This war is becoming more difficult to support in a romantic sense as the bloody months continue to pile up. What interests me most about true believers today, is that besides the token blather points – “Anbar now has casual Friday and a soft serve ice cream machine on every corner” or “I talked to someone who is over there, and they say that the war is going well” – there is still only that romantic outlook of how democracy can still be a good thing, even if half of the population has to die before it can enjoy its freedom to vote for government officials. To hear them say it, you’d think that every democracy in the world was doing well, operating openly and adhering to the will of its people. When the truth is, as long as the water is running, the electricity is up and there’s a job to pay the bills, most people don’t give shit about all the rest. It’s not that important when the alternative is possibly being doused with kerosene and set on fire, or having to move the family to a shantytown in Syria without a cent to your name…militia squatters have destroyed your collection of artwork, stolen your stash of pornography and used your bathtub as a toilet…you know it’s true, but all that can be replaced, repaired, remembered, as these American fellows seem quite optomistic about things, so I tell the wife and children that they will only have to turn tricks for a few more months and then we’ll be able to go back home.
No…these people are a very inconvenient reality for the true believer, and they are not featured as part of the romantic bullshit story of freedom, liberty and democracy. Neither are the veterans, nor the fact that IEDs kill more of our people than any other method of attack, nor the fact that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. Take out all of these elements and you’re close to the story they’ll tell you, but not there yet. Since the political party that handled this from the start is still in power, and happens to be the party that the true believer votes for, they are likely to sprinkle in a whole lot of blame for why the war has failed. It’s easy to point fingers at various nations full of brown people and accuse them of interfering with our occupation, so Iran, Syria and every other Arab nation besides Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan will be talked about, blamed for our own mistakes.
This is a tough thing to have to do, basically turn the brain off and revert back to the animal instincts. If necessary, eat your own. Veterans have it tough already, but now the true believers want us to know that they’re sick and tired of hearing about things they’d rather ignore. They’re offended that people who served in the military would have the audacity to lay claim to their woobie, their security blanket, this myth that somehow the right-wingers are the only patriotic Americans, and so the veterans speak, their families speak, the true believers want to smear them like they do every other political opponent, only it’s tabboo…or it used to be before these people lost their minds. Two pieces of evidence here, and the second is a video of someone I’m friends with online. The first is something written by a veteran in response to something Rush Limbaugh said:
1. So I’m a “Phony Soldier,” Rush? w/update
2. Wife of a veteran told she should ‘cease to exist’ by a right-wing professor at a Vets for Freedom event