Veteran's Day is Rightist Rubbish!

charleslb

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Sep 16, 2010
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Let me lead off with a tawdry true tale of a certain “veteran” (you’ll shortly understand why I place the word “veteran” in quotation marks) with whom I’m quite well acquainted. His name is Richard, but I’ll call him Dick, you’ll shortly understand why this is appropriate too. Today Dick is a fifty-something wannabe man’s man who’s wont to affect New York tough-guy diction even though he was born and bred in California, and to express sexist (borderline misogynistic) attitudes about women, whom he datedly calls “broads” and “dames”. But these aren’t the only ways that he struggles to affirm his manqué machismo, hence his relevance to my topic.

Let me provide some backstory. As a child Dick’s cheesy mother dressed him in Donald Ducky sailor suits, in honor of his dear old dad, who was in the navy for all of the last five minutes of WW2, a factoid of family lore that Dick likes to hype for the reflected manhood and glory that it casts upon him. The military had always been extolled to Dick as the honorable bastion of authentic manhood, the preeminent proving ground of one’s masculine mettle. So it’s hardly surprising then that when he reached his late teens Dick decided to enlist in the “service”, to follow in the proud if overmeasured footsteps of his idolized forefathers and join the navy.

Of course starry-eyed Dick went into the navy with the purest of conscious intentions, wishing to pay homage to the high ideals of his family’s mythologized military tradition, to serve his benevolently neocolonialist nation – perhaps his subconscious motives included going on an extended male ego trip and partaking of the carousing off-duty lifestyle that sailors are famous for, but then whose true motives are ever 100% pure, after all? Now then, our dear boy Dick was able to muster up enough of the right stuff to make it all the way through basic training, but alas that feat seemed to exhaust his scant supply.

Very shortly after beginning the daily grind of active duty, and finding himself under an overbearing superior (what are the chances of running into one of those in the military?!), he realized that he wasn’t liking the reality of life in uniform, and took off without leave, playing hooky from the U.S. Navy for most of his stint. He went on the lamb, flopping with one high-school buddy after another, and trying to get in as much partying as he could before being tracked down by military police.

Eventually he decided to turn himself in and plead for mercy before a court-marshal. On the drive back to base, however, he got in a quite serious vehicular accident and spent the next few months in hospital. When he was finally sufficiently recovered he was placed in the brig for a bit, after which the navy washed its hands of him by granting his sorry derriere a medical discharge. His injuries saved him from a dishonorable expulsion from the “service”, and left him with the bare-bones and bogus bragging rights of claiming to be a “veteran”.

And boy does he exercise said bogus bragging rights! You’d never guess how paltry are his props as a “veteran” from the way he’s embraced that masculine ego-boosting self-image. Yes, if you were ever to meet him socially you’d learn, within the first two minutes of chatting with him, that he was once in the navy, he always finds a way to introduce this little personal fact into any conversation. His e-mail address and online handle even includes a reference to his mediocre military background, so that everyone whom he communicates with knows before even reading his message that he’s a “veteran”. And now that he’s living on disability, his pathetic pièce de résistance of self-misrepresentation is, yes, to describe himself as a “broken-down vet”, dishonestly implying that his condition is somehow due to valorously-received war wounds, which is of course about as far as possible from the ignominious truth.

In other words, although Dick rather likes to ballyhooingly bill himself as John Q. Veteran, to overcompensate for his failure to be molded into a man by the military, in actuality he’s just a poseur. That is, a fraud who self-identifies with veterans for a self-serving payoff to his shaky male self-esteem.

And how, one might wonder, aside from his e-mail address, does he reinforce this fraudulent self-identification with veterans and members of the military? Why of course by becoming their biggest booster. No one could be a more avid backer of the troops, or a more warm-hearted proponent of the interests of veterans.

It’s all quite simple, really. Since ole Dick couldn’t quite man-up sufficiently to tough out his tour in the navy, he vicariously attaches himself to the putative machismo of real soldiers and swabbies and vets, thus giving his limp sense of manhood a shot of psychic Viagra, and this all takes the outward form of being empathetically-patriotically pro-military and pro-veteran. It’s of course not really armed forces personnel and veterans as individual human persons per se that he identifies with and feels the need to champion, it’s a classic masculine stereotype of the military man that his male ego tries to derive backbone from.

Which is to say that Dickie baby’s whole shtick of being a staunch supporter of his country’s fighting men is an egoic subterfuge with delusions of patriotic legitimacy. But perhaps you’re asking “Who cares about the subconscious psychology motivating this fellow Dick’s pro-veteran stance, that’s just him”? Ah, but is it?

