Robert Kaplan: Modern Heroes
The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Robert Kaplan this morning entitled “Modern Heroes” that attempts to repair the disconnect between the American public and the US’ volunteer military;
The cult of victimhood in American history first flourished in the aftermath of the 1960s youth rebellion, in which, as University of Chicago Prof. Peter Novick writes, women, blacks, Jews, Native Americans and others fortified their identities with public references to past oppressions. The process was tied to Vietnam, a war in which the photographs of civilian victims “displaced traditional images of heroism.” It appears that our troops have been made into the latest victims.
Oh, I agree – Michael Moore used them in his so-called documentaries, every night on the news is a clip of a legless or armless veteran trying to learn how to walk or eat again. I’ve met these “victims” still dirty from their encounters with the enemy and they’re ready and willing to return to their units – they don’t want to be pitied, they just want to do their jobs.
Kaplan continues;
The first Medal of Honor in the global war on terror was awarded posthumously to Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith of Tampa, Fla., who was killed under withering gunfire protecting his wounded comrades outside Baghdad airport in April 2003.
According to LexisNexis, by June 2005, two months after his posthumous award, his stirring story had drawn only 90 media mentions, compared to 4,677 for the supposed Quran abuse at Guantanamo Bay, and 5,159 for the court-martialed Abu Ghraib guard Lynndie England. While the exposure of wrongdoing by American troops is of the highest importance, it can become a tyranny of its own when taken to an extreme.
Although Kaplan gives the media a pass in the first few paragraphs, I don’t. The aging editors decide that the American public needs to only see the ugly side of war and not the side that rescues children from death and injury, the side that valiantly crashes through a door, not knowing what’s on the other side and drags wounded comrades out of the line of fire.
In particular, there is Fox News’s occasional series on war heroes, whose apparent strangeness is a manifestation of the distance the media has traveled away from the nation-state in the intervening decades. Fox’s war coverage is less right-wing than it is simply old-fashioned, antediluvian almost. Fox’s commercial success may be less a factor of its ideological base than of something more primal: a yearning among a large segment of the public for a real national media once again — as opposed to an international one. Nationalism means patriotism, and patriotism requires heroes, not victims.
But, see, recognizing that there are heroes means recognizing that there is something greater than Man worth fighting and dieing – something beyond this existence here on this planet. Recognizing heroes means you have to admit that there are better people than yourself – that we’re not really all equal in all things, and there’s no government program that can level that particular playing field.
That’s why the Left raises up it’s own heroes like Cindy Sheehan and Ramsey Clarke – two people when combined couldn’t make a pimple on the lowliest recruit’s ass. What the Left does isn’t at all heroic – the worst thing that could happen to them for the choices they make is a couple of hours in a sanitary holding cell waiting for arraignment in a society that forbids that anyone in authority even raise their voices at them. That’s not heroism – it’s gradeschool playground rules for the weak of spirit.
Kaplan warns;
The media is but one example of the slow crumbling of the nation-state at the upper layers of the social crust — a process that because it is so gradual, is also deniable by those in the midst of it. It will take another event on the order of 9/11 or greater to change the direction we are headed. Contrary to popular belief, the events of 9/11 — which are perceived as an isolated incident — did not fundamentally change our nation. They merely interrupted an ongoing trend toward the decay of nationalism and the devaluation of heroism.
When that second event happens, there’d better not be leftists at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Category: Politics, Society, Support the troops
