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.
We have an entire political party dedicated to enforcing STUPID. This is a very minor example.
Here’s the thing. Semantics aside, I have no problem giving respect to someone who, for whatever reason, acts out of service to a cause greater than him/herself. I don’t have to like the cause to respect the motive. But the only two large institutional examples of that we actually recognize in our culture are the military/law enforcement and the church.
Meanwhile, anyone else in our culture motivated primarily by, say, service to others – e.g., teachers, community workers, social service providers, etc. – is not elevated. More often they are demeaned, ridiculed, and/or scapegoated. My problem isn’t that too many people are called heroic – it’s that by the standards being used, far too few people are being called heroic.
Case in point, Jamie Dimon.
Nurses are stealing our tax dollars, Geov.
The sad thing is that I agree with this guy about 95%. But the 5% is so crucial. Check this out (the bolded part is mine).
I was nodding my head until the bolded part. My granddad was a surgeon during World War Two. We would have lost our freedoms without people like him serving our country. But the guys who have been fighting in Iraq haven’t protected any of my freedoms. In many cases, the war effort has impinged on my freedoms as the government has conducted illegal surveillance and subjected me to propaganda that is technically illegal under the law. The assholes at Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Force base who tortured, raped, and killed people didn’t do a damn thing for my freedoms.
Now, it’s wrong to dishonor troops because the cause was less than just or because they lost. But we honor the dead because it’s polite. We don’t investigate their level of valor or the circumstances of their death to decide whether or not we’ll give them full honors and a military funeral. We have medal ceremonies and court-martials to address people’s heroism or cowardice in the field. On Memorial Day, we don’t have trials or investigations. We honor the dead. And that’s how it should be. And we shouldn’t feel ambivalent about it.
The second you tell me that every soldier who ever served somehow saved our freedoms, you’re just wanking it.
Then he continues to jerk it.
The logical construction of this is:
a) sometimes war is necessary
b) our soldiers died in a war
c) all dead soldiers are heroes
The way it should work is…if a and b are true, then c must also be true. That’s not even close to being the case here.
let’s try again.
a) sometimes war is necessary
b) the Iraq War was not necessary
c) only people who die in necessary wars protect our freedoms
d) Donald died fighting in Iraq
e) Donald died fighting in an unnecessary war that did not protect our freedoms
if a through d are true, then e must also be true. And it is.
But that doesn’t mean we should not treat Donald as a hero. It doesn’t mean that he didn’t act heroically. The problem is with the argument that all our soldiers are heroes because they all protect our freedoms all the time.
Obama said he wasn’t against war, he was against stupid wars. It’s exactly this idea that all our troops died fighting for our freedoms that Chris Hayes was worried about.
So, in drifting off the logical path, this dude failed so badly in his mockery that he actually made Chris Hayes’ argument look good.
a) sometimes war is necessary.
b) always war is profitable.
c) sacralizing fallen soldiers protects that profit center.
My father fought in WWII. He’s a Jew. He knows what was at stake. He lost a brother. Not only does he say that they weren’t heroes, he says they were barely adults. For the most part, they were scared kids.
I presume that’s still true today, and I think it’s one reason why so many of us buy into the ‘heroes’ line. It’s not so bad if a hero dies in a (misguided) attempt to protect the country–and by extension, me. But if a scared kid dies in that same misguided attempt? That makes me complicit in something ugly.
But I must say I enjoy watching Republicans finally honoring at least one type of government worker.
Your uncle died fighting to put an end to one of the most grotesque and violent and hateful ideologies ever conceived. Who knows how well he understood the stakes? Maybe he thought his sergeant was a bigger a-hole than Hitler. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even really matter if he died through his own negligence or he was running away when he was killed. He fought. He died. And we can honor his sacrifice and his loss on Memorial Day without answering or caring about the answer to any of those questions. For one day, we can be generous about what it takes to be a hero. On Veteran’s Day, we can do the same for your father.
