In response to the dorkiest question in his "100 days" press conference:
During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office? Enchanted you the most from serving in this office? Humbled you the most? And troubled you the most?
Obama went out of his way to say:
Enchanted? Enchanted. I will tell you that when I -- when I meet our servicemen and -women, enchanted is probably not the word I would use. (LAUGHTER) But I am so profoundly impressed and grateful to them for what they do. They're really good at their job. They are willing to make extraordinary sacrifices on our behalf. They do so without complaint. They are fiercely loyal to this country.
And, you know, the more I interact with our servicemen and women, from the top brass down to the lowliest private, I'm just -- I'm grateful to them.
This sort of cringe-inducing pandering (see, we Democrats don't hate the troops! Honest!) not only lets the Republicans off the hook for decades of slandering Democrats' patriotism, and tacitly endorses the jingoistic hegemonic discourse they've employed to radically subvert the very essence of our national identity as a republic, it also actively participates in the brainwashing on which the exploitation of young recruits depends. In striking contrast to Obama's blithe platitudes, author Susan Galleymore talks about the reality, and her recently-released book, Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak about War and Terror:
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She just did a brief interview at the end of Friday's Democracy Now:
AMY GOODMAN: My final guest is Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak Out About War and Terror author Susan Galleymore, who went to visit her son in Iraq. On this day leading up to Mother's Day, your comments?
SUSAN GALLEYMORE: Well, I want to just reiterate everything that David Barstow just said, because I feel like we, the people, don't understand what's going on in these wars. We don't understand who the people are that we are fighting. We don't understand who the Iraqis are. We don't understand who the Afghan people are.
And we, the mothers of this country, need to learn. So, what I would like to say to mothers this Mother's Day is, instead of going out for brunch, say to your family, "Let's stay home and learn who these people are. Let's learn what these wars are about. Let's learn why, for example, someone like Anwar Jawad would have her whole family slaughtered on the streets by people, our troops, our troops. So let's learn. Let's learn who the Afghan people are."
Why did we just have 150 civilians killed in Afghanistan? They called it a random shooting incident in Baghdad when people are killed in the street. What do they call it when we bomb people in Afghanistan, civilians, women and children? We need to understand this. And I want the mothers of the United States to understand that we can stay home, instead of go out for brunch, and learn about this. And we can learn why our children in the military want to get out of there so desperately.
AMY GOODMAN: You visited your son in Iraq.
SUSAN GALLEYMORE: I did.
AMY GOODMAN: Did he know you were coming?
SUSAN GALLEYMORE: He did. He wasn't very pleased about it. But I wanted to say to my kid, "Don't do anything in this country that you will be ashamed of, because it will haunt you for the rest of your life." And we see that now with the young people coming home killing themselves, you know, traumatized. We need to understand why that is happening.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much, Susan Galleymore, for joining us. Her book is called Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak About War and Terror, in this lead-up to Mother's Day.
Our military has horribly misused and abused by the Bush Administration. Not only was the invasion and occupation of Iraq totally unrelated to 9/11, but even the invasion of Afghanistan was so ill-advised and badly conceived that it bungled what could have been the relatively easy capture and trial of bin Laden and the rest of al Qaeda's top leadership.
Yet, rather than question any of this, Obama instead indulges in mindless soft-core jingoist blather to "prove" that he's not a commie pinko Kenyan Islamic terrorist. He acquiesces in the hegemonic discourse, rather than challenging it.
A key component of this hegemonic discourse is the lie that the Vietnam anti-war movement was also anti-troop, when the reality was exactly the opposite: there was a anti-war movement within the military, and anti-war veterans routinely lead anti-war marches in the US.
This week marked the 39th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, where four anti-war protesters at Kent State were murdered by the Ohio National Guard. An interview with one of those who had been wounded, Alan Canfora, was played on Democracy Now! this week. While it had long been a matter of dispute whether orders had been given or not, that is no longer in dispute, as Amy Goodman explained:
AMY GOODMAN: Two years ago, one of the survivors of the massacre, Alan Canfora, released enhanced audio recordings from the day of the shootings. By listening closely, a voice in the background can be heard yelling, "Right here! Get set! Point! Fire!" Following the command, the sounds of shots being fired can be heard. The National Guard fired sixty-seven shots in thirteen seconds. The FBI has never determined whether an order to shoot was given.
However, the reason I bring this interview up in this context is something that Canfora said, just in the course of telling his story, about how the death of a friend, who had been fighting in Vietnam, fueled his anti-war activism:
ALAN CANFORA: My name is Alan Canfora. I was a member of the Kent State Students for a Democratic Society in 1968, '69. Forty years ago, we raised hell on this campus. We planted the seeds of revolt, which blossomed a year later, when four days of protests culminated with the shootings by the National Guard. Only bullets could silence our voices here at Kent State in 1970....
AMY GOODMAN: And were you shot first?
ALAN CANFORA: I think I was. I think was the first student shot. I was waving a black flag of protest that day. I carried that black flag as a symbol of my despair and my anger, because only ten days earlier I attended my friend's funeral. He was killed in Vietnam at age nineteen. So that was very fresh in my memory, and that's why I joined the protests and I helped lead the protests May 1st through 4th in 1970. And that's what led to me being shot.
This is painful, terrible, complex truth that's repressed and denied by the conservative demonizers of the anti-war movement, and by his refusal to challenge the edifice of lies they've constructed over the years, and his willingness to join in their mindless blather, rather than ask the sort of hard questions that being a citizen of a democracy requires, President Obama joins in the project of conservative hegemony, to bury the truth, rather than learn from it, and thus to ensure that thousands more shall also die needlessly, wearing the uniform he praises, and many, many times more than that shall die by our bloody hands.
A longer interview with Susan Galleymore on KPFK's morning show can be heard here. I highly recommend it. |
