After Pat's birthday

A brother remembers.

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Read, yes, the whole thing. The day after Pat Tillman's birthday we can begin to take back our country, our values as a nation.

Or not. In which case we will have shown ourselves to be a generation of cowardly, narcissistic castratos, without the curiosity to look behind our "Support the troops" slogans to see how those troops are dying. And why. An age when the incompetence of our national leadership has less impact on the casting of votes than the spector of gay marriage. When Republicans are rewarded handsomely for their cynical use of war, of torture, of lies, of racism, of bribery, of sexual hypocracy. Of the Constitution.

I hope that's not the case, though the dark thoughts have been getting darker as we approach another hopeful election night. Because as The Poorman writes, "Behind the national and global tragedy, there is sickness."

Now, the Left did not in fact cause 9/11 (although I’ve still got my eye on The Left), so one could legitimately question the wisdom of having such a public discussion at that particularly touchy point in time. On the other hand, the Right most assuredly did cause the Iraq War, as well as the many other problems which this country has brought upon itself over the last six years of Republican rule and right wing political media dominance, and these problems may prove to be the Right’s political undoing. We’ll see after Pat Tillman’s birthday. But despite this active national crisis and a looming political disaster, the nearest thing to self-reflection I have seen from the Right as a whole is some pondering about whether Bush is a liberal; concerns that Bush is not ideologically rigid and bloody-minded enough; and the usual up-is-downism, wherein we discover that, in NewsSpeak, “policy” is a synonym for “slogan”. (Fittingly, this leads us to Jonah Goldberg, pom-poms in hand, warning people not to question his playcalling.) A few brave souls have gone further, but it is my impression that they have been ostracized rather than engaged. This is my personal observation - I don’t have perfect knowledge of everything the Right does, and I will admit that I am not a fully dispassionate observer, and I would welcome correction. But it seems that, in a moment of actual, as opposed to philosophical, crisis, a crisis entirely of their own making, the Right is mostly concerned with shutting out any uncomfortable questions, like those raised by Kevin Tillman, and by millions of Americans just like him. This is the opposite of confidence and health - this is a sign of sickness, and fear, and weakness. And I see little reason to believe that this will improve.

Feeling better? Aren't you glad you stopped by?