Philadelphia Weekly

One of many images at lastdaysofpolaroid.com

Have you ever seen a bumper sticker that reads "fuck the troops?" Ever? Have you ever heard anyone say anything even vaguely rude about the troops? Or seen a poster that says: " While supporting the troops as a generality and in principle, I reserve the right to mildly dislike one or more of the troops should I meet them and find them to be disagreeable or otherwise unpleasant, or should they engage in atrocities, torture or other criminal acts that I judge to fall short of the standards required of the service people of a democracy in wartime"?

No, me neither. Which suggests that compulsory troop hugging is the biggest and nastiest example of freedom-of-choice negating political correctness in modern American. (As I've written elsewhere, if you think political correctness is liberal or left wing, try driving around with "fuck the troops" or "God damn the U.S.A." scrawled on your rear bumper).

Which is why I was greatly amused by this T-shirt--manufactured by the transgressive nogoodniks at T-Shirt Hell --reading: "Support our Troops--except Ron, that guy's a dick. (I know Ron, by the way. He is indeed a dick--and should therefore under no circumstances be supported.)

This brings to mind a drunken conversation I recently had with a young liberal woman who was appalled by my suggestion that one shouldn't necessarily support absolutely all the troops all the time under all circumstances.

This conversation largely involved me asking increasingly rhetorical questions, and her repeatedly stating what a lovely person her Vietnam vet dad is, despite his being a Republican.

Does she support all the troops?Yes--because of the sacrifices they make.

Does that include the troops who fight American troops? No.

Well what about the troops who rape, assault and sexually harrass female troops ? What about the hundreds of thousands of troops who helped make America a laughing stock by voting for Bush in the last election? Despite overwhelming evidence that he flat-out lied about the reasons for going to war? What if you knew a troop personally--let's call him Ken--and he was a dick. Would you support him? And how much of a dick would he have to be before you stopped supporting him?

Would you have supported the troops in the war against Vietnam? What about the troops who carried out the My Lai massacre and other war crimes and atrocities too numerous and hideous to mention? And would you have supported those troops as vociferously as you supported the tens of thousands of U.S, troops who mutinied and refused to fight ?

Would you have supported the troops at Custer's last stand? What about those American colonists who fought for the British?

If you lived in the empire in Star Wars, would you support the Imperial Stormtroopers? Or just some of the Imperial Stormtroopers--the nice ones?  After all it wasn't the average Stormtrooper who started the war. And besides, most Stormtroopers just joined to get help with their college fees, or to get citizenship. And just think of the sacrifices they make while preserving our freedom against the return of Jedite feudalism. Freedom isn't free, you know.

In short, how wrong would a war have to be before you stopped supporting the troops? And if "my country right or wrong " isn't the dumbest phrase ever uttered by a human being, can you--in the light of the Nuremburg trials--point me in the direction of anything demonstrably dumber? 

Of course that's an entirely academic questions. Apart from a few crazies banished to the outer limits of the internet ("fuck the troops" gets 15,100 Google hits compared to 1,650,000 for "support the troops" and 3,740,000 for "support our troops"), there is nobody in American who dares say dick about the troops. Except to say that we love them and respect them and support them with every last cubic inch of our achey-breaky all-American hearts.

The truth is the U.S.A--more than any other modern democracy--fetishizes its armed forces to an alarming and dangerous degree. The reason is obvious. It's because of the myth that troops returning from Vietnam were spit on and called "baby killers" by hordes of Marxist/feminist/liberal/Democrat hippies. And that's why we lost the absolutely vital and necessary war against Vietnam and why America is now communist. No, wait ...

>It's all utter crap, of course. As last year's awesome documentary Sir, No Sirshowed, it was the U.S. troops themselves who stopped the war against Vietnam, by refusing to fight it. Not some mythical mob of civilian leftist hippies.

And as for the spitting? That never happened either, says Jerry Lembck in his book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. It's an urban myth. Part of imperial America's desperate need to blame its greatest defeat on subversives and traitors. Rather than its own military incompetence and imperial overreach--and the fact that the war was just plain wrong.

We've been here before. After Germany's defeat in World War One the myth grew that the army hadn't been defeated; instead it had been stabbed in the back by liberals, Jews, communists and democrats. One of the most abiding aspects of this revisionist myth--repeated over and over again until it all but achieved the status of fact--was that veterans returning from the front were spat on by communist women.

The reality was that Germany lost WW I for the same reasons the U.S. lost in Vietnam--a combination of enemy action and mutinies and rebellions among its own troops

Now I'm not comparing pre-Hitler Germany to modern-day America. That would be silly. And I think the word "fascist" is massively overused in modern political discourse (if you label everything you don't like "fascist", it kinda leaves you groping for words when the actual fascists roll around.)