There are certain customs that public figures are expected to observe and respect. Among them is showing respect for members of our armed services who lose their lives in the line of duty. It doesn’t matter if the deceased died running into a crossfire to save their buddies or they died because they got drunk and crashed their Jeep into a tree. We call them heroes either way. The point isn’t to distinguish between valorous deaths and ridiculous ones. They put on the uniform and now they’re dead. So, we show them respect.
Now, some might say that calling all our dead soldiers ‘heroes’ is rhetorically proximate to legitimizing whatever they’ve been asked to do. If we call them ‘heroes’ then we are somehow making it more likely that we’ll fight more stupid and unnecessary wars in the future. This is overwrought hand-wringing. We do have a problem when we make it taboo to criticize our soldiers or their missions. But we can segregate discussions of policy from maintaining some solemnity and respect for the dead.
Nonetheless, even if I think Chris Hayes is acting like a parody of a liberal with his ambivalence about Memorial Day, that’s not a reason to call him ‘effete.’ He doesn’t like to call our war dead ‘heroes’ because it offends his sense of proper English usage, which reserves the world ‘hero’ for people who have actually done something ‘heroic.’ And he thinks calling all our troops ‘heroes’ precludes us from pointing out certain things, like the fact that some of them tortured to death helpless people in their care. You know, we don’t call the Charlotte Bobcats ‘champions’ just because they play in the NBA. The Bobcats suck, and so do some of our soldiers. So did some of our dead soldiers. If we go around calling the Bobcats ‘champions’ it will only encourage other basketball teams to have terrible seasons.
But here’s the thing. A basketball analyst can point out the truly historic suckiness of the 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats one day and then, when their team plane crashes into the Everglades, that same analyst can call them all ‘heroes’ and ‘champions’ and any superlative he might want to add. Because it’s polite.
Chris Hayes should remember that. And his critics should feel like dicks for pretending that every person in a uniform, living or dead, has to be called a ‘hero’ all the damn time, even when they’re acting like a coward or a knucklehead or a criminal. Yeah, let’s all try to enforce STUPID.
