Ole Chuckie definitely has a pattern going. With the Iraq adventure coming apart, I would have thought he would have been posting howling demands to kill, kill, kill more Iraqis as quick as possible. But when Chuckie's on an upswing, he's on the upswing.
His most recent one, Television, is a mellow but completely vapid ramble about NASCAR and football and fishin'.
The one before that was called The Troops. It says he and his band are scheduled to play for US troops in Kosovo soon. It doesn't have much of that Dark Side venom, although he does play back a weird Nixon-Agnew version of the Vietnam War days, in which "supporting the troops" means cheering for the Republican President's war policies. And he trots out one of his favorite urban legends:
If you ever spit on a Vietnam veteran or called one of them a baby killer you are an unspeakable pus bag in my book and if there’s ever a terrorist attack in your neighborhood call Sean Penn.
I'm just now reading Jerry Lembcke's The Spitting Image (1998) which discusses images of Vietnam veterans in popular culture and political polemics. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the contemporary evidence for the fabled spitting incidents seem to be as non-existent as Saddam's WMDs. Were the public or antiwar protesters hostile to Vietnam veterans in reality? Lembcke writes:
... [I]n a Harris Poll of veterans conducted in 1971, only 1 percent of the respondents described their reception from family and friends as "not at all friendly." Only 3 percent described their reception from their own age group as unfriendly ... . The archival record also shows that GIs and veterans did not perceive the anti-war movement as hostile to them. Collections of personal letters and the signed letters to editors of anti-war and othe publications, the signed anti-war ads in major newspapers,and, most important, the record of participation by thousand of GIs and veterans in marches and rallies against the war offer ample evidence that the anti-war movement was generally not perceived to be hostile to the interests and needs of servicemen. The fact that relations between the anti-war movement and Vietnam veterans remained close up to the time when the last U.S. troops returned from Vietnam in 1973 suggests that few soldiers and veterans bourght the Nixon line that anti-war activity was a threat to the safety of the troops in Vietnam.
But Chuckie did. But Chuckie's ready to drink just about any kool-aid Republican propagandists put in front of him. To paraphrase a Christian fundamentalist bumpersitcker: Fox News says it, Chuckie believes it, and that's all there is to it!
Just for grins, I checked into one of Chuckie's older posts, dated only "pre-2000": Morally Bankrupt. But from the content, it appears to be from 1999. Way back then, ole Chuckie apparently didn't think that "supporting the troops" meant cheering the President and his war policies. In fact, by his own standards of 2004, he was talking like a "pus bag":
While our president [Bill Clinton] sends our military forces into battle in Yugoslavia in what he claims is an effort to free the people of Kosovo from oppression we sit and wonder how much of this fight is an honest attempt at humanity and how much is the “wag the dog” theory. It is a sorry state of affairs when the so-called leader of the free world is such a liar that we can hardly believe a word that proceeds out of his mouth.
Gosh, Chuckie, I hope you don't spit on any of the troops while you're over there in Kosovo! They might not take so kindly to that, no matter how much they might like your music.
No comments:
Post a Comment