I still remember news reports from the Iran/Iraq war from the 80s (the accounts were probably in the Los Angeles Times, which was mostly what I read back then). The reports would look at the parents of families who had lost sons in the war, sometimes shocking numbers of them (my memory is that one mother had lost eight sons). They were proud of the sacrifice their boys had made for Saddam or Khomeini, and saw themselves and their whole family as gaining a kind of merit for the sacrifice of their children. They were patriots, they were true Muslims, and they were all good boys. The parents got a lot of prestige in the community. At the time, while not quite making fun of the suffering of foreigners like the media now tends to do, the U.S. journalists found it incomprehensible.
One of the many painful things about remembering the past is coming to realize that you are reliving it., For what those Iraqi and Iranian mothers and fathers should have taught me is that people always have the capacity to appropriate the sacrifice of others--it makes people feel good about themselves and gives them a sense of faux heroism. What the Bushcon administration has done so brilliantly, of course, is that now you can be patriotic by buying a TV made in China at Wal-Mart (courtesy of Sam and Rupert), and it is patriotic in a perverse way because they are the nation's largest employer, even though most of those workers are only making minimum wage and are forbidden to unionize. While I wasn't born into a military family, I find myself wondering having a son or daughter join up isn't like having a son or a daughter becoming a priest or a nun in a Catholic family. These deeply spiritual people (and many of them are) are willing to sacrifice their genetic continuity, their physical immortality, for a spiritual cause, but it is important to note that the rest of the family also gets something of the merit of their sacrifice. This isn't to trivialize it, and certainly not all Catholic or military families force their children into a pre-chosen profession, but I think there may be a certain temptation to sacrifice your own son or daughter so you can get right with God.
As the elections or even casual channel surfing will show you, many people don't want to know the facts, because then they have to either forget them or expend a lot of effort twisting them into something that agrees with their world view. They appropriate the sacrifice of other people as evidence of their own righteousness (gee, those people died for me, therefore I deserve to pay less in taxes). Basically, "conservatives" get other people to pay for their greed and self interest, and in their view the blood of soldiers and innocent civilians both sanctify and ensure their safety and their profits, which help the GNP and are therefore at least as patriotic as any dead soldier, and certainly a lot more so than any man woman or child killed or maimed by a cluster bomb (the whole war seems to be based on the premise that if we kill enough innocent people, we are bound to get some guilty ones too). The sacrifice of others substitutes for their own, while they can fight the good fight by paying fewer taxes, buying cheaper products, or--if they are in a position of power--union busting, downsizing, or finding cheaper labor. Profits are just God's way of showering his grace on the deserving.
In this neocongelical world view, the honored dead are truly Christ-like, not only in their willingness to lay down their lives, but because they redeem and justify all you and all the profits you make. There's a truly disturbing moment in Weapons of Mass Deception (an excellent film that I doubt will get seen by many, but I recommend it to all Kossacks), in which Tom Brokaw remembers NBC journalist David Bloom, killed in Iraq. He does this in the context of a massive party thrown by NBC in the General Electric Building (one of the many owned by the company that received 600 billion in war and "reconstruction" contracts. Brokaw sounds sincere and he no doubt is, but I can't help but wonder if the champagne flute he sips from has a bit of the metallic taste of blood as he steals the glory of the dead even as he says he honors them?
Many people say "it's us or them" by which they seem to think they mean, it's either the US people or the terrorists. What they really mean, I think, is it's either them or anyone else, and they are always glad others will spill blood--whether innocent or not--so that they can live and prosper. Those that live on are elect(ed). They are always justified, and they feel that the public record should reflect that even if it bears little relation to what actually happened. The dead, whether innocent or not, have no voice; they will always be misrepresented, although sometimes with the best intentions. At most, they will remain ghosts, staring out of old photographs, accusing those who will not see or hear what we've done to them, what we've stolen from them.