God How I Hate Them All

War protesters -- by which is meant protesteurs of the military -- have taken to picketing outside of high schools, carrying signs and handing out postcards to students, which if signed and mailed would remove the teens from lists provided to recruiters. Well? Teens are notorious for making bad decisions. They must be protected. That's why the drinking age is 21. We'll just ignore the fact that the voting age is 18. Odd, how personal decisions are regulated, but matters affecting public policy are not -- drinking, personal, restricted; voting, public, not restricted. We shall not be dismayed by such inconsistencies. Inconsistencies. Hm. I expect that the peaceniks who so stridently oppose the military imagine that their aggression is the good kind.

Well, it seems to be their right, to protest. Just as it is the duty of the military not to protest, but protect. Rights, duties -- who can keep these things straight? It's so confusing. Can't we just pick and choose? And we're dealing in broad generalities of course. Not all peaceniks are reprehensible disloyal hypocritical brain-dead cowards. Some have pure motives, not at all the outworking of a neurotic antipathy to their fathers and a sick attachment to their mommies' apron strings. Not all soldiers are honorable. (It is necessary to spell out these tiresome clarifications -- there are so many people who stumble after the obvious.) Not all priests, nor civil rights lawyers, nor community activists are, uh, bad? good? -- I'm forgetting what our bias is.

The point is that someone's identification with a group or a philosophy is no guarantee of probity. So maybe the scummy betraying moronic cowards who attack the military by trying to poison the well of recruitment, uh, maybe they're, uh, not as, er, subject to disapprobation as portions of this and the preceding paragraph might suggest. Clear? But I'm probably wrong in this.

What is clear is that lefties speak with fork tongue. Behold: "Increasingly, the preferred view of our young people in uniform, at least among some strident war opponents, is less than noble. It often sees them as somehow damaged by their service. The flare-up over first-person reports from Iraq in the New Republic ... is a case in point. The reports (the veracity of which is seriously in question) characterize Americans in Iraq as unthinking, unfeeling savages who run over dogs for kicks." Hm. Seems as if We Support the Troops But Not the War is more a bumper sticker than a credo.

We make of our experiences what we will. To contrast young soldiers with college students seems like something that could prove anything. We do it to prove the truth of our preconceived ideas. So it won't be a surprise that I consider my own son, presently serving in Iraq, to be a man whom I would count it an honor just to know, let alone to be his father. To imagine him associating with the hedonistic reprobates, the drunken male sluts, the wastrels and whores of so many college campuses -- well, I just don't see it. To think of my strong courageous self-disciplined and focused boy, infantalized by the loathsome left -- well, I have the right to call my son a boy. He is my boy. But he is a better man than these epicene ciphers could ever dream of being -- not that they'd aspire to manhood.

Yes, it is invective. It is my right. I do not suppose that it's entirely, or at all, valid. When is invective entirely valid? How often is it utterly invalid? But it is not unfitting that actions which oppose our own morality should be met with some expression of emotion. We try to stay on point, and we try to keep our stereotypes reasonably innocuous. Soldiers are ignorant and brutal. Peaceniks are cowardly and effeminate. The reality is always more complex. But for all this complexity, and for all our over-simplifications, we must still strive to be accurate in matters of fact.

Thus, the latest New Republic attack on the military, depicting our soldiers as increasingly reckless and cruel -- it is contemptible, and manifestly implausible as Charles Krauthammer has demonstrated. A formerly anonymous private, aspiring to be a literatus, concocted several heinous events he claims to have witnessed and participated in -- the point being to demonstrate how dehumanizing the Iraq War is to US soldiers. None of his examples enjoy the benefit of actually being true. No one else recalls tormenting a severely disfigured woman in a mess hall. Which couldn't have happened in Iraq anyway -- now he claims it's Kuwait ... is there a dehumanizing war going on in Kuwait, that we haven't heard about?

Or how about US soldiers running down dogs for kicks? Far out, right? Problem is, drifting giant military vehicles to run down dogs is just a stupid accusation, and is easily shown to be an impossibility. Yet somehow the charge has been met with credulous affirmation by les protestataires gauches. Of course. Are they the same ones who doubt we landed on the moon? Or is that the Bible-thumping right-wingers. Same thing, really. Move far enough to one side and you end up on the other. Everything in phenomenology is circular.

What else are we to expect, though? Integrity is the presiding genius of hardly anyone. Most of us look for what will prop up our beliefs ... facts to support a belief, rather than belief following the discovery of facts. It's unavoidable. Everything in epistemology is theory.

So here's what I suggest for you, my callow young friend. Calm down. Your moral certitude doesn't make you right. The stridency of your self-expression is not compelling. The most prudent approach is to suppose that you are right without imagining the opposition is evil. Maybe they are, but invective, as you have seen in this foolish and poorly reasoned diatribe, is not convincing. It doesn't matter how much I hate them all. My case is not carried by the ingenuity of the names I call them. Learn, please learn from my bad and foolish example, that you need not follow down the grim and degrading path I have traveled for so long. It's too late for me. I'm ruined, and simply cannot change my ways. There is no hope nor forgiveness for me, nor redemption. But you are young. Flee while you may! Flee from my folly, and be saved!


J