{"id":752,"date":"2005-02-08T12:33:49","date_gmt":"2005-02-08T19:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=752"},"modified":"2005-02-08T12:33:49","modified_gmt":"2005-02-08T19:33:49","slug":"support-the-troops-or-dont-it-doesnt-really-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2005\/02\/08\/support-the-troops-or-dont-it-doesnt-really-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Support the Troops — Or Don’t… it doesn’t really matter."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Provocative, I have to say. I had heard this line of thought before. It’s a caller to Clyde Lewis’s show, and it goes like this:<\/p>\n

“I DO NOT Support the Troops. Screw the Troops! It’s an all volunteer military, and they knew what they were doing when they signed the contract. Money for college? It’d be better if they danced on a pole or sold pot!”<\/p>\n

Two more callers called in, with some form of agreement. “I was talking with this woman, who said ‘I Have a son who joined the National Guard and has been sent to Iraq.’ I say, ‘I’m sorry.’ She said, ‘No… no… He’s defending our freedom!’ At that point…”<\/p>\n

Shades of the (seemingly) oversold stories of Vietnam War soldiers returning and being spit upon. Shades of “Hanoi Jane Fonda”. (IE “Heck, in a weird way, I support the troops in Iraq more than us — IT’S Their Country they’re defending! We have no right to be there.”)<\/p>\n

The phrase “Support the Troops” is an emotional hostage act. Half the time a media figure uses the line “no matter how you feel about this war”, it is almost instantaneously undercut with “because they are defending your freedom.” The “anti-warriors” who do gravitate toward the line “Support the Troops” is a sort of kicking away of free will by sort of infantilizing the troops — they’re… young<\/i>, scratch free will away from them because of their early adulthood. Whether that is any more or less honest than a sort of obscene “hero worship” the “warriors” who gravitate toward the line “Support the Troops”, I do not know.<\/p>\n

A game of semantics which is best left to boot away, and leave the lines of Logical Vigour for a different topic altogether. Consider it an experiment in holding multiple contridictory competing thoughts in your mind at one time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Provocative, I have to say. I had heard this line of thought before. It’s a caller to Clyde Lewis’s show, and it goes like this: “I DO NOT Support the Troops. Screw the Troops! It’s an all volunteer military, and they knew what they were doing when they signed the contract. Money for college? It’d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}