At yesterday's Trumpish press conference Donald Trump spent 20 minutes allowing himself to be adored and lauded in public by members of the military. One of them (I'm not sure he was there yesterday, as I couldn't find a list) was a Medal of Honor winner.
Not everyone who goes into the military does so for patriotic or even benign reasons, although most do. Some do so because they truly want to serve their country. My son is one. Others do so because they see it as their best ticket to upward mobility. Colin Powell, who the Trumpkins would deride for the color of his skin, not to mention his ancestry, was another. Still others (including the son-in-law of one of my friends from work) signed up during the Great Recession because it was the only job they could get.
However some do so to prove they aren’t what they are: cowards. I think much of the antipathy against women and gays in the military comes from a profound fear of the cowards being found out.
Some do so because they like killing. Audie Murphy, Medal of Honor winner, is sometimes described as a homicidal maniac.
Some are bigots, looking for a place where their bigotry will somehow be acceptable. The Marine drill instructor who tortured a boot in a clothes drier singled him out for harassment because of his Muslim faith. This DI was the same bad actor who forcefully slapped Marine recruit Raheel Siddiqui moments before Siddiqui ran away and jumped to his death from a third story stairwell in his barracks. The Corps, to my profound sorrow (my son was a two-Iraq-tour combat infantryman) tried to call this a suicide, and left the DI in place, but the cover up seems not to be holding.
My husband, who is as pro-military, and formerly as pro-Republican as they came-- literally doesn't know what to make of this military adoration of the Donald, and when I point out that those who support him support all of his racism, nativism, antisemitism, homo-phobic bigotry, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism (I love the uneducated), xenophobia, savage racism (anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, clearly racist in the usually way Americans understand racism, as anti-Black)and call for Fascism (beat the hell out of him, hang her, take away her Secret Service protection and Second Amendment her, referring to Hillary Clinton) he becomes angry.
I think it’s because he’s afraid it will reflect badly on the military, as well it should.
All of it. My husband, as pro military a man as ever you'll want to meet, will not admit to this.
America has always had a certain percentage of moral defectives--those in the categories I mentioned above--who are mostly kept in check by the larger share of decent honorable citizens. They are allowed to say, and within reasonable limits, do whatever they hell they want, provided, and this is a huge caveat, provided they don't harm anyone else. Their freedom of expression ends about one inch before they slam into the face of someone who disagrees.
Trump has enabled, freed, and encouraged these morons to do whatever they want. The riverine flood of hatred he has loosed on America will take decades to clean up. It will result in the death of the GOP as we know it, which I think is a good thing.
When you accept that a certain percentage of all American citizens are what I would term bigoted moral defectives, and you consider they behave in the ways they do (love of bullying, backed up by guns, mostly because they're frightened cowards with no accomplishments and lesser balls) it should come as no surprise to find that they are over represented in the ranks of the two American institutions where this sort of behavior is welcomed and encouraged: the US military, and the police.
Once you understand that, all else becomes clear. This is not to say by any means that these drooling hateful cretins represent the majority, or even, I hope, a plurality of the membership in those two institutions, but they do represent a significant share of them, and it is ongoing folly bordering on lunacy to pretend it does not. These are the kinds of people who become war criminals, given the chance.
The continuing exposure of anti-Black police brutality, now available for easy viewing on YouTube, thank you Apple, isn't something new. What is new is that the rest of the "bands of brothers" are having a harder time covering it up.
It now comes out that the military is no different. People who scream "traitor" of those of us who point this out simply prove our point: these deplorables go into these professions because they know they can get away with it.
Or at least they could, until now. The whole police cover up mentality is now falling apart, and while it will take decades to root out all of the malefactors and clean up the mess, I have no doubt we will.
And now the military's complicity in the same damn thing is exposed. Those who are "rooting" for the Donald, cheering for his screams to bring Fascism into America, will shortly have cause to rue the day he, and they, ever were born.