Is overcompensating Dick really such an isolated case, I think not. Take some of the most public apologists of the military, and advocates for its personnel and its alumni, on the right of the political aisle. Take, for instance, former president Ronald Reagan, who was only in the army during World War Two in the most technical sense. In reality being “in the military” didn’t cramp or alter Reagan’s lifestyle as a movie star an iota, as he was the beneficiary of a privileged form of draft dodging that was made available to Hollywood actors, allowing them to don the uniform but merely continue making films to promote the war effort, without ever having to take part in it on the front lines. Well, as we all know, Ronnie Reagan went on to become one of the great touters of the military of our time!

Just about the same was almost the case with another famous conservative actor, John Wayne. Although Wayne played a somewhat convincing marine, the same one with different names in movie after movie, he managed to avoid induction into the military entirely. But when the Vietnam War came along he was so gung ho to support the American troops fighting in it that one might have mistakenly thought that he could actually relate to what they were experiencing. Nope, you would have never guessed that he successfully evaded military service during the “good war”.

Another right-winger who wore being a fan of veterans on his sleeve like a badge of honor and manhood was of course Ross Perot. Like Dick, he couldn’t hack it in the navy and got out early, and then became another great, clearly overcompensating advocate for veteran’s causes. And speaking of naval washouts, after being “invalided” out of Uncle Sam’s navy, “libertarian” author Robert Heinlein became a writer of tales featuring virile military types serving heroically in futuristic “space navies”. Thus by promoting the positive archetype of he-manly warriors in his stories, he connected with a bit of macho glory through his characters and the archetype that they embodied.

Aha, it would appear that men who haven’t validated their masculine self-worth by authentic and successful military “service” tend to seek to do so by becoming rightist hero-worshippers of men-at-arms. This also dovetails with the primitively macho psychological nature of most conservative ideology. That is, in many instances it really does seem to be the case that conservatives are poignant individuals suffering from a masculine inferiority complex who’ve embraced pro-militarism/hawkishness and other conservative social and political stances because doing so makes them feel like the strong and hairy-chested men that they yearn in their quiet desperation to be.

Indeed then, as the examples above and my anecdote about a certain lame Dick go to show, wrapping oneself in the flag, and in the mantle of a supporter of those who have fought for it, à la so many conservatives, is a tried & true way of overcoming egoically painful insecurity about one’s manhood. And signing on with the rest of the conservative worldview and agenda, well, that’s truly taking overcompensation to the ideological hilt. Veteran’s Day is coming up, and if you listen with a critical mind to commentators and politicians on the political right sing the vapid praises of their country’s valiant veterans who’ve tragically and immorally gone into harm’s way to serve & protect the special interests of the plutocratic elite, you should be tipped off to the fact that they’re “hollow men” vainly trying to fill the hollowness in their own character with the bravery and manfulness of others.

:)
 
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A Few Afterthoughts

The hokey hoax of our “representative” system ideologically bamboozles us, the indoctrinated public, into buying into the idealistic idea that our government possesses a democratic and moral legitimacy. And it follows from the supposed legitimacy of our government that its armed enforcer, the military, also possesses legitimacy. That it is another democratic instrument of the will of the people, and that its members and veterans are public servants who deserve appreciation and respect.

However, in reality our society does without question have a power elite, and both government and the military do its bidding and serve its interest to an extent that seriously deprives them of the legitimacy naively attributed to them. Yes, in terms of being an agent of the will of society, or of being inclined to function in an ethical fashion, our military and its personnel lack any moral standing to claim our fawning respect. For 99.9% of the time our military most certainly does not operate so as to redeem itself as an agent of the popular will and an ethical actor on history’s stage. Rather, 99.9% of the time it’s nothing more than the million and a half man strong, glorified goon squad of the (capitalist) ruling class.

And so it is that Veteran’s Day is a holiday of, for, and by Dicks with a lowercase “D”, i.e. individuals whose perception of politico-economic reality is so unconscionably superficial that they fail to apprehend all of the above. Veterans, rather than holding their heads up with dinky little caps that say “WW2 Veteran” or “Vietnam Veteran” on them, should be hanging their heads in remorse. And rather than a Veteran’s Day, we should have a National Day of Apology and Atonement to the Victims of Our Foreign Wars of Aggression and Avarice.

