Prozac Nation

I've got this old buddy on the Witness Protection Program who is now not only a conservative, but a "born again" Christian. Of course he was always a James Watt conservative, a Free Market Capitalist like all the other cocaine dealers I ever knew. He supports Bush completely, but thinks the war in Iraq a mistake. Now his son has joined the Marines and my friend said to me last spring that he wasn't really supposed to tell me, but his boy is due to ship out "in November." Hmm, that would be right after November the 2nd, wouldn't it?

Josh Marshall has a good piece up about the possibility of the draft with RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie quoting the President Bush as saying "We don't need the draft. Look, the all-volunteer force is working…" Well, no, it's not working, Mr. President, as all the rest of us know. The only supporters you have left is the ones who don't ever admit mistakes. They have no choice but to look committed and optimistic.

What's more, the Bush Administration is stuck. They are not winning the war, and they are going to have to go back to the draft. As soon as they implement the draft, war opposition will increase immeasurably. So we can't have a draft and we're losing the occupation. Wait, now…uh. A lot of people are going to re-think their support for and acquiescence to Operation Iraqi Freedom or whatever it is being called. If they can re-think it before they vote, we won't have Bush to worry about except in the courts and in his support for the Ubermensch Ahnold in 2008. If the voters don't think about it until after November 2, then American, not to mention world, culture is going to absolutely convulse at the idea of a draft. I've always loved the line Dennis Hopper, as the old hippy radical Huey Lawton, said to Keifer Sutherland in "Flashback" (1990), something like "Man, the 90's are gonna make the 60's look like the 50's! Ol' Huey was nearly right, he only missed it by 10 years.

Currently, America is in the Prozac Position, i.e., "We have a volunteer army, they knew what they were getting into when they joined up!" and also, without apparent self conflict "We must Support our Troops, They are Brave and They are Fighting for (Our) Freedom!" So we don't have to care, but we should! So we're torn between these two sides of ourselves: "Isn't it sad!" and "They knew what could happen!" No single example of this is more obvious than the way we count the dead, but we don't go to (or show) their funerals. We may see them on local TV or in the local paper, and then we say "Oh dear, a soldier got killed over in Iraq!" What we also should know, easily, is that this is happening all over this country, right now. Right now, someone is getting the bad news, right now, someone has just come home from a funeral, right now, someone is still dealing with this 6 months or a year after the funeral, with only the flags, and the uniforms, and the rifles to counter balance the knowledge that for this family, iraqi freedom probably remains a very large abstraction, but Operation Iraqi Freedom is no longer an abstraction to them.They just saw at that funeral what the war is. They're having a hard time out in Muleshoe looking at that casket and saying "This was a good death." That's what "hard work" is, Mr. President. Plenty of families are wrestling with how to keep on supporting Bush and not being against what is every day a larger and larger war failure. A war of Choice. And people who don't do abstraction well are going to have a hard time believing that this abstraction they are being asked to drape over themselves can or ever will outweigh the grief they are dealing with right here, right now. Those of us who were against this war and are now in the uneviable position to tell the chickenhawks and loyalists we told them so, are being painted as "glad" that the death toll is as high as it is. I take no joy in this. Only sorrow. There have now (10/16/04) been 1098 Casualties in Iraq in about 576 days. That means that these small private ceremonies are happening on the average of 1.9 times a day, every day, somewhere in the U.S. So it's not just in your town, it's in every town. Really, it's Our Town.