David Masciotra, you know, one of those stank-ass hipster doofuses who thinks he has something worthwhile to say about veterans and actively serving troops vomits on to the pages of Salon to lecture the American people on how much he is ungrateful that American troops are responsible for the environment in which he lives, you know, an environment that allows him to criticize those defenders of his freedoms – not just troops, but he’s not grateful for the cops, either;
Put a man in uniform, preferably a white man, give him a gun, and Americans will worship him. It is a particularly childish trait, of a childlike culture, that insists on anointing all active military members and police officers as “heroes.” The rhetorical sloppiness and intellectual shallowness of affixing such a reverent label to everyone in the military or law enforcement betrays a frightening cultural streak of nationalism, chauvinism, authoritarianism and totalitarianism, but it also makes honest and serious conversations necessary for the maintenance and enhancement of a fragile democracy nearly impossible.
It has become impossible to go a week without reading a story about police brutality, abuse of power and misuse of authority. Michael Brown’s murder represents the tip of a body pile, and in just the past month, several videos have emerged of police assaulting people, including pregnant women, for reasons justifiable only to the insane.
It is equally challenging for anyone reasonable, and not drowning in the syrup of patriotic sentimentality, to stop saluting, and look at the servicemen of the American military with criticism and skepticism.
Yeah, douchenugget, it’s not the uniform that makes folks worthy of respect and a measure of adulation, it’s what the uniform says about the person wearing it and their commitment to the ideals that they are defending. Anyone can buy a uniform and put it on – our Stolen Valor page is chocked full of people who do that. Those spazwads do it because the uniformed services are the last government institutions which accomplish that for which they were created.
I like how he added in the “preferably white man” in there, as if he’s not a white man. I’m pretty sure that Liberals don’t know they’re white.
Masciotra claims that there is a “sexual assault epidemic in the military”. He doesn’t mention that a woman on a college campus is more likely to be assaulted than a woman on a military base. Masciotra recently graduated from college, so I wonder how many women he raped.
He refers to that tired-ass survey that the stank-ass hippies all use for proof that 1/3 of women in the military are assaulted. The folks who did the poll sent out tens of thousands of inquiries to women who had been in the military, they got a few hundred back and 1/3 of those few hundred said they’d been raped – does that sound a bit unscientific to anyone? But it says what the David Milquetoasts of the world want to hear, so, the veracity of the poll doesn’t come into question.
Chelsea Manning, now serving time in prison as a whistle-blower, uncovered multiple incidents of fellow soldiers laughing as they murdered civilians. Keith Gentry, a former Navy man, wrote that when he and his division were bored they preferred passing the time with the “entertainment” of YouTube videos capturing air raids of Iraq and Afghanistan, often making jokes and mocking the victims of American violence.
O-o-o-h. Chilling. I’m pretty sure that there are just as many college and high school students who are doing the same thing when they should be studying. Facebook is full of those videos and not everyone watching them are in the military. I’ll bet Chelsea Manning did a bit of war-pron viewing himself.
Wars that are not heroic have no real heroes, except for the people who oppose those wars. Far from being the heroes of recent wars, American troops are among their victims. No rational person can blame the soldier, the Marine, the airman, or the Navy man for the stupid and destructive foreign policy of the U.S. government, but calling them “heroes,” and settling for nothing less, makes honest and critical conversations about American foreign policy less likely to happen. If all troops are heroes, it doesn’t make much sense to call their mission unnecessary and unjust. It also makes conversations about the sexual assault epidemic, or the killing of innocent civilians, impossible. If all troops are heroes, it doesn’t make any sense to acknowledge that some are rapists and sadists.
The same principle of clear-eyed scrutiny applies to law enforcement agencies. Police departments everywhere need extensive investigation of their training methods, qualifications for getting on the job, and psychological evaluation. None of that will happen as long as the culture calls cops heroes, regardless of their behavior.
Again, Dave, who is silencing your criticism? There you are, on Salon, criticizing the troops and the police and I suspect that no one is kicking down your front door to haul you off to one of our famous gulags where you’ll be tortured and punished for expressing your opinion.
What he’s really afraid of is being scrutinized for being the weak, intellectually dishonest creepy-looking milksop who can’t see anything worth a little inconvenience in his own life. Mr. Milquetoast wants everyone to get the impression that he’s a hero because he speaks his mind, but what is heroic about evacuating his bowels in the pages of Salon when he’s just toeing the stank-ass hippie/hipster dufus party line. Maybe in his crowd he’s brave, but to the rest of the country, he’s just another motormouth dingus with a rat stuck to his face. I’ll bet he wears a ball cap backwards, too. By the way, look who Dave does think is a hero.
In these dark days, this country needs heroes and they ain’t gonna turn to the David Milquetoasts.
Thanks to Ann for the link.
