Because You Never Asked

(11/04)

     This essay is a reaction to a piece recently presented on National Public Radio. My patience with Public Broadcasting was already on the brink of exhaustion when the story in question pushed it into the abyss of informational sources not worth taking seriously. This is a particularly stinging blow for an American truth seeker, because Public Broadcasting might have been the last mainstream media source where some facsimile of reality was still available. Obviously, the pressures of raising money, with its ever-growing dependence on large corporate donors, has now coerced Public Broadcasting's message within the narrow bounds set forth by the global practitioners.

     The piece in question could only be deemed a quintessential cliché. We were taken to 3 rural towns --- a place in Maryland whose name never stuck; another town called Covington, La.; and Laramie, Wyo., a place less anonymous but surely a similar hotbed of stunted, provincial intellect. In each case, a young soldier had recently died in Iraq and we were made privy to the comments of his family and townsfolk. What followed was a flood tide of icky goo as they remembered the fallen hero as a wonderful this, or a friendly that, as a good son or magnetic blah, blah, as a gentle yak, yak, a loveable badda boom, always ready with a joke or a good natured yadda, yadda, as a star pitcher and a tear here and there, with droves of flowers and prayers and scholarships in his name and . get the picture? You've seen this one? A hundred times.

     The piece ran for about 15 minutes. Conspicuously absent was any angst with regard to the war's necessity or validity. The deaths of these young soldiers were accepted in the same way one would accept a drop in temperature on a north wind. The last segment --- the one from Laramie --- set off my I can't stand it anymore alarm, leading to a brusque shutting off of the radio and the eventual appearance of this essay. It seems that the mother of the dead soldier had received a letter or E-mail where he said, " . mother, you can't imagine how bad it is to live under a dictator. We have to defend our freedom .", and other such pearls of teenage wisdom. Could Goebbels do it any better?

     I don't doubt that the people used in this story were genuine and sincere. An effective propaganda source does not have to artificially concoct a theatrical version of the message they want to create. But they can selectively decide what to highlight and sell. They are always giving us the actress in the light she looks the best in. We will never see her as she gets out of bed in the morning, with her rancid breath, disheveled hair and pale, blemished skin. This latest Bush Oil War is trying to convince us that Elizabeth Taylor is still sexy and the whole studio is working overtime to do it. The question is: how gullible are the viewers?

     This writer does not work for the studio. That means he can write the following letter of condolence to the mother of that dead soldier in Laramie, Wyo.:

Dear Dead Soldier's Mother,

     I heard your interview on National Public Radio pertaining to your son's death and found it so disturbing that I could not help but write this letter as a meager way to purge my anger. I realize it will probably not be what you want to hear, but I send it off anyway with the remote hope that it might awaken some dormant seed of intellectual capability that surely lurks deeply buried in the physiology of your being. Unfortunately, it is infinitely more probable it will arouse your fears and anger, two human traits that have been far more cultivated by the people responsible for your son's death. With this in mind, and before going one word further, please accept --- in spite of how you might feel about me after reading this letter --- my most heartfelt sympathy for the death of your son. One of the most basic instincts of life is to procreate and a parent having to bury a child can only be recognized as one of the truest sorrows a human being can experience. I hope you can remember the genuine grief I feel for you as you continue reading this letter.

     And now comes the hard part. Your son, Mrs. Dead Soldier's Mother, died in vain. In spite of what he may have thought, he did not die fighting for my freedom, your freedom, or anyone else's freedom. He was not defending our country, or spreading democracy, or ridding a foreign land of a cruel dictator, and to say he was "liberating" the Iraqi people is a disgusting joke beyond the realm of any decency. He was nothing more than a pawn used in a dirty imperial game meant to secure a natural resource coveted by those responsible for his death. If your habitual sources of information have not expressed it to you in such a way, it is because they are co-conspirators in the usurpation and death of your son.

