Or, why a loving wife needs her arse severly slapping
Here I am, barely back two minutes, and already I have something to write about. As an aside, and before we get into the discussion, it quite astonishes me how happy I am to be able to do this once more - I really hadn't realized quite how much I missed this means of expression.
Anyway, on with the show.
(Link)
The link will take you to an article, published June 05 2006, in the English newspaper The Guardian. This article makes reference to recent events in Haditha, Iraq, in which members of the United States Marine Corps are alleged to have wantonly killed a number of Iraqis. An event that, among the bloggers of the Guardian's 'comment is free' section at least, is held to be on a par with the events that took place at Mai Lai, Vietnam.
You might wonder why an English newspaper would take an interest in what is fundamentally an American event. British troops were nowhere near Haditha and took no part in the events there, so why the interest on the part of an English newspaper?
Unless you, as an American, have travelled to Europe and spent some time there, I doubt very much that you can be aware of the obsessive interest that is paid to all things American, but in paricular American politics and policy, by the European media.
Europe as a whole occasionally gets a mention on Fox's 'Eighty Seconds Around The World' slot (Britain will infrequently merit a mention of its own). But in Britain particularly there's is not a newspaper that does not carry some mention of events in America, there is not a news show that does nor devote some of its airtime to America (the more prestigious shows such as Channel 4's 'News at 7' frequently devoting extensive amounts, twenty or thirty minutes out of a sixty minute block, to American politics - every day and every night, 365 days a year).
The slant taken by the Guardian (which was not something I was able to discern until I had left Britain and lived for some time here in America, having been a Guardian reader of many years standing while in Britain) is an even-handed negativity. It's editors demonstrate a refined derision for the current crop of American Republicans (who can blame them? Such a comedy of confusion, corruption, incompetence and honest but painfully obvious stupidity appears in politics once a century, if that often); and a refined contempt for Democrats - who are not quite socialist enough - even though the poor dears try really, really, really hard, and deserve all the support the European friends can give them.
Its expression in the Weltanschauung of the Guardian is really rather subtle, often being best expressed in the work of the paper's cartoonists (who are utterly brilliant and should be made Heroes of the Human Race for the true viciousness of their humor - directed as much at the politics of Britain as America - which is perfectly democratic and truly evenhanded because they despise all politicians with an absolute equality) and, to one steeped in the intellectual culture of the paper, as I was, utterly invisible.
During my time away from JU I participated in the forums recently created by the Guardian. These are referred to as 'comment is free' and were a means devised to actively engage readers with journalists and each other in debate about articles created by Guardian journalists and guests, Leader columns, op-ed pieces, and so on. What I encountered there proved to be illuminating.
Having lived here for three years, having driven an icecream truck through the housing projects of Cleveland for a season, having lived in the deepest depths of the 'hood in Richmond's South Side for two years, I know more about America than I did before I came here, and infinitely more than the average Eurodweeb blogging on the Guardian. Not only that but, while I wouldn't claim to think like some one born here, nor to fully understand how Americans in general think, I have begun to get a grip on what I can only call an American sensibility. Not for the little things: why, for example, bread is made with sugar; why you drive on the wrong side of the road while sitting on the wrong side of the car; why every brat in America has to be driven door to door from home to school and back again in those hideous yellow cattle trucks that are such a danger and inconvenience to anyone else on the road. Not the little things.
But the big things, like patriotism; sacrifice; duty. Not even a sensibility (which implies comprehension, understanding) but an appreciation for the absolute sincerity, the genuineness of feeling, with which these sentiments are held and expressed. Not so the Eurodweebs, who are convinced that all patriotism is either a deliberate fraud, or the consequence of an almost ineffable stupidity.
Which is why, to bring this slowly round to the point, I write on the Guardian as the Bald Avenger (despite my nomme du guerre's actual origin in the Wars of the Roses): Bald - because I've become aware of the wall of ignorant prejudice with which America is regarded in Europe, and have beaten my head hairless in attempting to combat it; and Avenger, because I no longer attempt to educate or illuminate but to thrash mercilessly those who present their ignorant opinionated nonsense as truth whenever I encounter them.
What annoys me most is not the rantings of the Eurodweebs (after all, I was once one of them - which is how I came to know which buttons to press in order to reduce them to screeching hysteria on the Guardian's talk board - which I do with regularity and considerable amusement) but the equally facile but far more pernicious treachery of those Americans who are the intellectual fellow-travellers of the Eurodweebs and their ilk.
I have been staggered, delighted, awed and amazed by America and her people, by everything they have done and everything they may yet accomplish in the future - as well as by the generosity of spirit with which I have been received here. What astonishes me is that though even I, with eyes and understanding still tainted by Eurodweebery, can see the good in America - many native-born Americans seem incapable of seeing the same thing.
While I lived in Ohio and ran the icecream truck I had occasion to gas up one day, at a station I often used on my way between one selling area and another. I'd fallen into the habit of brief conversations with one of the kids who ran the till for minimum wage. They were never very extensive or meaningful - but I valued them because they were one moment in the day when I was buying instead of selling, when I was served (politely) rather than having to deal with the boorishness and incivility of my clientele. During one such conversation, this young man having noticed my accent, that it was European, informed me casually that he hated America and wanted to go to Europe.
