The Crossed Pond

It was an interesting irony to think that listening to the congressional testimony today of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman’s brother, Kevin. The testimony gave a lot of heft and airtime to the cheap propogandizing behind this war effort, but I couldn’t help but be a bit moved by the personal level of it, regular Americans confused and angry, to varying degrees, at a government that decided they weren’t important enough to tell the truth to, or about.

It’s not that I don’t, on some level, appreciate the motives behind the “benign fiction” cooked up by the Big Daddy government to make his children feel warmer and fuzzier about the war. Pentagon higher ups shining their brass and cooking up movies of the week, medaling-as-coverup, or PR coups of planted Iraqis pulling Saddam statues down. It’s really not that I don’t understand that motive, and can even find it, at times, somewhat comforting. Who doesn’t want their government holding their hands a little and whispering sweet little lies at us so we don’t have to worry our pretty little heads off. It’s mostly, though, that they think we’re all such cheap dates. And these stories, I think, are emblematic of a lot of what’s wrong with how certain facets of certain political parties treat our military. As set pieces. As props. Or how they treat us, the American public. As frightened children, who don’t want, need, or can handle the truth.

“I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend,” Lynch said today. “The American people are capable of determining their own heroes…and the don’t need to be told elaborate lies…The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype.” In her case, it would have been easy enough to just take the fiction and run with it. …

Or Kevin Tillman (Pat’s brother, who was also serving and not far behind Tillman’s unit when the incident occurred), who has dogged the administration for many months now, saying that “Revealing that Pat’s death was a fratricide would have been yet another political disaster in a month of political disasters … so the truth needed to be suppressed.” The entire incident was, instead, dressed up in “intentional falsehoods” and “deliberate and careful misrepresentations”, which Kevin briefly listed some examples of, which were heartbreaking, and more callous than benign. The various other people who testified on this incident at the very least cause raised eyebrows. Kevin and his mother Mary make a pretty convincing case that skapegoating commanders and not dropping this on Bush and Rumsfeld’s doorsteps is “disingenuous” and, at this point, a bit naive. …

Or Rep. Henry Waxman, a Californian Democrat, who said “The government violated its most basic responsibility. The bare minimum we owe our soldiers and their families is the truth. …

Or Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, calling the Defense Department “a gigantic bureaucracy” and asking for tougher probing of the Pentagon’s public relations efforts. “We shouldn’t worship the military,” said he. “We shouldn’t let a patriotic fervor in times of war, any request the military makes, any expense they wish to incur. It’s our duty, we don’t support the troops if we let the military gloss over major mistakes.” …

Heroism still exists in America; it doesn’t need to be invented, and such benign fictions do nothing but cheapen it. Jessica Lynch is right. And, more to the point, an exemplar.