A Citizen's Obligation

The other night I was sitting with some people and the subject of Iraq and "supporting the troops" came up. One person involved had family in the military and another had served. The old platitude how once the decision has been made to go to war it is the citizen's duty to support the soldiers - which equates to supporting the military effort - because, after all, they are defending our "freedoms" was consistently served up.

Now these people I was talking with can be labeled as middle class, educated white Americans, early to late 30s with both males and females there. They were, at best, aware of the what is generally going on in the world, however replete with all the traditional media narratives and for the most part dreadfully uninformed even about their own domestic political realities.

Now quite obviously the idea that the invasion of Iraq is somehow protecting Western freedoms is very much a non sequitur, not to mention the many freedoms that are being dramatically eroded at an alarming rate in the so-called "War on Terrorism." Nevertheless it got me thinking a little more of what is required of the citizen to protect the freedoms established in a democratic system as well as the irony of the discussion itself.

Most reading this should be familiar with the maxim regarding not caring about politics, that is, to say you don't care is like someone drowning saying they don't care about water.

Well, after the initial discussion on supporting the troops, someone (a very well educated engineer) made the absolute ludicrous claim * that the media has only been interested in anti-war figures and that war supporters don't get their chance to make their case. (after Cindy Sheehan's name came up in response to someone else arguing that somehow those without family in the military can not criticize the war effort because they don't know what it's like to have loved ones at risk.)

Eventually most everyone started to get emotional and abruptly the topic was changed with the standard, let's not talk about politics plea.

Ok, here's my point. On one hand you have some declaring that one must support the troops and their effort because they are defending the freedoms we treasure so highly. In other words, it becomes one's duty as a citizen. Minutes later someone else makes an astonishingly naive and absurd claim regarding the media and the war (and others, by the way, hardly a clue of the any political machinations of the Bushies, the media or the political system itself  - for fun I asked who believed that Al Gore said he invented the internet.They all did and a couple got upset by that "phony" Gore) Then the subject must be dropped because, in the midst of their ignorance of the politics and media, they got too worked up.

What kind of ridiculous paradox is this? It is never anyone's obligation - whether there is family involved or not to blindly support naked imperialism and do so out of some misguided notion of patriotism. Rather the obligation the citizen has is almost completely contrary to this. If these people value their freedoms and democracy as much as they claim then it is their fundamental obligation to maintain themselves informed  and speak truth to power in order to check imperialistic aims and ensure a democratic society can function within the nation's boundaries.

But try having a debate on politics and society with your "average guy in the street" without either, one, hearing an amazing array of falsehoods argued as fact with the utmost tenacity and two, the conversation ending as others bitch about bad it is to talk about politics.

Is it any wonder that the democracy is crumbling?

Update: Just to clarify one thing. In no way is this meant as a comment on the role of the military or the soldier in a democratic society. That, of course is another issue and for me, the idea of supporting the troops most certainly must include keeping them out of harm's way by avoiding or stopping needless and irresponsible wars.

Update 2:

From the Smirking Chimp, Senator Jim Webb:

I still keep my father's picture to remind me of the sacrifices that my mother and others had to make, over and over again, as my father gladly served his country. I was proud to follow in his footsteps, serving as a Marine in Vietnam. My brother did as well, serving as a helicopter pilot. My son has joined in the tradition, now serving as an infantry Marine in Iraq.

Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm's way. We owe them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.

Webb is a very prominent anti-Iraq war politician who calls for the removal of all U.S. military bases and withdraw of all combat forces from Iraq so I guess then that makes him guilty of not supporting the troops.

-----

* To give just a couple of examples:

• Prior to the war just 7% of ABC coverage was anti-war.
• In an interview on April 4, 2003, with Aaron Brown,lead anchor for CNN’s Newsnight on Democracy Now! Rendell [Steve Rendell, from Fair and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)] noted that,“…On the four flagship shows on each of the four networks, that less than 1 percent of the guests they had speaking on stories about Iraq over a two week period in February…less than 1 percent anti-war voices were heard there.”
• The infamous New York Times work as an official government propagandist by printing all the Bush administration lies in the build-up to the war.
• Also one can click here to see a full outline of the American media coverage of the Iraqi war from the outset to the war to present day as well as, of course, Media Matters.
• Finally, it is exceedingly difficult to explain, if the media had an antiwar bias, how the a University of Maryland study could produce such startling results as these:

