What's the matter with you? Are you trying to spoil everything?
Don't you know "they" are a bunch of ultra-right wing fascists completely under the thrall of religious fanatics?
Or, "they" are a bunch of ultra-left wing big-government commies completely under the thrall of fanatical Marxist-Leninists?
Obviously, both!
So you start this nonsense that perhaps most of us are not like that and you'll destroy the jobs of hundreds of people who make their livings from this division.
Apart from causing unemployment, you might well insert doubt in the minds of people who now have completely surrounded the truth and enjoy the comfort of absolute certainty.
This can stimulate severe psychological problems.
Be careful what you write!
So there.
Harry
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Karen wrote:
If you read the historical commentary by Prof. Bacevich (A Less than Splendid Little War, posted 040103) about the dramatic born againtransformation of the US military and political worldview after the 1991 Gulf War, then Michael Gordons Dispatch from Iraq yesterday, The Test for Rumsfeld: Will Strategy Work? @ <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/01/international/worldspecial/01STRA.html>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/01/international/worldspecial/01STRA.html continues the unfolding story that military wars as we knew them are history, and the future of warfare, and perhaps global politics, is being made with new strategies and tools.
It still seems to me like the first Star Wars movie or any of the battle episodes of Babylon 5, confirming what Bacevich wrote, that we have wedded our military leaders and political leaders as Rome did, with proconsuls. Now since our economic engine is sputtering and in need of a tune-up, what will the New American Empires best export be? Are we already there?
As part of the ongoing story about the rescued female soldier and the one still missing (11 bodies recovered in that same rescue yesterday which should hopefully identify some of the 19 listed as missing as of yesterday), excerpts below from this historical commentary about The POW in the American Imagination @ <http://slate.msn.com/id/2080944>http://slate.msn.com/id/2080944. We can expect to hear a lot about the successful rescue mission, as we eagerly look away for a moment from the horrors that are there on the battlefield and in the towns and cities.
Excerpts:
During the Korean War, fantasies about the POW experience centered on the fear of brainwashing (a term whose usage dates to that war). Throughout history, captors had often tried, with little success, to convert their prisoners to their religion or worldview see, for example, the Allied de-Nazificationprograms in World War II. But the Communist Chinese during the Korean War were exceptionally intensive in their effort to indoctrinate Western POWs.&In 1955, President Eisenhower set forth a code of conduct for apprehended soldiers that addressed the fear of apostasy. The code ordered soldiers to tell their captors only their name, rank, service number, and date of birth and required them to make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country.
2&By the late 1960s, Americans had come to see Vietnam as a moral as well as a military quagmire. US soldiers and citizens struggled to find honor in a losing battle and painfully reckoned with war crimes committed by the American side, including the mistreatment of Vietnamese captives. From this morass sprung the culture of the POW.
Partly the impetus was political. With funding and organizational help from Ross Perot, then a relatively anonymous Texas billionaire, President Nixon put together a media blitz, replete with rallies, TV shows, and merchandise, to fix public attention on those missing or captured in Vietnam&The PR campaign, promoting images of victimized Americans in peril of being forsaken and in need of support from back home, aimed to drive from peoples TV screens and conversations the less welcome images of massacred Vietnamese villagers and napalmed children.
Hungry for a story line that cast American soldiers as heroic victims, not oppressors, a large segment of the public took up the POW/MIA cause. Families of the unaccounted-for-soldiers formed groups to lobby the government to retrieve the missing waging their campaigns long after the war ended and Nixon resigned. Spreading the fiction that American servicemen remained imprisoned in Southeast Asia, the cause won legions of adherents and managed to get the now-familiar black-and-white POW/MIA flag to fly over the White House once a year, on National POW/MIA Recognition Day the only flag other than Old Glory given that honor.
3&The glamorizing of the Vietnam POW, like that of the hostages taken captive in Iran in 1979 who became celebrities upon their release, marked an effort to replace weakness and defeat with heroism and redemption. But the Vietnam-era image of the POW may not, like so much else in this new Gulf War, be in flux its masculine imagery no longer adequate for an Army touting virtues of flexibility and mobility and featuring women on the front lines.
Lets rejoice when captured soldiers are returned to the safety of their comrades and families. Let us honor those slain in battle, and those who fight with honor. While we are demonizing our enemy, lets not mindlessly devote ourselves to hero-worshipping warriors in battle; rather, let us praise wisdom and the courage to use force only when it must be used, not indiscriminately or recklessly and just to make myself clear, Im aiming at our leaders, not just those armed to die in battle who face lethal split-second decisions.
We are at a turning point once again, and must keep in mind our recent experiences and our own military, political and cultural history as we lived through previous wars and be aware how they transformed us. And let us not forget that the enemy pays the ultimate price, too, as those on the battlefield know only too well.
Final note, at least in Oregon, shops that usually do most of their business in sports trophies are busy producing inexpensive blue and red bracelets to wear in support of the troops. According to news reports, they cant make them fast enough. You can buy a generic version commemorating Operation Iraqi Freedom supporting the troops in general for $8 and have a name engraved for $11. Expect to see them on those genuinely caring and those politically correct and those shamelessly profiting. If you are looking for photos and names of those confirmed KIA, both the NYT and PBS Newshour are providing this service.
Karen trying to stay in the middle of the road
East of Portland, West of Mt Hood
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