Words. Words. Words. The Rhetoric: Troops

When I was a boy my mother spoke of "our boys" who'd fought in World War II or were fighting in Korea. When I was in my teens that terminology was still in common usage for the soldiers, sailors and airmen who'd been sent off on the foolish mission to subjugate Vietnam. If they weren't "our boys" they were soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines. They had some identity. Each was, at least a sailor, a Marine, a soldier. And when they came home broken in mind or body or for burial, there was an individual coffin, an individual loss. We saw those coffins. We saw the funerals, heard the buglers and the fired salutes. On television we even saw them fall.

Today we see no coffins. The horrors of war are little in evidence on the television. The buglers are on tape. The salutes go unfired. Even at their home bases the memorial services are collective rather than separate for each individual loss. And those "boys" are now simply wrapped up in the impersonal plural of "troops". I've even heard those who should know better use the plural, collective noun "troop" to refer to a single person.

Proverbially we are what we eat. I would suggest that most people think what they hear and speak as they think. Or don't think more likely.

It is in the interest of those who perpetrated this obscene, unjustified war in Iraq that we not see the consequences of their hubris and blunders. It is also in the interest of these same war criminals that we think of the human beings whose murder they abet of impersonal, faceless troops rather than individual soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines and certainly never consider them as "our boys".

Unfortunately for Dubya and his fellow neo-fascists who have perpetrated the crime that is the Iraq War, too many troops have gone to the Middle Eastern desert for too long. Too many have come home in pieces for the impersonalization to retain its initial force. As the hollowness of their rhetorical ploys has become as apparent as the open graves into which more and more are laid, Dubya's popularity has plummeted. More people than the neo-fascists thought understand that the rhetoric about "cut and run", "stay the course" and "timetables for surrender" really mean, "We don't care that your child or loved one may die or be maimed as long as we can claim to have remained strong. None of our children stand in harms way so we can safely persist in a policy that never made sense in the first place." Then they can hop into their limousines bedecked with a magnetic "Support Our Troops" yellow ribbon without any pangs over the horrid irony.

We know from countless television and movie crime dramas that murderers, particularly the psychopaths, impersonalize their victims. They refuse to name them individually. I would suggest that Dubya and his co-conspirators are murderers and entirely psychopathic but then did we really need to analyze their rhetoric to understand that?.