The culture of the anti-war movement in the USA today is decidedly more pious and patriotic than that of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
I don't know what to make of this. What I do notice is the absence of thought...the inability to think. After enjoining Americans to "support our troops" thought seems to stop. It doesn't seem to matter WHAT these troops are doing. Since we all know that the troops are carpet bombing, invading a foreign country, destroying a country which has not done anything to hurt America and Americans, it's really hard to see how patriotism comes into this on any rational level.
The populist sentiment behind support for the troops seems to take root in the observation that they "are just doing their jobs." (For those of you who have partaken of Hollywood's war films lately, that seems to be a common theme. There's no idealism...there are no political or other goals....one does one's job to protect one's fellow fighters. Beginning, middle, and end.) In the same way, it strikes me that the fervor behind supporting the troops has less to do with political goals than it has to do with the working class actually being able to defend the only positive image of itself that the government is willing to back. It's as if criticizing our troops is the equivalent of attacking the working man for doing his job. It's as if the working class having been identified as "losers" for the last twenty years (cause anyone who doesn't make it is a loser) has at last found a space within which it can win, and it doesn't want that domain or that credit taken away from it. It wants a kill and it wants a victory and it doesn't want to be criticized for just "doing their job."
I'm probably putting this very badly -- but I'm trying to articulate an unconscious position and the way that position is being used to build support for a war which, considered on any other terms, is unconscionable. The level of political discourse in general is low. It does not much exceed the propaganda of the last twenty years which taught the working class that the sumum bonum was "having a job" and the sumum bonum of capitalists was that they were "creating jobs." It did not matter that many of these jobs involved building the most formidable gulag of the twentieth century -- the American prison-industrial complex and, in effect, two of the most representative films of the last twenty years were "Forrest Gump" and "Schindler's List." The first movie gave us the working class hero as moron...as conceived by late twentieth century capitalism, and the second explained to us that we have two choices: good fascists (Schindler) and crazy fascists. We should all be happy that we can work for Schindler and not worry to much over the fact that our president, our little Caligula, bears a much stronger resemblance to the other guy.
But now the leftists are to blame because they can't cut through this mindless crap? I don't think so. Because, in reality, the only thing that can cut through it is, I'm afraid, real suffering. It was not judicious of De Genova to call for a thousand Mogadishus, but sometimes I wonder what it will take to wake up this country from its deadly and dangerous sleep.
Joanna
