Independence Day
The other day in The New Yorker, George Packer had something to say about Web logs. Distinguishing our Iraqi misadventure from other military engagements, he wrote,
It was the first blogged war, and the characteristic features of the form - instant response, ad-hominem attack, remoteness from life, the echo chamber of friends and enemies - helped define the tone of the debate about Iraq.
If Mr Packer is right, then I am wasting my time here, no? But I'm probably not. While I know perfectly well how poisonous some blogs can be, and how readily blogging technology brings aid and comfort to the wounded narcissist, Web logs are no more condemned to exhibit the "characteristic features" than old-fashioned letters in envelopes are bound by the cut-and-paste conventions of blackmail. As always, vice is easy and virtue is hard. This will become clearer as bloggers and their readers inevitably mature.
When I was young, my greatest fear was that I would have to serve in the Army - or in any branch of the military. It was an instinctive dread of masculinity that I couldn't articulate at the time but understand very well now that I am getting positively old. Suffice it to say that I find the first half of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket more compelling than any Greek tragedy. Even now that I am confident and relatively easy-going, I doubt that any soldier and I would have much to talk about, in the way of common interests. But my aversion to military values - how much happier the human race would be without them! - has not stood in the way of admiration for our beleaguered troops in Iraq. Condemned by an ignorant president and his vicious enablers to risk their lives in a campaign of empty calories, these men and women are learning the hard way what it means to be an American, and some of them are not surviving the lesson. I would offer this Independence Day as a second Memorial, to the memory of those who have died to make this country free no more than to those who are helplessly dying to make this country hated.
Do read read Mr Packer's essay, in which the grief of a father for his dead son, felled by shrapnel in Iraq, encapsulates a capital denunciation of the Bush Administration's ways of doing things. I hope to come back to it later in the week. But not on a holiday.
Comments
You said: "Even now that I am confident and relatively easy-going, I doubt that any soldier and I would have much to talk about, in the way of common interests."
This implies that soldiers *want* to be in the military and that such an occupation defines them entirely. While the draft existed, many men, including my father had to serve whether they were suited to military life or not. You might find their perspectives on any number of topics fascinating.
Also I think it would be good for you to expand upon what you mean by "having much to talk about in the way of common interests." I'm sure many of these men loved their wives the way you love yours, find strong significance in travel and were also avid writers, not unlike yourself. Sometimes conversation is no more than that.
I, thankfully, will never be subject to a draft nor would I ever contemplate any time spent in the military, but I have always enjoyed hearing stories from my neighbors and relatives about their times in combat and their unique perspective on world events. My father was in Germany, having been drafted because of the Berlin Wall, when JFK died.
Do not be so quick to point out the separations between yourself and the soldiers. The military, yes, but not the soldiers. Did you read the times piece on the two friends who joined the national guard together in 2000 and now one is dead and the other has lost a leg? I believe your piece reveals the humanity that binds us all together despite our differences.
Posted by: Ms. NOLA | July 4, 2005 10:27 AM
The article is “The Home Front,” where George Packer writes about the death, in Iraq, of a twenty-two-year-old private named Kurt Frosheiser, the effect of Kurt’s death on his father, Chris, and the broader issues that death raises about the war. The article appears in today's issue of The New Yorker, it is not yet available from the archives. It should be show up in the next week or so, for now only a Q&A with Packer is available online from The New Yorker.
Packer has had a lot to say about blogs in general and the War in Iraq in The New Yorker, Mother Jones, and on NPR's The Connection over the last few years. I will try to post a limited bibliography for Packer on Quality of the Light sometime later today in conjunction with a very interesting bookmark I received in the snail mail.
When you say that you wouldn't have much to talk about with soldiers in the way of common interests and then say that you admire them as beleagured troops in Iraq I sense a certain dissonace. It's as if you were talking about tradesman, say refuse handlers, whose work you find necessary or admirable but feel that as a class you wouldn't find the tradesmen very appealing as conversationalists or worse. I think you might want to rephrase those statements if only for PR reasons to make your appeal on the level of 'I support the troops but not the war' more palatable.
Take it from someone who lives in the midst of troops who will be deployed again soon to Iraq you might, as Ms. NOLA suggests, find a good deal to talk about with any of them in terms of common interests like life, love, and the war.
And, believe me it is very difficult sometimes. The mother of one of my ten year old son's playmates, who is a senior NCO close to retirement, will be deployed again in a few months back to Iraq, she has two grade school age children at home. Think about talking to her in the next month or so, what do you say, 'take care' hardly covers it, does it? I dislike the War in Iraq intensely, but I do not dislike my neighbors who prosecute the war from conviction or obligation.
A memorial to needless death is not much of a memorial.
Reconciling differences of what are termed political views which really are much stronger and deeper than the term implies with day to day life and the people in your neighborhood is quite difficult.
I'll try to write more on this topic on my own blog later today.
Posted by: George | July 4, 2005 01:31 PM
Intelligent postings from a few who have been or are going to the sandbox can be found at Intel Dump.
Try Another FNG…or FNB if you will. for some recent insight from someone you might have much in common to talk about.
Originally, this blog was started by Phil Carter at blogspot under the same name.
Posted by: George | July 4, 2005 05:50 PM