option -- because they can’t afford school (like Lynndie England) or because they’re sick of a dead end job (also like Lynndie England, who was working nights at a chicken processing facility when she enlisted) or because they’re encouraged (or even forced) to do so by parents who think they need discipline or coerced by recruiters dispensing empty promises. This isn’t everyone, certainly; but it’s what the University of Michigan’s lawyers would call a “critical mass.” Of course, there are a lot of Pat and Kevin Tillmans too -- young men and women who believe that they have a responsibility to serve their country when they’re needed. But plenty of them will continue to sign up for causes that seem just only to find out when they get there that they’d been misled if we continue to denigrate those who return and tell the world what they know.
One of the bedrock principles of liberal representative democracy is that information should be freely available to anyone who wants it. One of the other ones is that people should be unfettered in their attempts to disseminate information. One of the fundamental underlying truths of this principle is that information itself is not good or bad in and of itself. One of the other ones is that the more information we have to evaluate for ourselves, the better off we’ll be as a nation and as a people. John Kerry, Kevin Tillman, and thousands of others made our democracy work once by signing up to fight for it; they also grease the wheels of democracy by making sure we know exactly what’s going on around the world. There are those who would say that the two things are so different in import that it’s absurd to put them side by side. But it’s not. If they’re not equally important, equally crucial -- then what is it exactly that we’re fighting for?
This is, of course, old news. The Bush administration was in quite a pickle three years ago, trying to figure out how to beat a guy who fought in a war the President himself weaseled out of. Fortunately for them, Kerry wasn’t a John F. Kennedy or a George H.W. Bush. He wasn’t a “war hero” -- he didn’t pull an injured guy through the water with his teeth or win the Distinguished Flying Cross. Even more fortunately for them, he came back from Vietnam and decided to share what he’d seen with the guys who make decisions and said a lot of shocking and brutally honest things that ended up being painted as disgracing his fellow soldiers. He spoke about what the war had done to his friends and to himself; he talked about the way good, well-meaning kids had been overcome by barbarism how some up raping and killing innocent people. He didn’t lie; but apparently telling the truth wasn’t the honorable thing. He also wasn’t the only one who ever testified at those hearings; but he’s the only one who ended up running for President.
And now he tried to make a joke about how our stupid President never cared for homework and has now gotten the country he somehow ended up in charge of stuck in a never-ending mess in Iraq. It was a bad joke and he didn’t tell it right and now he’s given the chickenhawks more fodder for the John Kerry/The Democrats Hate(s) Our Troops Show. That was stupid, dude.
Lost in this is another voice in the wilderness -- that of Kevin Tillman brother of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals linebacker who after September 11, 2001 turned down a three-year, $3.6 million contract to enlist in the Marines and fight for his country. Kevin himself turned down a shot to play major league baseball to do the same. And everyone knows how it turned out. Pat was deployed to the Middle East and then redeployed to Afghanistan where on April 22, 2004 he took three bullets to the head from members of his own unit. U.S. Army Special Command originally said Pat died in hostile fire and later, when the facts were more clear, took their sweet time correcting themselves.
It turns out, according to his brother and best friend, that Pat’s attitude about the war changed somewhere along the way. Reports from those close to him (including his mother) suggest that he had asked a friend to arrange for him to meet with Noam Chomsky when he returned from Afghanistan. Other friends say he encouraged them to vote against George Bush in the 2004 election.
And Kevin? Well, he’s taking a lot of heat. Responses to his article have included accusations that his brother would be disappointed in him, that his brother was a hypocrite and (wouldn’t you know) that he’s disgracing his fellow soldiers by saying what’s on his mind and trying to expose the reality of war. The bottom line is that we really don’t want to know. We want to imagine that everyone soldier is a hero, and that every one of them fights every day with a clear objective and a full-throated and whole-hearted belief that what they’re doing is 100% correct.
But the world doesn’t work that way. Many, many men (and women) enlist for lack of a better option -- because they can’t afford school (like Lynndie England) or because they’re sick of a dead end job (also like Lynndie England, who was working nights at a chicken processing facility when she enlisted) or because they’re encouraged (or even forced) to do so by parents who think they need discipline or coerced by recruiters dispensing empty promises. This isn’t everyone, certainly; but it’s what the University of Michigan’s lawyers would call a “critical mass.” Of course, there are a lot of Pat and Kevin Tillmans too -- young men and women who believe that they have a responsibility to serve their country when they’re needed. But plenty of them will continue to sign up for causes that seem just only to find out when they get there that they’d been misled if we continue to denigrate those who return and tell the world what they know.
One of the bedrock principles of liberal representative democracy is that information should be freely available to anyone who wants it. One of the other ones is that people should be unfettered in their attempts to disseminate information. One of the fundamental underlying truths of this principle is that information itself is not good or bad in and of itself. One of the other ones is that the more information we have to evaluate for ourselves, the better off we’ll be as a nation and as a people. John Kerry, Kevin Tillman, and thousands of others made our democracy work once by signing up to fight for it; they also grease the wheels of democracy by making sure we know exactly what’s going on around the world. There are those who would say that the two things are so different in import that it’s absurd to put them side by side. But it’s not. If they’re not equally important, equally crucial -- then what is it exactly that we’re fighting for?