Outrage, Conservative Virtue Signaling, and The Vet

Fox News traffics in populist outrage.  It is its forte, its stock in trade so to speak.

It’s not hard to see why.  For one thing, it’s great for ratings.  It stokes the need of its core audience to perpetually seethe with resentment.  One of its specialties is bringing to light the opinions of obscure dissenters no one would ever have heard of had Fox not pointed them out as proof positive that good old fashioned American values are in dire peril of extinction.

This week, the Fox affiliate in Philadelphia aired a story about a Drexel University professor who Tweeted that he wanted to vomit after seeing a first-class passenger on his plane gave up his seat for a service member in uniform.  The network picked up the story, which is now on all the major news nets.

The professor, one George Ciccariello-Maher, had drawn right wing ire a few months back for another Tweet calling for the abolition of the white race.  Ciccariello-Maher claimed his remark was sardonic, but the story of the plane incident began by describing him as an “anti-white Drexel professor.” 

The good professor’s nausea stemmed from the botched coalition airstrike on Mosul last week, which is reported to have taken a couple hundred civilian lives while doing nothing to break Islamic State’s hold on the Iraqi city.  Didn’t the other passengers who thanked the man for yielding his seat know that the uniformed soldier was complicit in this tragedy just by being in the military?

The newsreaders displayed the expected level of disgust at Ciccariello-Maher’s words while reporting the story.  The trolls crawled out of the woodwork in force to leave comments condemning Ciccariello-Maher’s message, with the predictable profanity and malice.  One poster wrote ominously of the “enemies within.”

For me, the report dredged up the usual mixed emotions whenever I read about encounters between progressive academia and the rest of society.  You see, I’m that overeducated, godless, lefty professor your conservative, God-fearing parents warned you against.  But I’m also a veteran.  I understand the passenger’s gesture.  I accepted a number of small kindnesses from people while traveling in uniform over the years which helped make the stresses of being far from home bearable.  As a civilian, I’ve anonymously bought a drink or paid a restaurant check for service members from time to time, particularly if one was traveling through an airport alone.

So, I’m not about to knock the guy who gave up his seat.  The soldier could have been traveling for a number of reasons.  Perhaps there was a family emergency such as a sick relative.  Maybe he was rushing home for the birth of a child.  It could be that he was beginning or coming back from midtour leave or returning from a long overseas deployment.  Regardless of the reason, it was a gracious gesture which I’m sure was graciously accepted.

But let’s take a clear-eyed look at that gesture in the context of how the public views the military.  “Thank you for your service” has become the obligatory affirmation during any encounter with a service member or veteran, however trivial.  Just this afternoon, I was on the phone with my insurance company.  This particular insurer is a well-known company whose clientele consists exclusively of current and former military personnel and their immediate families.  The customer service rep was pleasant and was able to assist me with the issue I’d called her about.  The call ended like this:

“Thank you for your membership with -------, Mr. Scholar, and thank you for your service to our country.”

“Um, thanks…thank you for…for your help.”   

I never know how to respond.  I’ve come to see gestures such as thanking veterans and giving up seats on planes for soldiers as a form of conservative virtue signaling, a little like wearing American flag lapel pins or attaching Christian symbols to the backs of cars.  Membership in the U.S. military has become politicized, a phenomenon which would certainly horrify the founders of this country if they ever found out.

I blame our collective guilt over how we initially rejected the Vietnam vets. Prior to the Cold War, we never had a large peacetime military.  Soldiering was a refuge for petty crooks and ne’er-do-wells in times of peace and a noble calling for citizens in times of war.  The Second World War was the apogee of the citizen-as-soldier ethos, and rare was the family without someone in the services.  The inequities of the postwar draft were impossible to ignore, however.  During the Vietnam era, the poor were shipped overseas by the thousands while their middle class contemporaries hid behind student deferments and exaggerated minor ailments.

I’m agnostic concerning tales of returning Vietnam vets being assaulted and spat upon by “hippies” at airports.  Some I’ve known claim vehemently that this happened to them.   On the other hand, I’m familiar with historical investigations which were unable to identify a single substantiated incident. 

America was split down the middle over vets in the years following the withdrawal from Vietnam.  I recall the repatriation of the prisoners of war in 1973.  My small town put up banners in celebration, though none of the returnees were from there.  (“Mommy, what’s a ‘pow’?” I asked in confusion.)  That was my small town in the rural West.  Out in the world beyond its limits, people thought and believed differently.

