[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Mutterings over the graves of soldiers

Sun May 25 18:31:20 MDT 2008

On Memorial Day we'll hear about men who gave their lives for their
country, but many lives were not given, they were taken, and taken
stupidly and carelessly.

by Garrison Keillor

Salon.com (May 21 2008)

The Current Occupant tossed Nazis into a speech last week, something he
rarely does since it only reminds people of Dick Cheney. He likened
those who would negotiate with terrorists to those who tried to appease
the Nazis, an awkward comparison, since Nazis were self-defined and wore
the swastika proudly, and terrorists are anybody we nominate to be
terrorists, who may include terrorists, people who know terrorists,
people named Terry, or people with wrists. One reason Guantánamo is kept
top-secret is so you and I won't know how many innocent people have been
locked up there and how little the bureaucracy cares about innocence,
which might remind people of the Nazis.

The Nazis have served us well as an embodiment of evil even after
they're all dead and buried, thanks to wonderful movies with cruel men
with bad skin and guttural voices - and the word itself, which has an
ominous buzz to it, unlike the gentle "communist", a cousin to
"communion" and "community", though when it comes to outright hardcore
evil, communism outdid the Third Reich hands down. Stalin was the most
murderous man in the history of the world, having had a larger victim
pool to work with, and yet "Stalinist" is not the epithet it should be.

That's because communism was exploited for short-term political
advantage after World War II by Richard Nixon and other weasels of the
right, much the way "terrorist" is today, to scare people into acceding
to unprecedented secrecy and concentration of power and freedom of
bureaucrats from any accountability whatsoever. Spooky old hammerhead
politicians found anti-communism to be wonderfully profitable and they
rode that horse for years and cheapened the language.

The war on terror, to most people, is a lame joke, and Republicans
who've been embedded in Washington too long are now finding that the
word "terrorism" has lost its tread. This multitrillion-dollar war is
going to wind down, one way or another. The Occupant will hand it off to
the next president, who can then negotiate with people who know people
who know terrorists and work out a way to extricate our people from the
desert.

If a Democrat does it, it will be appeasement, and if a Republican does
it, it will go down as a courageous act of statesmanship, but one way or
another, it will be done.

I got a letter from a US Marine in Fallujah ("trapped in this heat and
smoke ... running in circles that won't change anything") who, though a
"right-wing social conservative", asks, "Where are the protests from my
contemporaries in America's colleges? Why do I not detect an appropriate
sense of urgency from our citizens and elected officials?"

It's only May. You will see more urgency from elected officials as
November nears. Senator McCain is now talking about withdrawal except of
course he wants to call it "victory", and Republicans up for reelection
are learning to sound a little more thoughtful and even skeptical about
the war. In Minnesota, a man is up for reelection who sat on a Senate
committee with oversight responsibility for the rebuilding effort in
Iraq and who showed no keen interest in the billions of dollars
disappearing down rat holes. He is now starting to recover some memory.

Meanwhile it's almost Memorial Day and here is a vet on television
talking hopefully about his dream of making a good life who has been
horribly burned and grafted back together, his head looks like a candle
stub with a mouth and blinking eyes. Your heart goes out to the brave
young man. And what choice does he have other than to be brave? It's
either that or the life of a potato. But who did this to him?

On Memorial Day we'll hear about men who gave their lives for their
country, but many lives were not given, they were taken, and taken
stupidly and carelessly. And there has been great public piety about
those men and their "sacrifice" on the part of politicians who blithely
sacrificed them.

Back in 2001, McCain said that a person couldn't talk policy to the
Current Occupant for more than ten minutes and then his mind wandered
and he was anxious to talk about baseball. His impatience with detail
was apparently a factor in the disastrous move to disband the Iraqi
army. I hope he gets to spend some time in his presidential library in
Dallas and catch up on what he missed out on.

_____

Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday
nights on public radio stations across the country.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2008/05/21/memorial_day/index.html

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/