I suppose we should give the mainstream press some kind of award. After three years or so of people actively opposing Bush's preventive war on Iraq, our so-called "press corps" has discovered there is an antiwar movement out there.
I'm sure they find it difficult to take seriously, since after all, the "wise" people haven't really jumped on board yet.
But we are starting to get a few more serious thoughts about war in general and Bush's Iraq War in particular popping up in the newspapers.
For instance, Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle (08/04/05) carried the following two:
Old soldiers to the front: The resentful anger of aging males must be put to good use by Jaime O'Neill.
In America's war on terror, the time-honored tradition requiring young people to do the fighting and dying needs to be seriously re-evaluated.
... it is only reasonable to propose that perhaps we have arrived at a time in the history of human struggle when the old people can do the fighting. ...
Tapping that pool of warriors should be easy. Aging males are easily the most gung-ho of all warriors.
From Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove right on down to the guys who write letters to the editors of the nation's newspapers, the fiercest warriors are men over 50, men with expanding waistlines and receding hairlines who would tear the enemy a new one if only they could get up off the sofa in less than three tries.
Then there's this article, written by a guy remembering one of his friend's kids who was killed in the Iraq War: Boyhood wish: kill enemy soldiers/A violent culture led to violent end by Chris Christensen.
His head was already filled with a lot of crud from the recruiter about being a scout, riding a four-wheeler ATV around -- big fun! (Christopher was an Eagle Scout.) He had an acquaintance who had been doing that (not in Iraq), and I got the sense that this acquaintance was giving him the hard sell, too. I wonder if the Army has a referral bonus system.
Christopher also had this inexplicable desire to "go shoot some 'Raqis." Maybe some latent desire from too much video gaming. I heard that in the weeks before his death, he was involved in a brief firefight and froze in terror. No doubt reality caught up to him at the speed of a 7.62-caliber bullet. Too bad his recruiter or buddy had not told him about the fear he would experience when he realized someone wanted to really hurt him or kill him. ...
This is my sadness. Our children are being weaned on hatred and violence in this country. It starts with television, gets reinforced and is refined with violent video games (one is produced and distributed by the U.S. Army), and finally the infection spreads through violent team sports in high school. Football in the South is the battlefield training ground for the next generation of cannon fodder. Kids are told to go out there and "hurt 'em, tear 'em up, kill 'em." It is ingrained.
(Careful now, don't get me confused with the liberal left. I own guns and support conservatives. There is a huge difference between defense of home and property and exporting violence to other countries.)
Christopher didn't know it, but as a small-town Southerner he was being trained for his death since early childhood.
Now, this is one of those arguments that when I read it I think, there's something wrong with this. But, I can't say exactly what it is that's wrong. And he does have some kind of a point.
Despite my lack of patience with whiny white guys, I am pretty resistant to any notion that there is something uniquely problematic about the Southern way of doing things, other than on questions directly related to race.
But I also remember in eighth grade when the varsity football couch made a pitch for the boys to "go out" for football when we got to high school. The most memorable part of his pitch was his claim that former high school football players were the only American soldiers who never broke under torture during the Korean War. (Say what?!?) Sorry, Coach Boone, you're a great guy, but that wasn't one of your better moments.
I ran into Coach Boone a couple of years ago in the drug store on a visit to Mississippi. He's retired now. He bought a farm and spends his days leisurely plowing the field. "We had a nice visit," as they say around there.
I don't know if he is in favor of the Iraq War or not. It wouldn't surprise me if he thought it was a big crock. It also wouldn't surprise me if he were gung-ho on it.
But there has to be some remedy to the situation in which soft, cowardly rich kids like George Bush make up lies to send men and women off to kill and die, all unnecessarily, in a war like the one going on in Iraq. And then Bush dresses up in a flight suit and prances around like a Hollywood war hero and asks the enemy who is out to kill our soldiers, "Brang 'em on."
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