Republican Class Warfare
by tristero
For too many years now, I have been diligently reading the modest amount of biographical information you publish about American service members killed in action in your listings under the headline “Names of the Dead.”
In addition to the heartbreaking youth of most of the dead soldiers, I am struck by the fact that half the time I have never even heard of the small towns they come from — and I am someone who loves geography, studies maps for pleasure and has driven across the country a dozen times.
Many of the soldiers dying in our current wars come from tiny rural towns and from very limited economic circumstances. I would guess that military deployment is the first time many of them have been out of the country.
I’ll go further than Mr. Hayden. I’ve been to some of these small towns in Wisconsin and Missouri and spoken to military-age kids, including some who served. In far too many cases, it’s likely their deployment is the first time they’ve left their state.
There’s a name for this: class warfare. Bush -exploiting the surge of patriotism after 9/11 – deliberately targeted the recruitment of those young Americans who were the least experienced and informed to fight his insane wars. And oh! the cunning of it! Of course, the children of the elite weren’t recruited, minimizing those ever-so-embarrassing moments when some celebrity’s child gets his head blown off. But Bush went further: since most of us don’t live in these tiny little hamlets, those of us who aren’t in the military are very unlikely to encounter anyone who lost a child to Bush’s madness. The wars were, and are, essentially painless to the vast majority of Americans.
Unless, of course, you have an active imagination and read about the casualties.
Needless to say, those small, obscure towns are the very same ones the repellent extremist Sarah Palin characterized as the “real America.” The enormous cynicism of modern Republicans still has the power to shock me, no matter how inured I think I am to it: real people, decent people – Americans, Iraqis, Afghanis, and others – have been callously slaughtered because of them.
Note: The letter concludes with a call for what seems to be a draft. For a variety of reasons, I don’t support a draft. However, there’s a general principle that I think we can all agree on: the elite scum that indiscriminately advocate American aggression should be compelled, daily, to face the consequences of their decisions. We could start on that by bringing the Bush-era war criminals – and Bush himself, of course – to justice. Occasionally, I waver and think, forget punishment, we just need a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Then I”m reminded, as I was by this letter, of the malicious, sadistic, remorseless murderous intent of these thugs and I know they must, somehow, be brought to account.