# Fifty-seven percent of mainstream media viewers believed the falsity that Iraq gave substantial support to Al-Qaida, or was directly involved in the September 11 attacks (48% after invasion).
# Sixty-nine percent believed the falsity that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 attacks.
# Twenty-two percent believed the falsity that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. (Twenty-one percent believed that chem/bio weapons had actually been used against U.S. soldiers in Iraq during 2003)
# In the composite analysis of the PIPA study, 80% of Fox News watchers had one or more of these misperceptions, in contrast to 71% for CBS and 27% who tuned to NPR/PBS

Comments

[the unknown man-]

Nice piece of work.... It just goes to show how nieve our culture/generation has become...

[machinegods]

When you say "support our troops" are you talking about the bumper stickers people put on their windows or are you talking about the media's use of the term to encompass the whole equation? Bush said if "You are not with us, you are against us". People draw the lines at different points and I guess this is where things can get emotional for people.

The last thing you need is a poor education and the words that describe those lines can get a little confusing.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines Invented as;

To produce or contrive (something previously unknown) by the use of ingenuity or imagination.
To make up; fabricate: invent a likely excuse.

and defines Created as;

American Heritage Dictionary

cre·at·ed, cre·at·ing, cre·ates

To cause to exist; bring into being.
To give rise to; produce: That remark created a stir.
To invest with an office or title; appoint.
To produce through artistic or imaginative effort: create a poem; create a role.

Both definitions are somewhat the same but to invent something can also have a negative connotation. Here you have a situation where words make a big difference depending how they are used. This is also why I also like hanging out in places where no one speaks english.

If Al Gore thinks he even came close to inventing the internet then he's proven himself an idiot but for him to actually think he took the initative of creating the internet is just as wrong however it's worded a little better.

A few things were going on in 1979. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis developed a means to efficiently pass information across two computers in two different locations. Most people remember this as the BBS systems we connected to through our telephone lines. What made it work was not the initatives or conception of ideas that became the internet but the fact that it was open source software and it was given to the people to use. Did Gore dial his commodore 64 up to a BBS? Did he hand them an award years later? Maybe, but the creation of the internet can never be claimed by anyone person. What does the initiation of creating something really mean anyhow?

By the looks of things in 1979 Al Gore was pissing Climatologist Robert Durrenberger, past president of the American Association of State Climatologists.

July, 1979: “Al Gore brought me back to the battle and prompted me to do renewed research in the field of climatology. And because of all the misinformation that Gore and his army have been spreading about climate change I have decided that ‘real’ climatologists should try to help the public understand the nature of the problem.”

I've also read that he was fathering a child and giving pro choice speaches. Gore Graduated in Art and Politics not Computer Science or Climatology. So to claim that he created anything other than a pretty polical picture would truely be impressive. Unfotunately what he tried to paint to the people angered many. Why would the media be upset? Believe it or not they are mostly a technically savy bunch. Who else would shake their heads at this comment? Perhaps every person with any knowledge of how the internet came into being and then the people who know it's funny to simply say that he invented it because it pisses democrates off.

I'm sorry but Al Gore messed up by saying that and no matter if someone really thinks he invented it, created it or even had a hand in the matter well thats just funny. Heck I tell people that he invented it just to get a chuckle, however it really sucks when someone fires back that I'm an idiot. I still laugh.

Food for thought..

"Inventor of the Negative

While Burke struggles with using the word inventor for he feels that language has invented man, he points out that negatives do not exist in nature. He contends that negatives are purely a characteristic of symbol systems, which he has already determined belong uniquely to man. He further refers to morality as being particularly human and based largely on the idea of negatives; that is, there are things we should not do (Burke, 9-13).

Intrinsic to this portion of Burke’s Definition is the idea of paradox. Burke explains that the idea of negation is, by its nature, paradoxical. He explains that conditioning a statement with a negative draws a positive image of that very statement. This, he argues, defeats the purpose of negation, yet is an inescapable situation (Brock, Burke, Burgess, & Simons, 1985)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_man#Inventor_of_the_Negative

machinegods

[b.h]

In terms of supporting the troops, I simply am referring to what that means to the right wingers and the uncritical, you support the troops by supporting the war.