The prevailing attitude toward the military and veterans in the 1970s was roundly negative.  The mass media have left an indelible record of the time.  It’s common knowledge that the TV show M*A*S*H was really about Vietnam despite being set in Korea.  The antihero protagonists of Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver were Vietnam vets.  In Black Sunday, a disgraced former POW is goaded into attacking the Super Bowl with an explosive laden Goodyear blimp.  The disaster movie Earthquake featured a psycho National Guardsman who tries to rape a woman he’s obsessed with and a cowardly Army colonel who flees a tunnel in panic at the first sign of collapse.  Even movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter which were praised for their compassionate portrayal of men and families damaged by Vietnam contained a hint of superciliousness.  During my first year or two of high school, visiting recruiters were greeted with smirks, smartass remarks, and the occasional taunt.

Then, as if somebody had thrown a switch, the zeitgeist turned on its head.  Reagan’s cocksure swagger and anticommunism had something to do with it.  Frustration over the Iran hostage crisis and other foreign policy reverses probably did as well.  For whatever reason the Eighties were the Decade of the Heroic Vietnam Vet in American pop culture.  There was First Blood and its sequel Rambo, of course, not to mention any number of Chuck Norris movies.  Platoon played in theaters to rave reviews.  One or more of the main characters in Magnum P.I., Riptide, Miami Vice, and The A-Team were Vietnam vets.  A Rumor of War, Platoon Leader, and The Things We Carried told the grunts’ story to a mainstream which would have scornfully rejected it a couple of years earlier.  Pop songs such “Goodnight Saigon,” “Still in Saigon,” “Born in the USA,” and “Walking on a Thin Line” extolled the travails of the discharged vet in an uncaring world.

This new awareness not only inspired guilt-ridden feelings about vets, but over the military generally.  The Iran crisis made Americans realize that despite decades of propaganda to the contrary there was a lot of pent up anger over U.S. policies abroad.  It also made them aware that future military actions abroad might be necessary and that the burden of these would fall on the shoulders of recruited volunteers.  Americans love the troops because they don’t have to be the troops.  The specter of the draft lurks in the background, particularly during rough patches such as the Iraq War prior to the 2007 surge.  There’s a kind of desperate cheerleading from the mainstream which I trace back to the 1991 Gulf War.  It’s born of remorse over one’s affluence, comfort, and safety when others are facing danger even though few would ever, ever entertain the thought of volunteering or allowing their sons and daughters to do the same. 

There are other symptoms of our collective embracing of veterans.  The sudden anointing of the-vet-as-hero has had its seamy underside.  Rambo gave credibility to the Vietnam Dolchstoẞ myth of the left behind POW.  Despite the black POW/MIA flags flying from the flagstaffs of numerous public buildings and burly biker types too young to have served wearing “You Are Not Forgotten” vest patches, no evidence has emerged proving Vietnam is still holding American prisoners.  What could they gain?  It defies common sense.  Vietnam has had diplomatic relations with the U.S. for over twenty years and the U.S. is an important trading partner.  Why not come clean up front and avoid future friction? 

Another unfortunate side to our hero worship is the rise of the imposter.  Lots of guys have their war stories with a detail or two exaggerated here and there.  That’s one thing.  Telling everyone you were GI Joe with a kung-fu grip when you were really a cook, claiming you received the Medal of Honor or even a Purple Heart when you never heard a shot fired in anger, or accepting veterans benefits when you never served is another matter.   

Why doesn’t anyone call foul on these antics?  Why do they go so long without being caught?  It’s because the public has become intimidated.  Criticizing anyone linked to the military is seen by some people as tantamount to treason.  Hence the uproar over the yielded airplane seat.  The soldier who drew Ciccariello-Maher’s opprobrium in all likelihood had nothing at all to do personally with the tragedy in Mosul.  He is neither villain nor hero.  He’s not responsible for decisions made by the Pentagon or CENTCOM.  He was just a traveler trying to get to where he was going. 

By the same token the hubbub on Fox and elsewhere over the professor’s infelicitous Tweet has a further chilling effect on any legitimate critique of our foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.  Question our policies or tactics, and you’re disloyal and un-American.  I think that this incident is one of countless symptoms of misplaced guilt masquerading as Americanism.  Perhaps if we had done right by Vietnam veterans in the first place we might have avoided this unpleasantness.  But in light of the heavy doses of propaganda ladled out to us by government and media alike over the past century, I am inclined to doubt it.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar