The mystery of whiny patriotism

Patriotic Americans seem to have no voice. Our side is never heard.

This is from some segregationist Mississippian circa 1963, a quote which could be multiplied thousands of times over. James Silver cited it in his 1966 book Mississippi: The Closed Society. And, no, the speaker didn't mean that she was taking a stand against states-righters and people nostalgic for the Confederacy.

But a truculent brand of patriotism went hand-in-hand with states-rights rhetoric, which was really pro-segregation more than anything else. Silver cites a statement from the Mississippi State Farm Bureau in 1962 complaining that some public school texts did not sufficiently teach "states' rights, racial integrity, free enterprise and Americanism".

He also remarks sardonically, "Curiously, in Mississippi political theory both 'nationalism' and 'state rights' are valued highly".

This incessant whining from privileged groups about nonexistent or wildly exaggerated grievances I think of as the "whiny white folks" phenomenon. Since the commercial Christmas season is upon us, it can't be long now before Bill O'Reilly and the "culture war" crowd start telling us once more about how the Jews are on the verge of stamping out Christianity in America through their nefarious "war against Christmas". This particularly vapid piece of whiny-white-folks complaint seems to have become an annual ritual for the FOXists.

The flap this week over John Kerry's joke is also a good example of this. He made a statement that very obviously used Iraq as a synonym for "a hellhole where no one in their right mind would go unless duty required it". Iraq is a hellhole? Duh! Who would have imagined it? I wish he had stuck with his initial, truculent response to Republican whining that Kerry's remark might have hurt the delicate feelings of some Republican soldier somewhere who already hated Kerry's guts. Instead, he came out with a non-apology apology that won't appease the Reps one whit but backs off from the in-your-face attitude that fighting Dems need to have these days to survive the hyper-partisanship of the Republicans, a trait which will only get worse if they lose control of one or both Houses of Congress. (If you aren't already sick of hearing about it, you can check out Marc Sandalow's account, Kerry's gibe, GOP reaction stir up perfect political storm San Francisco Chronicle 11/02/06; and maybe check out Simon Jenkins' We have turned Iraq into the most hellish place on Earth Guardian 10/25/06 for a reality-check.)

Which brings me to the little tribute poem above, which was featured at the Tanker Brothers blog on 10/31/06.


Check it out. From the first line, it's a whine about people protesting. Apparently about people protesting anything, it's not exactly clear what.

But not all the bloggers at Tanker Brothers think all protest is bad, as illustrated by this photo they featured on 11/01/06:


Another reality check here. I'm very much in favor of soldiers' free speech rights. And that includes the rah-rah-Bush-is-great "milbloggers" like those at Tanker Brothers who are being pressured not to blog by a Pentagon obsessed with control and secrecy.

But there are also good reasons why military regulations forbid soldiers from making partisan political appearances in uniform. Aren't the partisan Republican soldiers in this photo really pushing the line? Are Republican protesters allowed to use their uniforms like this because 90% of the officer corps are Republican?

Partisan politics is partisan politics, dudes. Whether you're within regulations or not, you can't use your uniform to hide your partisan political stances from criticism.

When I see things like the apparently untitled and anonymous whiny poem in the picture at the start of this post, I understand some of the background of where it comes from. Nixon and Agnew tried to equate support of their disastrous war policies in Vietnam with support for the soldiers there. During the Gulf War, Old Man Bush and his supporters made a big deal about equating "support the troops" to "cheer for Bush's war policies". And ever since 9/11, Republican zealots have equated any criticism of Cheney's and Bush's war policies to attacking the troops. So I get the history of it as far as that goes.

But who do things like this really appeal to? According to the one poll I've seen that surveyed US troops serving in Iraq, support for an early withdrawal is stronger among soldiers there than among the general public. But why should anyone be surprised that soldiers' political views tend to mirror those of the American society of which they're a part?

And it seems painfully obvious to me that anyone over the age of, say, 14 can understand the difference between the actions of the individual soldier doing his duty and the war policies that put him where he's fighting at any given moment. Look at Jim Webb, the Democratic candidate for Senator in Virginia, a Vietnam veteran and former Secretary of the Navy. His son is a Marine serving right now in Ramadi, Iraq. And yet Webb has become one of the best-known critics of the Iraq War and publicly opposed it before the invasion.

Does anyone in their right mind believe that means that he's not supportive and proud of his son and his service? Does anyone in their right mind believe that his son should regard him as insulting the soldiers serving today because he's criticizing the disastrous Iraq War policies of the Cheney-Bush administration?

Maybe in the alternative world of OxyContin fantasies displayed on FOX News and other Republican outlets. But not in this one.

It really makes me wonder exactly who entertains themselves with things like this poem above, whose real point is that anyone who protests (presumably against Our Glorious Leader Bush's war policies) is depreciating ordinary soldiers:

We came here to fight for the ones we hold dear
If that's not respected, we would rather stay here
So please stop yelling and put down your signs,
and pray for those behind enemy lines.

I'm not sure who finds such things appealing. But I'm confident in saying that the ones who do don't think that "put down your signs" should apply to the Republicans in the second picture shown in this post.

But what's so patriotic about the whining part of it? Especially since critics of the war if anything have gone way too far in trying to reassure people that criticizing the war doesn't mean you're criticizing the soldiers. Hell, the soldiers who torture prisoners deserve to be criticized, not least because they're helping get their fellow soldiers killed, the ones who do their duty under exceptionally difficult circumstances, because of the inevitable reaction to that kind of maltreatment of prisoners.

But what kind of people take legitimate and necessary criticism of bad acts by some soldiers as somehow a blanket criticism of the rest? I mean, if the district attorney busts a mechanic who has committed a murder, we don't hear people assuming that this means that the DA is on a judicial jihad against mechanics.

Which brings us back to whiny white folks. Just like the quotes of nasty Mississippi segregationists of 40 years ago who were making delusional claims that they were being persecuted because they were white Southerners, a lot of today's Christian Right "culture warriors" also have a strong emotional stake in seeing themselves as the upstanding Good People who are being unfairly persecuted by Evil Liberals, antiwar protesters, dope-smoking hippies (although those are hard to find in the real world these days) and various Jewish and Commie conspiracies. The fact that today's variety are disproportionately Southern isn't entirely accidental.

My guess is the average soldier or Guardsman called up for duty is a lot more angry at the lender who repossessed his car or the Pentagon bureaucrats who call them up for third and fourth tours of duty and the Veterans Administration that won't provide adequate treatment for war-related conditions than he or she is about the majority of the American people who are opposed to the Iraq War.

And the bottom line is, as much as we may want to step gently with the tender feelings of easily-offended whiny white folks, its not only the right but the responsibility of citizens to take a critical look at its government's policies, especially when it comes to war and peace. When something is as screwed up as the Iraq War is, people have to look at what has gone wrong and what is going wrong to find solutions.

And guess what. The whiny white folks are going to whine anyway. Because that's what they do.

Tags: iraq war, patriotism, john kerry

| +Save/Share | |