It may be overwrought, but it’s a valid point, nonetheless. One of the insidious results of this national habit of ours is that it can be easily used as an immediate and effective knee-jerk response to cut off debate. It provides the unrighteous with self-righteous cover.
Like the ubiquitous “support our troops,” it’s a easy go-to when one doesn’t feel like examining our wars too closely. You say our motives for invasion were falsified, there’s corruption all up and down our occupation, any one of a thousand well-known and documented criminal activities in our wars of choice? “Well, I support our troops (followed by a smug glance around the room seeking approval)”
But it’s a dumb battle to pick.
It’s like when Gen Wesley Clark went on TV in 2008 and made the observation that having been shot down in Vietnam didn’t in any way qualify John McCain to be president. He didn’t even challenge McCain’s status as a “war hero,” but you’d never know judging by the reaction.
General Clark probably should have known better. Chris Hayes definitely should have. We do need to move beyond these infantile notions of war and hero worship if we’re to have some badly needed realism in our national debate, but going meta isn’t going to make it happen, because either the American audience isn’t capable of having that conversation, or there are more than enough bad actors among the opposition whose actions are dedicated to ensuring we can’t have honesty in that conversation.
Hope that makes sense. Thunder is playing the Spurs on TV right now and I’m a bit distracted.
I think you hit the most important fact about this entire conversation:
Super dumb considering Memorial Day weekend. I’d forgotten about that angle.
It’s not necessarily a bad subject to raise. But timing is an important thing in life.
Your uncle might have been a terrible drunk who beat his kids and never paid back his debts. But it’s probably not a good idea to bring this up at his wake. Whoever gives the eulogy should probably focus on the fact that he was a good baseball coach, loved to fish, and never forgot to put a little money in the church tray.
If you can’t keep true to these little courtesies in life, you soon become just as big of a shit as the people you insist on being honest about. I’ve found that women understand this more easily than men. Many times I’ve received a kick in the shin under the table when I was being truthful at the wrong time. I was always wrong. And my lady friends were always right.
Society has become so thoroughly permeated with the military mindset we can’t even have a proper “Memorial Day” – a day originally set aside to honor all who have gone before, all who have shaped our world, be it our parent and grand-parents, a favored college professor, disfavored politician or some crazy old logger – without it becoming yet another glorification of War and our War Culture.
Tomorrow I’ll be honoring the memories of my parent and grand-parents, a favored college professor, disfavored politician and some crazy old logger along with The Founding Fathers, Abe, FDR and Ike, Ken Kesey, Jerry Garcia and Satn Owsley while trying to forget for one day my fallen comrades as well as all those others who have fallen in chicken-shit corporate wars.
Um, Memorial Day has never not been about dead soldiers. See, for instance, this piece from the History Channel. Maybe you’re thinking of the Day of the Dead.
More specifically, Memorial Day started “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion”, per Logan’s General Orders #11 (5/5/1868). http://www.usmemorialday.org/order11.html
We here at home had a big discussion about this topic, especially after Booman posted. Our issue centered around using the word “hero” for all dead soldiers. It seems that by doing so we are essentially saying that all soldiers are heroes (dead or alive) except deserters or torturers, etc. One wonders whether such a broad brush for the word “hero” waters down its meaning, essentially making it a gratuitous remark.
There are other questions that arose. Are “contractors” that die in war “heroes” too? How about Iraqis or Afghanis? The opening premise Chris Hayes made was that we memorialize them all on Memorial Day. Should we call them heroes? Is a martyr a hero by another name? Does heroism require some special valor over and above the agreed upon norms within one’s voluntary obligations?
It is a courtesy to call these folks heroes, but it’s being overused.
On the issue of whether the word is losing its more traditional meaning, I posed as a counterpoint the frequently heard argument against same-sex marriage: that legitimatizing same-sex relationships as “marriage” essentially alters the meaning of the word marriage, and to some devalues that meaning. Is the same true with “hero.”