:)
 
Alternate opinion:

thanks to all y'all vets who served your country and insured our freedom with your sacrifices. your roles are all vital for, as Milton so rightly pointed out, "they also serve who only stand and wait".
 
Alternate opinion:

thanks to all y'all vets who served your country and insured our freedom with your sacrifices. your roles are all vital for, as Milton so rightly pointed out, "they also serve who only stand and wait".

Ditto that...

I will take my family to the Veterans Day parade as we have done for many years.

May God bless America.
 
I like the alternate opinion best


I feel like the sorts of vetern that my Dad and brother were/are more indicative of the norm. And in any case deserving of our gratitude.

Of course not everyone will agree but thank goodness we still have that right as a well, right.
 
Let me lead off with a tawdry true tale of a certain “veteran” (you’ll shortly understand why I place the word “veteran” in quotation marks) with whom I’m quite well acquainted. His name is Richard, but I’ll call him Dick, you’ll shortly understand why this is appropriate too. Today Dick is a fifty-something wannabe man’s man who’s wont to affect New York tough-guy diction even though he was born and bred in California, and to express sexist (borderline misogynistic) attitudes about women, whom he datedly calls “broads” and “dames”. But these aren’t the only ways that he struggles to affirm his manqué machismo, hence his relevance to my topic.

Let me provide some backstory. As a child Dick’s cheesy mother dressed him in Donald Ducky sailor suits, in honor of his dear old dad, who was in the navy for all of the last five minutes of WW2, a factoid of family lore that Dick likes to hype for the reflected manhood and glory that it casts upon him. The military had always been extolled to Dick as the honorable bastion of authentic manhood, the preeminent proving ground of one’s masculine mettle. So it’s hardly surprising then that when he reached his late teens Dick decided to enlist in the “service”, to follow in the proud if overmeasured footsteps of his idolized forefathers and join the navy.

Of course starry-eyed Dick went into the navy with the purest of conscious intentions, wishing to pay homage to the high ideals of his family’s mythologized military tradition, to serve his benevolently neocolonialist nation – perhaps his subconscious motives included going on an extended male ego trip and partaking of the carousing off-duty lifestyle that sailors are famous for, but then whose true motives are ever 100% pure, after all? Now then, our dear boy Dick was able to muster up enough of the right stuff to make it all the way through basic training, but alas that feat seemed to exhaust his scant supply.

Very shortly after beginning the daily grind of active duty, and finding himself under an overbearing superior (what are the chances of running into one of those in the military?!), he realized that he wasn’t liking the reality of life in uniform, and took off without leave, playing hooky from the U.S. Navy for most of his stint. He went on the lamb, flopping with one high-school buddy after another, and trying to get in as much partying as he could before being tracked down by military police.

Eventually he decided to turn himself in and plead for mercy before a court-marshal. On the drive back to base, however, he got in a quite serious vehicular accident and spent the next few months in hospital. When he was finally sufficiently recovered he was placed in the brig for a bit, after which the navy washed its hands of him by granting his sorry derriere a medical discharge. His injuries saved him from a dishonorable expulsion from the “service”, and left him with the bare-bones and bogus bragging rights of claiming to be a “veteran”.

And boy does he exercise said bogus bragging rights! You’d never guess how paltry are his props as a “veteran” from the way he’s embraced that masculine ego-boosting self-image. Yes, if you were ever to meet him socially you’d learn, within the first two minutes of chatting with him, that he was once in the navy, he always finds a way to introduce this little personal fact into any conversation. His e-mail address and online handle even includes a reference to his mediocre military background, so that everyone whom he communicates with knows before even reading his message that he’s a “veteran”. And now that he’s living on disability, his pathetic pièce de résistance of self-misrepresentation is, yes, to describe himself as a “broken-down vet”, dishonestly implying that his condition is somehow due to valorously-received war wounds, which is of course about as far as possible from the ignominious truth.

In other words, although Dick rather likes to ballyhooingly bill himself as John Q. Veteran, to overcompensate for his failure to be molded into a man by the military, in actuality he’s just a poseur. That is, a fraud who self-identifies with veterans for a self-serving payoff to his shaky male self-esteem.

And how, one might wonder, aside from his e-mail address, does he reinforce this fraudulent self-identification with veterans and members of the military? Why of course by becoming their biggest booster. No one could be a more avid backer of the troops, or a more warm-hearted proponent of the interests of veterans.

