the language we use isn’t what we want

Another political post today, spun out of something that I wanted to address in the previous post, but couldn’t fit in.

There was an editorial that ran in the Boston Globe a few weeks ago, written by a military officer and Iraq War vet presently attending Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, about how the American public at large seems disconnected from what is happening over in Mesopotamia. It wasn’t the typical “protestors are making us lose the war” nonsense, but a broader lament about the lack of home front involvement in what the author saw as a just and necessary cause.

As typical whenever these points are raised (not too frequently, but often enough), World War II -- the last “Good War” -- was brought into the argument as an example of the seamless meshing of domestic and military policies. It’s a potent mythic evocation, conjuring images of victory gardens, scrap drives, and war bonds, but it’s also highly anachronistic and rather pointless in the context of present day American society, and shows that the writer might be as disconnected with the greater reality as the people on the “home front.”

To put it bluntly: If the Iraq War required the sort of domestic, social, and economic organization that World War II required, there would never have been an Iraq War. The planners of the conflict were well aware of this, and based policy on a deliberate separation of the military and domestic spheres, knowing full well that a “war tax,” or food or fuel rationing, or any other war-related inconvenience levied on Joe or Jane Q. Public would have far more political repercussions than the death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi civilians. Moreover, it’s impossible to imagine the nation’s titans of commerce and industry submitting to profit-eating regulations or levies for the sake of a greater cause that would then face intense scrutiny from the moneymen and the general public.

Instead the goal has been to tailor the demands of the conflict to maximize support while minimizing the potential for political or economic backlash. So it’s been “support the troops” (meaning “sit down, shut up, and slap a yellow ribbon magnet on your Escalade”) and “they hate our freedoms” (meaning “the brown-skinned heathens are coming to eat your children” – xenophobia is always a safe bet when dealing with Americans) which are great for triggering gut level reactions that pacify without asking much of those pacified. It hasn’t been a complete success, so badly botched the whole affair has been, but in terms of keeping the average person at arm’s length to what’s really going down, it’s been fairly effective. Sacrifices made in the name of fear or “patriotism” can only go so far, though, and tend to work better when it comes to poorly understood intangibles like civil rights or protection by law than those of the pecuniary or immediately personal sort.

Those who feel the pain inherit the problem, and the powers at be have done their all to keep the populace as numb and comfy and as detached from the truth as possible.

Danse Society – We’re So Happy (from Seduction: The Society Collection, 2001)

Rudimentary Peni – Sacrifice (from The EPs of RP, 1987)