Playing Army: Who's "tough" and who's a "coward?"

[Sparkly]

It really makes me crazy when BushCo and their media spin military issues as if they were playing with those little green plastic armyman toys, or maybe a G.I. Joe doll. They put themselves into the roles of the toy soldiers, the same way kids play -- "I'll be this one. You can be that one."

So they'll say things like, "Bush had the guts to go into Iraq..." No, he did NOT "go into Iraq." He sent other people in. What guts does it take to play at being a warrior?

Or the common element in Bush/Cheney speeches: "We can't lose our nerve." How is it about "nerve" for those of us who aren't in battle? It isn't.

Or the headline from Deborah Orin today about "Howard the Coward." Whether one agrees or disagrees with what Dean said, there was nothing "cowardly" about it, nor does it make Orin "brave" to advocate continuing failed military 'strategy' with no change and no end in sight.

It's not about courage or resolve or spine or anything like that to continue BushCo's bungled simplistic non-strategy; in fact, it's a sign of personal cowardice in my view to claim "we're makin' progress," mislead the public about the level of Iraqi training, posture in front of uniforms over and over, and read spin-filled speeches.

Courage here at home, it seems to me, is telling the truth when people do NOT want to hear it, going up against the GOP machine, voicing dissent, and taking a stand against the Pentagon and the White House.

It takes NO "backbone" to say "MY G.I. Joe isn't going to back down or retreat cause I am tough -- so bring it on!!" It's particularly ironic coming from people like Chimp and Cheney, who went out of their way to avoid combat when it involved putting their actual skins in the line of actual fire.

Does this bother anyone else as much as it bothers me? :grr:

[BOSSHOG]

1. And let us never forget the enablers

My neighbors and your neighbors who never served a day in uniform and yet wave the flag and sport the yellow ribbons and posture as badass asskicking Americans. As evil and as bad and as wrong as the politicians are that you so aptly described, they would not be in positions of power if it were not for those who love to live the Soldiers life vicariously and who think it there contribution to the betterment of America by voting. It pains me and troubles me and bothers me every day.

[Sparkly]

3. That's true, too.

I wonder if some just aren't thinking at all, but no doubt others have their own inner GI Joe Dolls that help them feel courageous and tough, as if it were THEM in danger.

[Pam-Moby]

2. Yes it sure does bother me a lot.

I agree totally. They make me sick. It needs to make the world sick as well. We need to get them out there and put their lives on the line for once.

[petgoat]

4. It's not just the politicians who are sending others in their stead...

According to wikipedia, 43% of the US troops in Iraq and 55% of the US
troops in Afghanistan are National Guard members and reservists. The
National Guard members who signed up for flood and hurricane duty are
sent to fight overseas while career soldiers stay home and applaud
Bush's war-mongering speeches.

[Mountainman]

5. What bothers me is that we never learn the lessons of prior wars.

It's the American people who let them get away with what they do. How many Americans remember the Vietnam war or the Korean war? If we would look back at history and see what tough talk has done to this country we would not let leaders say what they do today. But we merrily go our way feeling good because we are tough yet the results of this war will be the same as those other two wars. No winning just a return to some form of coexistence after millions of people have suffered and died.

[adigal]

6. Has Deborah Orin served?? Does she have children

serving?? If not, then she should not be calling anyone who disagrees with the war a "coward."

[dusmcj]

7. let's list the special words

Doober is just making use of the special words Daddy installed in the American public for him (well, that he had his social engineers from the intel community install). Let's list them:

Connected
Trust
Under Control
Natural Law
Pay The Price
Leader
Confident
Resolve
Firm
Character
Commitment

What's special about these words ? In current public usage, they have for many people been laden with affect, i.e. they trigger a conditioned emotional response when heard - you think of your Dad, your muscle tone improves, and maybe you get a hardon (don't know what the equivalent for women might be and don't want to be crass...). They evoke hearty conservative imagery of a strong masculine culture (primarily in the paternal, protective but also structuring, sense) devout and devoted to simple principles, ready to stand strong in the clear-cut fight between good and evil.

This is life reduced to a comic book. It's based on denial of complexity, asserts that humans are reduceable to reactive machines, and doesn't involve critical thought, independent analysis, decisionmaking, volition or even belief, because the conditioned response happens at a lower level of brain function than those - it's the same thing as the idiots who blubber about getting teary when the flag goes by, without having had the personal emotional experience to justify the response (since there are some who actually have done things involving flags which gives them the right to claim that kind of experience). Instead it promotes a mass organism, which only forms thoughts by group interaction and averaging, and uses language with associated reaction conditioning to break down the obstacle formed by people's higher brain function and inclination to use it to perform individual (!) analysis of proposed ideas.

It is amusing to see a group of conservatives in action, and see how thoughts and plans for action are passed between them, and for most, "knowledge" is received as whole cloth from someone else. At best, some may add minor tweaks to the piece of thought, but it largely spreads in a viral way, with each repeating what they heard from their source to others. On the one hand, this gives them a certain advantage in that they are monolithic, and each will help the other and speak a common language while doing so. On the other, it is slow, such that one individual with reasonably strong mental skills can run rings around them, and also predict their behavior with fair accuracy after a short period of experiential training. Further, the quality of the thought material produced by the collective is fairly low, since their focus is on norming and smooth spreading and agreement, rather than optimizing the content and combining individual input from all members (since individual creativity violates the mores on humility and reticence, a la the old puritans who believed perfection created by humans was an affront to God's domain and needed to be degraded in some way), which might introduce discord into the group. I.e., this is a culture doomed to fail (and we see it tottering before our eyes on the nightly news).

It's cheap and easy to degenerate public discourse down to the animal concerns about who's strongest and who's going to fuck with the most offspring produced. For those who haven't been dealing with the stupid long enough, this still evokes the old fears of inadequacy in some of life's fundamental matters, and results in the above-mentioned stiffening, which is really a response to the fear of being seen by others as, or discovering for oneself that one is, weak. The appropriate response is to quietly remind the misguided ones lower on (particularly the mental/cultural side of) the evolutionary scale that life isn't simple, it's complex, that we need to make our models of the world correspond to physical reality, cause doing otherwise is called delusion, and if they won't respond appropriately, to neutralize their ability to affect life for normal people by any legal means necessary (note the modification of Malcolm X' popular phrase, just so we all know exactly what we're saying). If they insist on aggressively promoting their devolutionary reaction, return the favor in multiples.

In other words, the next time some conservative circlejerker sniffs or coughs at you as though there was something wrong with you rather than them, or uses the above words or other similar ones and looks for the appropriate affirming response from you, play the shitbag for as much as you're able and/or care to do. The world they attempt to foist on us sucks shit, it's time to state that publicly in so many words, and live and act accordingly. Adios, losers.

*I was particularly charmed when big Dick Cheney mouthed off recently about "commitment" as part of the administration's offensive "offensive" (no, that wasn't a typo) against the "liars" who are "rewriting history" about the administration's PNAC-inspired stovepiping of intelligence. In line with the above, the only thing really to say to the Chickenhawk-in-Chief is that he can s*** my d***. He and his tribe should keep going on their current path, they may find out who has how much commitment...