     A traditional factor leading to the grief you are suffering is an insufficient intellectual base with which to defend yourself from such usurpation. Please don't misunderstand me. By emphasizing such intellectual weakness, I don't mean to suggest that you or your son are/were stupid. Although human beings might have differing interests and talents, we are all born, with rare exceptions, with similar reasoning capacities, with similar capabilities to think, deduce, and process the data our life experience comes in contact with. What differs greatly amongst us is this life experience and where it leads us. For millions of people, this life experience could be dubbed as "data deficient", because their information sources, as well as their ability and/or zeal in pursuing useful data, are limited. Much of this has to do with that whole tangled web of sociological muck we refer to as "social class", a quagmire definitely not appropriate for this letter and surely beyond the scope your own life experience has offered you. With this in mind, let me put it to you like this:

     It is my guess, Mrs. Dead Soldier's Mother, that you are not an affluent person. You may not be desperately poor --- though it is quite probable that many of the men in Iraq seeing true combat come from such deprived environments --- but I'd sooner think to go snow skiing in the Amazon before I'd think you are affluent. You know why? Because affluent people are not getting killed in Iraq. Affluent people are sitting home thanking your dead son for his great sacrifice while watching football games rife with patriotic symbols and rhetoric. That includes your President, whom, in your data starved confusion, I'm reasonably certain you voted for. If you are offended or upset with this paragraph, I suggest the following course of action:

     Turn off the TV --- the "reality shows", the soap operas, the gossip mongering, brain killing talk shows and such --- and go do some research into the military careers of the President and his most trusted advisors . the one's who sent your son off to his death. Go ahead, it won't take long because almost all of them have no military records. That's right, Mrs. Dead Soldier's Mother, virtually none of them have ever faced one hostile bullet in their whole lives. And guess what? They are all very affluent. You know what I'd be willing to bet? I'd bet that none of their sons are fighting in Iraq either.

     But this is not a rant about rich and poor, or what the Republicans would call "class warfare". If some people have swimming pools twice the size of most peoples' apartments, I can live with that. If you really want that swimming pool, there are enough avenues open in our society to procure it. But when people are asked to go off and die in defense of that swimming pool there can be no divisions of labor. Everyone --- poor, rich, and in between --- must assume equal parts in this burden. If dying is not shared communally by the whole nation, then no war can ever be considered a just war.

     I know it will hurt you, Mrs. Dead Soldier's Mother, when I say that your son and almost all the soldiers he fought with were not motivated by patriotic fervor or love of country. Most of them, like your son, were just a bunch of teenagers fresh out of high school, looking for something to do with their lives. The military offered them some security in a difficult world: a place to live, some food to eat, some money to spend, a chance to get out of the stultifying reality of their meager world experience, and the recruiter surely made it sound pretty good. Heck, a lot of them probably even thought that a dose of war could be a great adventure. They'd seen all the films by Mel Gibson, and Schwarzenneger, and Bruce Willis and all the rest, and they thought, "hey, I'd like a piece of that". Did you ever stop to think that not one of these Hollywood heroes --- not one, Mrs. Dead Soldier's Mother --- has ever come near a real bullet aimed at them? That's right, not even John Wayne. They are a lot like Bush-Cheney and all their cronies in that respect . and to top it all off, they get paid millions of dollars to fake it, while your son got paid peanuts to really die.

     Oh yes, the truth must eventually be told and if this letter can have an impact on you and the others like you, Mrs. Dead Soldier's Mother, then your son's death will not have been in vain.

     There is one positive thing I can say about your son and it gives me great pleasure in saying it to you: your son was not a coward. This is a wonderful testimony in today's America because our nation, taken as a whole, has become a very cowardly nation. We are taking the immense wealth of our country --- a wealth we can be proud of --- and squandering it on obscene military expenditures that are sucking the life out of an ever-weakening social contract needed to better serve its people and the world. And what do we do with these billions of dollars in military power, an investment that is almost more than the rest of the world combined? We attack little third world countries in pursuit of our imperial global economy needs. That's right, Mrs. Dead Soldier's Mother, it's not freedom or democracy, it's a killing spree meant to maintain and perpetrate their diarrhea of fat ass consumption, and millions and millions of Americans sit back and applaud these efforts because they have your son out there dying for them.

     Don't you think they're a bunch of cowards, Mrs. Dead Soldier's Mother?

     OK, enough. I'm sorry if I've upset you, but I suppose there's a slim chance these thoughts are opening your mind to the supreme crime you and your son have been the victim of . but I doubt it. It's more likely that you hate me by now and are greatly offended by this letter. If such is the case, I ask you to consider this: my grief for your son's death is infinitely more genuine than the cowards running our government who sent him out to die. This is no form letter from your draft-dodging President. I took a lot of time to write it.

Sincerely,

Post Consumer Man