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Chris Hayes Military Controversy
This, is it an American thing? Are you instantly evil because you don't believe that a couple of people getting suckered into fighting wars they have no business being in because of a sense of nationalism are heroes?
You're not allowed to have different opinions on stuff like this?
Comments
Short answer? Because American culture has a fucked up sense of military pride where we elevate service folk by virtue of them being... in the military. Personally I think it's bullshit. Being in the military doesn't automatically make you a hero. It makes you a person who signed up for a job. A job which in all ways supports killing people, a detail people too often gloss over because jingoism and patriotism.
Every time I hear of someone in the news or elsewhere named Hayes, I feel a compulsion to check if I'm related, even though the surname is common enough that it's unlikely and I don't know of any resources to use in searching. It's a bit awkward.
Hey look, it's a bunch of "conservative" keyboard warriors jumping on an easy opportunity to be jerks to someone for being a "liberal".
It's true that most people who join the armed forces do so because they want to be heroes, and at the very least I think that counts for something. But unless we're talking about people who've actually saved a lot more lives than they've destroyed or ruined, then yeah, the title "hero" is not really applicable even in death. Just because people want to fly like birds doesn't mean they can magically grow wings out of their arms and learn how to use them in a split-second.
I will always view conservatives as idiots in general for wanting things to stay the same in a world that's always changing, and events like this really don't do much to lift my view of them.
One thing that jumped out at me in that article was Coulter's tweet. By now, you'd think that nothing Ann Coulter said would surprise me, but this did.
"Chris Hayes 'Uncomfortable Calling Fallen Military 'Heroes' - Marines respond by protecting his right to menstruate."
Wow. Menstruation = wimpiness, apparently. You really must have hated yourself for a long time there, Ann, being so weak and pathetic and tampon-using.
But as for the idea that being in the military automatically makes you a hero, I really do not understand that. What you do, or don't do, determines whether you deserve to be called a hero or not. Being a soldier isn't easy. They don't make it easy to qualify for service (although I seem to remember the standards being relaxed somewhat after America's wars started stretching its armed forces thin and they wanted to get more people in without resorting to a draft), so are soldiers hard-working? Sure. Are they tough? Sure. Are they skilled in the use of firearms, and in good shape, and know something about hand to hand comabt? I'm sure they are.
Do those things make you a "hero"? Well, if they did then why are Japanese soldiers who fought in WWII not also called heroes? They were able to do all the same things that American soldiers were. They could shoot guns, they were in good shape, they were willing to work hard, some of them were perhaps willing to sacrifice even more than the average American by literally flying suicide missions in order to hurt their enemies...but I'm willing to bet that none of the people blasting Chris Hayes for what he said would be willing to call the Japanese soldiers heroic.
Why not?
Because they weren't American? Or wait, maybe it was because "Japan started it by bombing Pearl Harbor, therefore they were the bad guys and all of their soldiers were villains, not heroes." I try to avoid strawmanning and hope I'm not doing so here, but I figure that's pretty much how the thinking goes. And if the thinking really does go that way, well, it's wrong and here's why. The United States has also started wars. In fact, they started the Iraq War. Therefore, if the difference between heroes and villains boils down to "Which group of soldiers are on the side that started it?", then American troops are not always heroes. Sometimes they are villains, by that logic.
It's more complicated than that, of course. There are, as far as I can think of, four reasons somebody might join the military. Either they see it as a means to pay the bills, or they want to prove something and brag about being a badass Marine or whatever, or they know that a war is going on and they believe it to be a just war and they think "I want to do my part in this just war," or they have no choice in the matter because they've been conscripted.
At best, they're people who believe they're helping to make the world a better place and, not only that, but that every other person in their armed forces is also helping to make the world a better place. They have good intentions.
Some of them might even get a chance to earn the title of "hero", by saving somebody's life.
But not all of them. I live in Canada, but I have relatives who served in the United States Navy because that's where my relatives happened to live. One of them, my grandfather, was a chaplain. It wasn't his job to be a hero, it was his job to provide religious guidance and comfort to the crew of the ship he served on. My father served on a destroyer. He was on that destroyer during the Vietnam War, but the ship was never actually in a battle. And you know something, when I was growing up and when I thought that being in the armed forces and fighting in wars was really really cool, I admired them both, but I never thought "My dad and my grandpa were HEROES!" I was pretty sure that if they were thrown into a situation where they needed to be heroic that they would have been, because I looked up to them both, but the simple fact was that neither one of them was ever in a situation like that.
My point is: it is possible to respect people, even admire people, while simultaneously holding the opinion that they are not heroes.
Hopefully this won't derail the thread, but this reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut wrote called "Happy Birthday, Wanda June". It was a play instead of a novel, so it's shorter than most of his stories. It's certainly not as well-known as "Slaughterhouse-Five" or "Cat's Cradle", but I read it for the first time very recently, so it's fresh in my mind and I think it applies here. You see, the play is about this guy who was a soldier in a war, and after the war ended he went around the world killing big game. (Vonnegut had somewhat mixed feelings about Ernest Hemingway, liking some things about him and hating others. In the foreward he said that he based this character on the part of Hemingway that he hated, namely the Hemingway who hunted endangered animals for sport.) The character thinks that he's awesome, that his worth as a man and a human being is measured in how many people he's killed and how many wild animals he's killed and how many fights he's won and so on. He acts like a dick during the play, belittling just about every other character for not being as great as he is, as manly as he is. (As far as the women are concerned, he's just sexist as all get-out.)
