As I said in my previous diary, I'm not one for accepting "They hate us because of our freedom" as an excuse for why the right-wing behaves the way it does. There has to be some underlying reason why they hate the troops so much. Is it guilt, or callousness, or even cowardice? I have some theories...
The core constituency of this new `troop hating' wing of the Republican Party comes from the Vietnam era right-wing chicken hawks. These are the people who in every way possible actively avoided service in Vietnam. College deferrals, butt cysts, making babies, whatever it took to avoid going `over there.' While they may have avoided the war, they hated the war protesters. They supported the broad concept of a `War on Communism.' They just weren't going to be the ones to fight it. Today these are the people who have a "Support Our Troops" magnet on the back of their Excursion, but they'll tell disabled vets to "get a job" when they ask for a couple bucks to get their meds. Or when the VA asks for more money they'll respond by saying they don't want to "throw money at the problem."
I've always been of the belief that those who actively avoided Vietnam are really no different than the protesters themselves. They certainly didn't think the Vietnam War was worth dying for. As Cheney so famously put it, they had "better things to do" during the war. Philosophically, the only difference between Dick Cheney and Ken Kesey is the level of mind-expanding drugs that one man took and the other didn't. Well...that and Dick Cheney's heart pumps, not blood like yours or mine, but a thick vomitous oil that oozes through his rotten veins and clots in his pea-sized brain; which becomes the cause of his Nazi-esque patterns of violent behavior.
But I digress. This history helps to create the very disconnect that the average war-dodging dittohead faces today. They support the war, but for one reason or another they just don't care about the people who actually fight it. I've thought of three possible motivations for their troop-hating behavior. It could be one or the other, or it could be any combination of all three.
- Regret - One potential motivating factor is that they feel they wasted an opportunity. Say what you will about the hippie culture, but it looked like a whole hell of a lot of fun. Many of these Republicans have only had sex with one person (their wife), never did drugs, and have all of the pressure of adulthood without having blown off any steam during their college years. We see this as resentment, but most of them know it's regret. The biggest dittohead in my life, my father, has admitted that he regrets having never tried marijuana in the 60s. I think many of them regret missing out on all the fun when the counter-culture became cool. So one possible motivation is that, somewhere in the cockles of their hearts, they wanted to be hippies.
- Guilt - Many Republicans no doubt feel some form of `survivor guilt' over having avoided Vietnam. In a perverse sort of way this guilt could manifest itself as a form of jealousy toward those who actually did serve in Vietnam. They just don't want to be reminded of the people who served in their place. I think there's a better explanation for this, though, that takes the guilt a step further...
- Absolution - Deep down the above-mentioned Republicans know that what they did during Vietnam was wrong. For every one of them who got a deferral, there's another guy who didn't. And whether that guy made it or not, his life was forever changed by the experience. So how can you deal with that feeling of responsibility? The knowledge that you may have ruined or even ended someone else's life?
It's very hard to balance modern-day jingoism with later-day cowardice. There's only one way I can think of--there needs to be a way for someone to have served their country in a cowardly fashion. It is vital for the dittohead mind to find those who served just as cowardly as those who avoided service, for only in that way will they find closure. That leads to the creation of totally nonsensical motivations for veterans, like service for the sake of resume padding.
This is what they did with Paul Hackett. In their minds, if they could impugn the motives for his service, then the service itself would become meaningless. But just in case, the right also tried to imply that Paul was just a "desk jockey" or a "paper pusher," and that he served in some cushy post while in Iraq. For the record, I'd like to know where any cushy posting would be in Iraq. I know this much--it sure as Hell isn't in Fallujah, which is where Paul served.
Then there's the Max Cleland approach. Max didn't have questionable motives. He was a decorated Vietnam veteran and a triple amputee. Wow...how do you get a guy like that? If you lived in a moral vacuum, maybe you could imply that his injuries were the result of a drunken prank, and that they occurred far from combat. Then you imply that he lied about how he got his injuries just to make political hay. Bingo! He's a liar and a coward, and therefore he doesn't have to be respected!
John Kerry, of course, got the double whammy. The right pulls out all the stops for Presidential elections. To disrespect Kerry, the dittohead mind first accepted as gospel the idea that he only enlisted because he knew he'd run for President some day. Then, once he was actually there, he shot himself repeatedly to get the 3 Purple Hearts he needed to get back home. The two Bronze Stars? Ah, all he did was run down an unarmed kid for the first one, and he made up an after-action report for the second. Don't question it! Everyone knows it! Even if every piece of evidence proves the opposite, and the only thing supporting the idea is the now different eyewitness accounts of people who disagree with him politically. Oh, and never mind that fact that some of these eyewitnesses profited from business relations with the current administration. Those facts are a buzz kill. We need to be able to believe the Kerry was just as much of a pussy as we were during Vietnam.
We often talk about how the right likes to create equivalencies between unlike political realities. Like Cheney lying about having never met Edwards, and Edwards saying we'd spent $200 billion in Iraq when in reality we'd only appropriated $200 billion. Clearly the only place where these two facts are equivalent is in the mind of the dittohead, and they do this all the time. "Harry Reid did the same thing as Tom DeLay!" "Fox News doesn't do anything any worse than the liberal mainstream media!" "Rush can lie about that because the left lies about it, too!" So well rehearsed is this practice of equivalencies that I believe that this distain for the troops represents a subconscious one. "I didn't serve, but the troops who do are no better than me!"
This goes beyond simple denial or cognitive dissonance. It's about getting the yellow monkey of cowardice off of their collective college deferred, butt pimpled, 4F backs.