Regarding the Gore internet thing. It was a complete falsehood that now even the MSM admit. Of course Bob Somerby is the expert who reported on it in real time and has documented the whole sordid tale of the war on Gore for years now. But let's get it on record one more time. From the Daily Howler March 26, 1999:

Did Vice President Gore “invent the Internet?” Better yet: Did he say that he did? Here is what the VP said when he chatted with Wolf on March 9:

GORE: During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

And of course Gore did take the lead, within the Congress, in promoting and advancing the technical developments that have led to our now-beloved Net. Here’s what Internet guru Vinton Cerf told the Post’s John Schwartz:

SCHWARTZ: Vinton G. Cerf, a senior vice president at MCI Worldcom and the person most often called “the father of the Internet” for his part in designing the network’s common computer language, said in an e-mail interview yesterday, “I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator.”

According to Schwartz, Katie Hafner, co-author of a history of the Internet, “agreed” with that assessment:

SCHWARTZ: Hafner said people have been haggling over the true beginnings of the network for decades. “...[T]here are so many people who did at least one pivotal thing in either creating the network, or encouraging the use of the network, or bringing the network to the public--and Gore was one of those people.”

William Greider wrote this, in a Rolling Stone profile published before the recent flap:

GREIDER: [Gore] held the first congressional hearings on industry’s casual disposal of toxic wastes and on global warming, and he was an early champion of the system we now call the Internet.

Chuck Raasch, of USA Today, quoted University of Pennsylvania professor Dave Farber, whom Schwartz described as “one of the early players in the Internet:”

RAASCH: Dave Farber, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told [The Commercial Appeal of Memphis], “Gore did not technically create the Internet, but without him there is a good chance it would not be where it is today.”

Indeed, when Gore made his initial statement March 9, it produced no comments in the press corps. On Wednesday, March 10, and on Thursday, March 11 not a word was written. Even in the Washington Times, a paper which lives for Clinton-Gore scandal, not a single word appeared about what the VP had said.

But to many within this celebrity press corps, it’s just not a day without scandal. And as we’ve often shown you before, the scribes just love being handed spin, and rushing it right into print! And that’s exactly how the Great Gore Scandal took the nation on Friday, March 12, as obedient pundits recited spin they’d been handed by historian Richard Armey.

We’re not quite sure who invented the fax, but Armey sure knows how to use it. He sends out messages of dubious accuracy, and pundits just type them right up! For the pundits, it’s a whole lot simpler than going out and spending their time doing real reporting! And Armey’s stuff has pre-packaged panache, the kind that those editors simply love!

And so it was that, starting on Friday, the nation’s press was full of experts, spinning remarkably similar tales about how the Net had begun. The Washington Times ran AP on page one. Here’s how the story began:

MITTELSTADT: Vice President Al Gore’s claim that he is the father of the Internet drew amused protests yesterday from congressional Republicans.

At least you get your spin up front. Quoting what Gore had actually said would have taken some of the bang from the story. So Mittelstadt juiced it up a bit with her “father of the Internet” jive.

In paragraph two, Mittelstadt’s source becomes clear; she quotes a thoroughly perplexed Mr. Armey, describing Gore’s statement as an “outrageous claim.” And she says that Gore had “raised eyebrows” on Tuesday when he made his worrisome statement. But as we’ve mentioned, we’re not quite sure just where it was that those eyebrows were raised. No journalist had said a word about it--not until Armey’s staff hit the fax.

Was the ARPANET where the Net began? Back in ’69, when Al Gore was a boy? We don’t really know, and the scribes don’t know either. But Dick told Mitt, and Mitt typed it up. And after that, everyone said it.

I would argue that the responsibility for ignorance lies both with the citizen for keeping themselves uninformed and the media for their generally shameful conduct. But, make no mistake, to believe that Gore should be ridiculed for what he said is in itself worthy of ridicule.

Perhaps the media to some degree are technically savvy - I don't have the slightest idea - though savvy and today's media strike me more as an oxymoron. Nevertheless I can most certainly say that the claims regarding Gore had nothing - nothing at all- with some kind of resentment due to a superior knowledge of technical issues. They hated Gore and there exists volumes of evidence demonstrating their sophomoric and unprofessional behavior. Spend a couple of hours going through the Daily Howler's archives. The proof is irrefutable.

Some interesting info and commentary though. It's appreciated.

[the unknown man]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10043126-38.html