It’s all quite simple, really. Since ole Dick couldn’t quite man-up sufficiently to tough out his tour in the navy, he vicariously attaches himself to the putative machismo of real soldiers and swabbies and vets, thus giving his limp sense of manhood a shot of psychic Viagra, and this all takes the outward form of being empathetically-patriotically pro-military and pro-veteran. It’s of course not really armed forces personnel and veterans as individual human persons per se that he identifies with and feels the need to champion, it’s a classic masculine stereotype of the military man that his male ego tries to derive backbone from.

Which is to say that Dickie baby’s whole shtick of being a staunch supporter of his country’s fighting men is an egoic subterfuge with delusions of patriotic legitimacy. But perhaps you’re asking “Who cares about the subconscious psychology motivating this fellow Dick’s pro-veteran stance, that’s just him”? Ah, but is it?

Is overcompensating Dick really such an isolated case, I think not. Take some of the most public apologists of the military, and advocates for its personnel and its alumni, on the right of the political aisle. Take, for instance, former president Ronald Reagan, who was only in the army during World War Two in the most technical sense. In reality being “in the military” didn’t cramp or alter Reagan’s lifestyle as a movie star an iota, as he was the beneficiary of a privileged form of draft dodging that was made available to Hollywood actors, allowing them to don the uniform but merely continue making films to promote the war effort, without ever having to take part in it on the front lines. Well, as we all know, Ronnie Reagan went on to become one of the great touters of the military of our time!

Just about the same was almost the case with another famous conservative actor, John Wayne. Although Wayne played a somewhat convincing marine, the same one with different names in movie after movie, he managed to avoid induction into the military entirely. But when the Vietnam War came along he was so gung ho to support the American troops fighting in it that one might have mistakenly thought that he could actually relate to what they were experiencing. Nope, you would have never guessed that he successfully evaded military service during the “good war”.

Another right-winger who wore being a fan of veterans on his sleeve like a badge of honor and manhood was of course Ross Perot. Like Dick, he couldn’t hack it in the navy and got out early, and then became another great, clearly overcompensating advocate for veteran’s causes. And speaking of naval washouts, after being “invalided” out of Uncle Sam’s navy, “libertarian” author Robert Heinlein became a writer of tales featuring virile military types serving heroically in futuristic “space navies”. Thus by promoting the positive archetype of he-manly warriors in his stories, he connected with a bit of macho glory through his characters and the archetype that they embodied.

Aha, it would appear that men who haven’t validated their masculine self-worth by authentic and successful military “service” tend to seek to do so by becoming rightist hero-worshippers of men-at-arms. This also dovetails with the primitively macho psychological nature of most conservative ideology. That is, in many instances it really does seem to be the case that conservatives are poignant individuals suffering from a masculine inferiority complex who’ve embraced pro-militarism/hawkishness and other conservative social and political stances because doing so makes them feel like the strong and hairy-chested men that they yearn in their quiet desperation to be.

Indeed then, as the examples above and my anecdote about a certain lame Dick go to show, wrapping oneself in the flag, and in the mantle of a supporter of those who have fought for it, à la so many conservatives, is a tried & true way of overcoming egoically painful insecurity about one’s manhood. And signing on with the rest of the conservative worldview and agenda, well, that’s truly taking overcompensation to the ideological hilt. Veteran’s Day is coming up, and if you listen with a critical mind to commentators and politicians on the political right sing the vapid praises of their country’s valiant veterans who’ve tragically and immorally gone into harm’s way to serve & protect the special interests of the plutocratic elite, you should be tipped off to the fact that they’re “hollow men” vainly trying to fill the hollowness in their own character with the bravery and manfulness of others.

:)

Or, as in your case, you can make up stories about "Dick" and take swipes at veterans to deflect from the fact that you neither served, nor could be bothered to even consider such serving.
 
Or, as in your case, you can make up stories about "Dick" and take swipes at veterans to deflect from the fact that you neither served, nor could be bothered to even consider such serving.

The anecdote about Dick is a 100% true story, and I'm quite proud indeed to be able to say that I never served Lockheed Martin or Halliburton or Exxon-Mobil or the rest of the plutocracy in the military of the United Corporate States of America.

:)
 
A Few More Thoughts

Well, Veterans Day has come and gone, and what with the planned full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq having been announced recently I have some additional thoughts to share here. A question. How is it that folks who wish to express their patriotic appreciation-support for this country's latest graduating class of veterans to be schooled in the horrors of war and the hypocrisy of American for-profit militarism rationalize away the little ole fact that conquering Iraq wasn't really necessary for national security and didn't actually uphold & defend the Constitution of the United States?

