Reading through
starkravinglunaticradical's visceral response to Cindy Sheehan and the thoughtful approaches by
bulldog manifesto and especially
shanikka to the whole controversy, I wonder if there might be another way to look at this. I understand stark took offense at Cindy's blithe reference to the Trail of Tears, and it does seem as if Cindy never quite got the nature of the offense.
On the other hand, the Trail of Tears might actually be a useful way to look at Iraq. Now, I'm not talking about the death of Casey Sheehan and Cindy's personal grief, but about the war itself and how it fits into America's image of itself and our treatment of people we consider less than civilized.
More on the other side...
What I'm suggesting is that we fit the Iraq War into the model developed by Richard Drinnon in his
Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building.
Drinnon's book actually starts with the first Thanksgiving, which he contrasts sharply with the Pequot War. The former, he tells us, is the image we like to have of White-Indian relations; the latter, however, is the way whites actually treated Indians -- as savages whose bodies we could kill and rape, and whose lands we could steal at will.
He identifies a pattern of behavior throughout westward expansion that traces back quite nicely to the Pequot War, a pattern in which whites provoke war against Indians, and then brutally prosecute that war leaving the Indians dead or marginalized and their lands in white hands.
There's nothing in that book that an Indian activist, as stark appears to be, would object to. In fact, it's a solid piece of history documenting how genocidal treatment of the other lies right at the center of American national identity.
Where the book gets interesting however, and what makes it relevant to Cindy and Casey Sheehan, is when Drinnon takes the story first to the Philippines and then to Vietnam. What at first appear to be random acts of brutality perpetrated by American soldiers on Filipino and Vietnamese civilians turn out to be the continuation of patterned behavior going back all the way to the Pequot War.
Obviously, it's only a short step from Vietnam ("gook") to Iraq ("haji").
Now, it's been more than twenty years since I've actually held a copy of Facing West in my hands. Still, there's no doubt in my mind that Drinnon's analysis would not only hold for Iraq, and also provide the bridge over which Cindy and stark could meet in peace and comradeship.