MSNBC, enterprisingly enough, did an impromptu town meeting on the speech from a Baptist church in Nashville, having already scheduled a special edition of the Chris Matthews "Hardball" show from that location to discuss, among other things, politics and religion.
Matthews led a post-speech discussion that included assembled experts, most of whom leaned to the right or far right, and an audience made up largely of military families. Two soldiers' wives interviewed said they were prepared for the war to last 10 or 12 years...
Missed most of W's speech last night thanks to a timely phone call from my brother. I watched about 20 minutes of post-commentary on "Hardball" until I couldn't take anymore.
Bush's choice of a military audience was very telling. The man is not tolerant of dissent and he chose a crowd that is literally under his command. And war opponents have not yet, in the post-Vietnam era, figured out an effective response to the fallacy of Republican argument: "to support The Troops, you must support the war."
I've confessed before that I don't get the culture of the military and the military family. I've never had close family or friends in the armed forces - just a couple cousins who are de facto strangers. My brothers and I were lucky enough to have middle class opportunities and a draft-free era.
Attitudes toward the military, and the presence of a military member in the family, is now one of the strongest indicators of political preference - right up there with self-declared party ID, race, and church attendance. Perhaps this is the consequence of a post-draft era where the military community is self-selected.
As Chris Matthews interviewed his crowd, the Bush support was unanimous. The military family culture seems incapable of questioning policy. All the wives included the same information by way of introduction: husband's specialty and unit. This was meaningless to me but obviously has great significance to that culture. And there was the usual talk of sacrifice and "doing your job" with no apparant moral quandries about the nature of the job.
I try as hard as I can not to judge but I just can't avoid the conclusion that anyone who enlists is complicit, in whatever small way, with the policies they are enforcing. Maybe their choice is so small as to be unrealistic: an offer, however false, of a way out of a life of uneducated poverty may be too good to resist, so in that sense enlistees may be victims, or their complicity may be unwitting.
But my attitude gets reinforced by the clear support demonstrated by the families. Maybe the psychological barriers are just too big for mere humans. It's hard to be apart from one's loved ones, especially where mortal threat is involved. Perhaps I expect too much to hope that the troops and families will question the policies. Clearly, military families are more deferential to authority than civilians, and to question policy is in a sense insubordination, questioning your ultimate "superior officer."
More to the point, no one wants to believe their "job" is useless or wrong. If one questions policy, it leads to the inevitable conclusion that their very real pain and loneliness are all in vain. And that's a lot to ask.
Politics
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