It would seem that the veteran-validating loose logic of the average true-blue John & Jane Q. Citizen goes something like this: The terrorists that we fear are predominantly Muslim and Arab, and Saddam Hussein and the population of Iraq are Muslim and Arab, ergo invading-occupying Iraq must somehow have made us safer, and ergo the veterans of the invasion-occupation must have done their sworn patriotic duty to protect us and we therefore owe them a debt of gratitude. Lol! This is rather like reasoning that invading Cuba should make us safer from the Mexican drug cartels because Cubans are Hispanic and Catholic and so are Mexicans!

Understandably, for those who wish to do the culturally in-vogue thing in post-Vietnam America, i.e. thank & praise those who have worn the uniform of their country's armed forces in time of war, the realization that in truth we the people and our vaunted democracy haven't been at all served by the "service" of those who've done a tour in Iraq is a hard actuality to accommodate to their thinking and to acknowledge. But if your boosterism of our latest eligibles for VFW membership returning from Iraq and Afghanistan is based on nothing but conventional, clichéd, and hollow patriotic rhetoric about America's wars invariably being for a good cause, and our military men and women being the impeccable paragons & paladins of public spiritedness & service who defend our freedom with their blood, then despite your heartfelt sincerity, the vapidity of your support for veterans only accents the poignancy of the manner in which they've been exploited as cannon fodder for the economic gain of the corporate plutocracy.

Tragically, for those whom it inspires to enlist and for the victims of the U.S.'s economically-motivated aggressions, American's suffer from the morally haughty & hubristic attitude that their country possesses an infallible integrity. This sense of nationalistic holier-than-thouness of course no longer imbues Congress, or the presidency, or the various civilian institutions of the public sector with a luster of ethical excellence in the eyes of contemporary Americans. Nope, no such luster blinds us nowadays to the faults of government and the phoniness of politicians. But the military (and the police), i.e. the armed enforcement branch of the state, unfortunately does still retain a false and blinding luster that works to dupe many of us into unquestioningly backing its members, even when the death they deal out is unjustified in terms of being a response to a genuine threat to our lives and liberties. In other words, as a people we're morally supercilious hypocrites whose elevation of veterans up onto a pedestal as objects of pious veneration is little more than an expression of our own inflated sense of national loftiness. Raging national egoism, that's the shrouded-in-sanctimony, buried-in-our-unconscious dirty little secret of American pro-veteranism.

If the U.S. is ever to become a less warlike and more pro-life (in an ethically broad not a limited conservative sense of the term) nation, well, we need to begin to recognize such things about ourselves and our culture. Only owning & admitting the truth, unflattering though it is, can set us free from our worship of false ideological idols, from our national pharisaism, and from the tendency to use military violence to feed our plutocracy's Moloch-like appetite for profit and hegemony. Quite simply, as a people we must stop fetishizing veterans, and we must lose our morally toplofty tude, or else we'll heedlessly stay the course set by our historical pattern of martially manifested greed, and our modern sense of global "manifest destiny" – i.e. a self-assured path that will lead to our inexorable downfall.

:)
 
The anecdote about Dick is a 100% true story, and I'm quite proud indeed to be able to say that I never served Lockheed Martin or Halliburton or Exxon-Mobil or the rest of the plutocracy in the military of the United Corporate States of America.

:)

Quite proud to be be a drain on what they provide for you without any service...typical.
 
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Quite proud to be be a drain on what they provide for you without any service...typical.

Lol!!!!!!! It actually sounds as though you're suggesting that one should feel moved to sign up by the debt of gratitude that we owe to our corporate benefactors, i.e. the elite CEOs who make twenty or thirty million a year yet use their lobbyists and conservative tools in Washington to oppose raising the minimum wage, who outsource our jobs, who wish to do away with compassionate social programs for the poor while gorging at the corporate welfare troughs, whose interests and influence instigate our wars, and whose greedy shenanigans have caused the global Great Recession. Yeah, I really feel this powerful sense of obligation to serve the folks in the fat catocracy with my blood, sweat, and tears. NOT! But if you do, if your conservative mind-set is that you're quite proud to be a dupe of and cannon fodder for your capitalist masters, well, that's downright preposterous & pathetic, and I sincerely hope that such a mind-set doesn't one day lead you to make the ultimate sacrifice, or worse, to kill some innocent Third World citizen, for the ignoble cause of enriching an already obscenely rich company such as Lockheed Martin or Halliburton! That would be a genuine moral and human shame.

:)
 
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