This was a clean-cut, all-American boy with a strong local accent who had evidently been born and raised here. To be born and raised here is a privilege and a blessing that most of the world wishes ardently it could share. This ignorant, pampered (what else can you call someone whose waste-disposal eats better than most of the world?) ingrate had no idea what he had said, nor how shocked and offended I was by his wilfull failure to see what immense wealth and opportunity he was heir to simply in virtue of bein born here. I had nothing to say (nothing civil), paid and left.
And finally, to the point.
"The marine unit involved in the killing of Iraqi civilians in Haditha last November had suffered a "total breakdown" in discipline and had drug and alcohol problems, according to the wife of one of the battalion's staff sergeants (italics added).
The allegations in Newsweek magazine contribute to an ever more disturbing portrait of embattled marines under high stress, some on their third tour of duty after ferocious door-to-door fighting in the Sunni insurgent strongholds of Falluja and Haditha."
Is this woman deranged? Has she forgotten, that no matter what the stress of the situation in which her husband and his comrades found themselves, no matter what that stress might have induced them to do, he is her husband and a serving member of her nation's armed forces?
How dare she stand in the face of the world and decry her husband and his comrades, making them out to be ill-disciplined and out of control, bringing contumely upon her nation - whether or not he and his comrades did that of which they are accused?
As a purely personal opinion (to which no one else need subscribe) I believe the greater the ferocity, the greater the cruelty, the greater the terror, that American soldiers inflict on the opposition in Iraq, then the fewer will be American casualties, the more willing the local 'authorities' will be to collaborate, and the sooner will the appearance of democracy be established in Iraq so that the troops can escape this grotesque political adventure of Bush and his idiot confraternity and be brought home. If all the Iraqis are dead there can be no more insurrection in Iraq, right? Mission end - Bush has his legacy - everyone goes home. History is written, after all, by victors - not the corpses of their enemies that they leave to rot in the sand.
But that's by the way (though it's the sort of comment that ties Eurodweebs in absolute knots and has them calling me a 'neocon redneck fascist asshole' lol).
The true point is the absolute treachery of a wife indicting her husband over something she did not witness, betraying her nation to the poisoned tongues of its fairweather friends and almost-enemies, and actively collaborating in the defamation of her country. She knows nothing of what was done and her part was to keep silence, since she couldn't find it in herself to defend either her man or her country.
This oracle goes still further -
"The wife of the unnamed staff sergeant claimed there had been a "total breakdown" in the unit's discipline after it was pulled out of Falluja in early 2005. "There were problems in Kilo company with drugs, alcohol, hazing [violent initiation games], you name it," she said. "I think it's more than possible that these guys were totally tweaked out on speed or something when they shot those civilians in Haditha."
This villainous slut (I hope her husband beats her senseless when he returns home and discovers her treachery) proceeds to vilify, not merely the personnel of Kilo Company but, by proxy, every man and woman under arms in the service of America. It is of absolutely no consequence whatsover whether Kilo Company did what it is accused of. The issue is why would any American provide this support to those who are only too eager to denigrate America at every turn? What is it in the American Weltanschauung that makes such refusal to support one's country (from the gas guy in Ohio to this demented slut) so pervasive that it goes almost unnoticed?
Americans, why don't you love your country any more? It's irrelevant whether or not you 'approve' of the Iraq war. For whatever reason your fellow-citizens fight and die in Iraq, and may do soon in Iran. In time of war, no matter the genesis of that war, there is an absolute duty upon the citizen to support no matter what the armed forces of the polity of which he is a part.
Europeans used to understand this. The English, in particular, used to understand this. It was irrelevant why we went to war with Hitler. We went to war with him and his nation and our aim, as a nation, as a people, was to remove him from the face of the earth. Justice did not matter. Right did not matter. Means did not matter. We were at war, and our enemy was not one to be sympathised with, the justice of his cause was an utter irrelevance: what mattered was his destruction - in which all were involved, from the least to the greatest - simply because he was our enemy.
Americans die in Iraq, killed by Iraqis. Since they kill our people (and yes, though I am not yet a citizen I have come to think of myself as an American) they are our enemies and they ought, for that reason alone, to be slaughtered out of hand at every opportunity. And while the soldiers of America are doing the good work of killing those who resist America (there is nothing to be ashamed of in admitting that this war began because Saddam Hussein ultimately proved resistant to the will of those who had raised him to power) it is the absolute duty of Americans to support unequivocally those doing the slaughtering - even if you can't bring yourself to support the machinations of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al, which brought about the war in the first place.
The two issues are completely separate: support for the soldier on the ground is not the same as support for those who sent him there in the first place. Disown the politician if you will - but do not disown the soldier who fights and dies in obedience to his (or her) duty.
From Eurodweeb to.... what, in three years? My wife calls me a born-again American patriot. I'm not sure it is patriotism, in the emotional, visceral sense that native born Americans feel that sentiment. I have always had a strong sense of civics, of civil obligation. I had, until I came here, begun to doubt its reality. Perhaps it's simply an awareness of what America has taught me in these last three years.
Some things are worthy - even if, at times, the agents of these worthy things do wrong.
Some things are worthy."