"Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify. Because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city, you're actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it. You know what I mean, you are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt, they *hate* him now. Boo! different shirt!! Boo."
Now, that said, I've been getting more than my share of patriotic rubbish over the last week.
I have to ask, in an illegal war of occupation (also immoral as per John Paul II and most other church leaders), based on lies, what *could* we cheer for?
Shall we root for the fact that our soldiers are some of the worst trained in the 'laws of war' on earth?
Shall we cheer that they've been misled in their constitutional duties?
Shall we celebrate their maimed bodies, or the many more maimed and murdered victims, or perhaps the environmental destruction wreaked by our depleted uranium weapons?
Really, all there is to 'cheer' is the soldiers continued participation in *our* delusion.
If they had been trained in the Geneva Convention (as is required by international treaty) then they would have to conclude that they were being instructed to violate it (and the UN Charter, and most likely their own religious beliefs). If they had decent civics training, they'd understand that the 'enemy' is the one instructing them to violate US and international law, and both refuse to cooperate and attempt to detain the criminals.
The 'heros' in this aren't the soldiers. It's the little people who just stood up and said, "This is wrong." Or perhaps ones like Father John Dear, who merely took Pope John Paul II at his word and started preaching against the USA's immoral war of aggression in Iraq. Certainly the folks at SOAW who go to jail yearly protesting the training camp that spawned Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are heroes.
The guy who is dumb enough to go off to Iraq and leave the bottom half of his body there is a dupe, but unless we want to start beatifying rubes, he's not a 'hero'.
You note, he's not a *villain* either. That was the mistake we made in the sixties. This isn't some kind of monster we've made, it's just a guy, doing a job that he thinks is *really* important and heroic.
The villains are the guys who make turning yourself into pâte 'important and heroic' by lying.
The real heroes would be the guys who make the point to the rubes that they're being had. If the soldiers woke up, the politicos would be in *real* trouble.
Of course, if any of the soldiers actually was doing the 'job description' that's always listed, they *would* (by definition) be heroic.
It's a bait-and-switch con job.
You'd think the Vietnam vets (at least) would have woken up by now. I mean, first, you get the revelation that Tonkin was both a lie and staged to boot, then you get the continuing 'MIA' flag thing, which signifies a severe distrust of the US Government's veracity, compounded with the Agent Orange coverup, and the revelations about covert ops in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma and now, the whole war crime thing going on again with a privately contracted Lt. Calley this time ...
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