The thing is that this character wants conflict. He wants to go and fight in wars so he can brag about living through a war. He wants to go and hunt lions so he can brag about how he killed a lion. He wants to goad people into getting into a fight with him so that he can kick their asses and then brag about kicking their asses or, if they don't fight him, so he can brag that they are scared of him.
The character measures his worth by whether or not he can take down his enemies. So he's gone around the world looking for enemies to take down. And, when there are no more enemies, he tries to make enemies.
Maybe by continuing to call soldiers "heroes", we create people like that character. The play never gets into how he got to be the way he did, but my guess is that he grew up hearing about how there were these bad and dangerous people out there, and that anybody who went and killed them would be this great hero. Or, as a child growing up today might overhear, "There are people all over the world who want to destroy America! They're horrible, horrible people! And the soldiers who kill them are all heroes!"
(This might raise the question of whether I think Kurt Vonnegut was a hero due to his military service. I think that true heroes are modest, that they are the first to say "I'm no hero." I don't think Kurt would have called himself a hero. I think he was a great person, but not because he was in a war.)
I think that most U.S. military service personnel are heroes.
And by that standard, most people are heroes.
This is not a joke. Many people across the world are everyday, unsung heroes whose contributions to others are often underappreciated. Think about your parents. Would you consider them to be heroes? Unless they massively screwed up your life and abused you or something, they probably did a decent job with the long, arduous, and often difficult process of raising you. And then there's all those people who do their jobs day in and day out to keep economies running. And then there's all those people who volunteer their time and effort at charitable organizations. And all those people who are teachers and coaches that we look up to. And so on.
There's a related issue wherein some individuals (especially those in the military) use military service as a justifying factor for certain attitudes or behaviours. Personally, I think they have it backwards; if you're part of a highly powerful and potentially prestigious organisation like a national military or a suborganisation of such, then your conduct reflects on that body. Ergo, rather than giving soldiers leeway when it comes to attitudes and behaviour, they ought to hold themselves to higher standards as representatives of their organisation. These are people who are trained to fight and kill, both of which carry heavy social responsibility (as they ought to). We should expect the best from fighting personnel, and if they can't match their station with the required conduct, thoughtfulness and restraint, then they are probably unfit to hold and use a weapon.
In short, being in the military is not a qualifier that proves a measure of objective worth -- it's a bar that has to be exceeded, and exceeded consistently. Once upon a time, professional soldiers were expected to be diverse individuals, with grounding in a variety of domestic skills, philosophy and even science. This was a controlling factor that ensured that the most well-regarded warriors also had a certain degree of intellectual capacity. That was a good system, as it prevented the pursuit of violence as being the sole qualifier of a warrior's worth -- they had to be social servants, artists, politicians and other things in combination. I believe that this is one of the major differences between a modern soldier and the men-at-arms of previous eras, and comes as a result of early 20th century hypermasculine standards. Soldiers don't only need to be told that's it's acceptable to be diverse as an individual, but expected.
If someone is going to go overseas into a combat zone as a soldier, I would hope that they are intelligent, compassionate and thoughtful. Any sane person will kill, if need be, when they are armed and their life is threatened by armed adversaries, but it takes more than sanity to consider the "enemy" in human terms with respect towards their position and culture. Violence, killing and war are far too grave to send in young men whose idea of battlefield glory comes from a war-positive culture, where films and especially video games consistently portray soldiers in a gleaming white light.
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/memorial-day-shocker-how-the-u-s-government-really-handles-veterans-benefits-deny-deny-deny-until-they-die
>soldiers are heroes and should be treated as such
>own gubbermint treats veterans like shit
fourteenwings,
I definitely think you are allowed to have different opinions on stuff like this, but given the positive way people typically talk about soldiers in the U.S., it does not surprise me that Hayes's comments received that negative of a reaction. From the looks of it, part of that response is just people jumping onto comments that seemed to confirm what they already believed, whether it be their thoughts on MSNBC or on liberals in general.
For what it is worth (not much), I tend to side with those who believe that the issue is a bit more complicated than military service=heroism. Regardless of whether I agree with everything in KilgoreTrout's post, I feel like it really speaks to the diversity of reasons people have for joining the military.
This whole thing is ridiculous, though. People should be allowed to have opinions, even if you don't agree with them.
Forzare,
I don't think all soldiers are necessarily heroes, but I do think they should be given some respect for what they do, even if I don't agree with the war.
Well said, it certainly takes some guts to make the sacrifices that serving in the military entails. If nothing else, I think that kind of dedication deserves some respect.
Yeah, to clarify: I'm not saying that they don't deserve respect. But the word "hero" and the definition of it is pretty subjective, and I think that when I was a little kid and still learning what different words meant I heard the word "superhero" before I ever heard the word "hero". So I came to associate heroism with people doing the kind of stuff that Batman or Spider-Man did: saving people's lives, defeating bad guys.
My definition of "hero" isn't quite as narrow today, because I'd consider guys like Gandhi and Martin Luther King heroes. But that's because they did things that were beneficial, that changed their respective countries and even the world for the better.
There are people in the armed forces who have never saved anybody's life, defeated a bad guy (they may not have even been up against bad guys, depending on the conflict), or done something beneficial that changed things for the better. Do they deserve respect? I'd say yes, unless they've done something terrible like the people at Abu Ghraib did. Are they heroes? I'm not so sure.
I think a hero has to be defined externally, and there is no definition of the word that can answer to every scenario wherein one might be called "hero". In essence, though, I think a hero is someone who provides a significant, powerful service to someone else or a group at a cost to themselves and/or for no gain.