Slogans I detest
For reasons that will occur to at least one regular, I just blogged one of the slogans I hate above all others: "Freedom is not free." I had the good fortune to find a current post by a kindred spirit.
I was daydreaming about hunting down the original authors of this piece of fatuity and either strangling them or smashing their two typing fingers, but this person outdid me and found a plausible author: Dean Rusk. Dean Rusk, a former staff officer who numbers amongst his credits the bright idea of dividing Korea along the 38th parallel.
Speaking--to be perfectly clear--as a veteran, I find there are three sorts of people who wander around muttering this sort of platitude. The most common these days are the lot who have never served one day of military service: often, they nurture a peculiar envy of those who did, even to the extent of manufacturing bogus military records. The ones who used to be the most common spent their wars in safe jobs, never exposed to hazard or injury of any kind. Both my father and one uncle, who had their fill of horrors, spoke with contempt of these people...the ones who led the Legion and the VFW. The ones like them who knew better stayed silent for many years...sometimes all their lives.
I'm the first to say my Navy day job was comparatively safe: it was the occasional diversions that provided the exposure.
The most pathetic of the platitude-addicted can't get over their service. Not because of PTSD: believe me, I know what that's about. They can't get over it because they have never, or think they have never, done anything as important in their lives as to go out and put on a uniform and, in a few cases, get shot at or otherwise endangered. Once, some of them were brilliant men--think Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Joshua L. Chamberlain--whose glorification of war is past comprehension.
The actual modern veteran who obsesses about his service, and the always-civilian wannabe, get hard to tell apart. They must make a golden memory of a horror which, while it must be shared and should be told, ought not to be glorified. I am sorry for both groups. They must live their lives as servants to people like Rusk, for whom platitudes like this are just a means of mass exploitation. They never give themselves a chance to see the value of the other things they have done, or could do.
One idea found at that link above I enjoy above all others: that freedom is free. It is in fact an unalienable right , according to a document that has been rather tarnished over the last eight years.
I was daydreaming about hunting down the original authors of this piece of fatuity and either strangling them or smashing their two typing fingers, but this person outdid me and found a plausible author: Dean Rusk. Dean Rusk, a former staff officer who numbers amongst his credits the bright idea of dividing Korea along the 38th parallel.
Speaking--to be perfectly clear--as a veteran, I find there are three sorts of people who wander around muttering this sort of platitude. The most common these days are the lot who have never served one day of military service: often, they nurture a peculiar envy of those who did, even to the extent of manufacturing bogus military records. The ones who used to be the most common spent their wars in safe jobs, never exposed to hazard or injury of any kind. Both my father and one uncle, who had their fill of horrors, spoke with contempt of these people...the ones who led the Legion and the VFW. The ones like them who knew better stayed silent for many years...sometimes all their lives.
I'm the first to say my Navy day job was comparatively safe: it was the occasional diversions that provided the exposure.
The most pathetic of the platitude-addicted can't get over their service. Not because of PTSD: believe me, I know what that's about. They can't get over it because they have never, or think they have never, done anything as important in their lives as to go out and put on a uniform and, in a few cases, get shot at or otherwise endangered. Once, some of them were brilliant men--think Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Joshua L. Chamberlain--whose glorification of war is past comprehension.
The actual modern veteran who obsesses about his service, and the always-civilian wannabe, get hard to tell apart. They must make a golden memory of a horror which, while it must be shared and should be told, ought not to be glorified. I am sorry for both groups. They must live their lives as servants to people like Rusk, for whom platitudes like this are just a means of mass exploitation. They never give themselves a chance to see the value of the other things they have done, or could do.
One idea found at that link above I enjoy above all others: that freedom is free. It is in fact an unalienable right , according to a document that has been rather tarnished over the last eight years.
posted by Uncle | 01:40
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