Blogger Dennis Dale has a piece at his Untethered that I wish I had written as it expresses my thoughts better than I could have. Okay, maybe he is not channeling me, but there is nothing he has written in his article Support the Truth that I disagree with.
"Support the troops", with its seductive appeal to the romance of martial heroism, the obsequious and pointless genuflection it compels of all, constricting discourse, is a death spiral. It is the nuclear option of debate, the napalming of one's own position, the burning of the village in order to save it. It would not be deployed if not for the hopeless logical and factual position of those who use it.
People do not propose entering into a war in order to support the brave men and women who fight it (though the appeal to glory is always implied); but they can always be counted on to insist on continuing a war, no matter how pointless or unjust it is revealed to be, for this very reason.
I could quote and highlight all of the article, but it is his. Go and read it. Read it to the end.
It's time to become conscientious objectors refusing the call of "support the troops." No one is "against the troops"; this phrase is a content-less redundancy, obscuring more than revealing. It's time for a discharge. Call it a reduction in forces. These words have lost all meaning, one more casualty of our new culture of war. They have been left on the front lines of a meaningless war, sacrificed for the goals of the corrupt and cowardly, just like their real world counteparts.
Here's one more heresy for you: our greater obligation is to the truth, not the troops. They, and the rest of us, will be just fine if we can only honor this.
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Dennis is definitely on a roll, and not just on this post alone. His last three or four have been very much to the point, and something close to necessary reading. Must be related to his having deprived his readers of the opportunity to comment. A bit tyrannical, but what of it?
After having read one of his lucid analyses, I generally have only to say - in the drawled, near mumbled words of the now long departed Georgia Senator and atavistic scoundrel Herman Tallmadge, "I concur."
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