Most soldiers would probably deny that they are heroes. My wife reminds me that their mothers wouldn’t agree.
Sorry for the rambling post. It was a rambling discussion!
http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175423/andrew_bacevich_ballpark_liturgy
I’m not a hero just because I signed on the dotted line.
I do think that people evolve a bit in what they think of the military if they have a loved one who is serving.
I do know that I and most of the people I’ve served with have tried to represent the USA honorably. It’s a shame that some haven’t.
I really liked Charlie Pierce’s blog post from the other day. The quote from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address struck home.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/support-the-troops-9146514
What I object to is the constant bullshit that we should be grateful to the heroic troops in Eye Rack and Afghanistan for making sure we have “our freedoms”. Whatever U.S. troops have done or are doing in those places it has nothing to do with us our “our freedoms”, and it is sheer stupidity to ask us to honor them on that basis.
The reality is that the U.S. military has not been involved in defending anyone’s “freedoms” since WW II, and there are some very good people who challenge even that involvement.
I think the United States government has an obligation to take very good care of those people whom it has duped into risking life and limb for empire and corporate greed, but I don’t have any obligation at all to honor them. I wish them well, but there is not a chance in hell that I will thank any of them for their “service”.
Chris Hayes has trouble being a liturgist for the state civil religion of war as sacrificial service. And Memorial Day is one of the high holy days of that cult.
Is not part of the seduction of the military for those who enlist the fleeting thought that if the worst comes to pass, they will be treated with highly formal ritual and high honor?
Isn’t that why the inter-war description of soldiers as cannon-fodder so galvanized public opinion against wars like World War I? And created the high point of the international anti-war movement.
I think it was great historian Barbara Tuchman, back in the mid-1980s not long before she died, who pointed out how even the basic concept of what ‘hero’ signified had been pretty thoroughly compromised, distorted, snd rendered meaningless in our society. When she was discussing this she used the example of a little girl who’d fallen down a well and was trapped there for several days and how the media and the public kept referring to that little girl as a hero.
Yes, in that sense, anyone showing courage becomes a hero, regardless of the cause of their distress.
On a related note: Have you noticed how the word “fallen” has expanded its range over the last decade or so? It used to mean specifically “died in battle” but more and more it’s applied to police and firefighters who die in the line of duty. Given the increasing militarization of police forces ever since 9/11, perhaps that’s not surprising.
However, I’ve recently noticed that the anchors and reporters on TV “news” programs have begun to use it for non-servicepeople killed in non-service-related ways.
That’s probably an inevitable drift of the word’s connotations, given the tendency of words to shift meanings over time combined with the human preference to seek euphemisms for unpleasant realities (“die” is just so blunt, innit?), but I’m sorry to see that useful distinction wither away.
if you put on the uniform and decide to put your life on the line for this country and you lose your life, you’re a hero.
fuck Chris Hayes.
HERO, a word we all know, but has different meanings to everyone. We identify our meaning, but is it “my meaning” that everyone else means?
In many ways, the use of the word HERO has been over used and very abused in our common discourse. In many ways, it is like the N Word of WWII; to overuse it is to DEMEAN it’s true meaning, and basically invalidates what it’s TRUE meaning is by it’s over usage.
War is Hell, and with Hell comes Heroes to save us from
“others”. To me,deeds DO matter, but so does the character of the person.
To me, the big losers during our CRUSADES in Iraq were the National Guardsman who lost their lives to fight King George’s war against the man who tried to assassinate his daddy. These guardsman signed up to protect America, on American land, in times of natural disasters and to be ready for A real WAR.
The National Guardsman who lost their lives, for a mission they DID NOT volunteer for, are the heroes in this war hating DFH’s mind!
The true losers were the Iraqi people. They never had any choice in the matter, not for one millisecond.
Some people had a choice..
http://www.disinfo.com/2012/04/iraq-wars-curveball-confesses-all/
I don’t know how judge one person’s loss from another.