Dying for the Rhetoric of Old Men

[kpete]

ANN DAVIDOW FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

We will no doubt be remembered as one of the most wasteful societies ever, not only for our devastatingly careless treatment of the environment, but also for the terrible toll our arrogant disregard for human life has exacted on our youth - - without apology or shame, it should be noted.

Remarkably, former vice president Cheney - who never carried a weapon in defense of the country, and who successfully floated deferment after deferment during the Viet Nam era in the name of fatherhood - still struts the land as if his role in engineering the nation’s foreign policy produced the desired sine-qua-non for all time. Aside from his dismissive attitude with regard to torture, his deceitful manipulation of classified and semi-classified material was breathtaking.

His stand-in, Scooter Libby, tore the journalistic fabric to shreds by engaging former NY Times reporter, Judith Miller, to shepherd propaganda pieces purporting to be straight news onto the front page of the Times. Cheney, meanwhile, stood back, innocently pointing to the fact that his team was right after all - - the world’s most illustrious newspaper having reached the same conclusion as the Bush team. In the end, Judith Miller lost her position at the Times and moved on to Fox News, but by that time few people remembered the details or cared much about them.

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Before we ever again send troops into battle, we should make certain that we aren’t just responding to the rhetoric of old men who are willing to sacrifice the lives of young men in long and pointless wars that fail to resolve political differences, or validate the positions we take.

http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/17814-dying-for-the-rhetoric-of-old-men

[patrice]

1. Re our reaction to Cheney: IMO, in the '60s, one of the strongest drivers of protest and counter

culture was recognition of being manipulated, or out right coerced, into PROVING to our parents' generation that THEIR sacrifices, what they gave up, and ought perhaps not to have, of themselves, for _____________________________ , was not in vain. For many of their generation, their love was conditional and for many of us that was intuitively offensive. Christianity contains the essence of un-conditional love and we were being told that we better invest ourselves in our parents' own quid pro quos, or else not be loved.

Free Love was a natural reaction to this coercion and, whether we got authentically close to that, or were blind-sided as most generations are, by the rest of what we inherited from one's parents' temperaments, or not, that doesn't mean that the principle of Free Love is invalid. It just means we didn't understand it or ourselves. Whatever became of Free Love, some of us have made an effort to keep the faith with the principle that we don't own our children and they have nothing to prove to us; others have pretty much forgotten the whole thing or never were really into it that much in the first place.

I don't support inter-generational hostility. All of us inherit from and react to aspects of the generations preceding and succeeding our own, though some traits are stronger and other traits are weaker in specific generations.

A salient identity trait of my generation of the '60s was that recognition that old men, and women as accessories to men, should not enslave subsequent generations in order to prove their own worth, in order to validate their sacrifices for them. Just like individuals, if a generation has worth, it is in their/its ability to live that worth themselves. The people of the '60s knew that each generation needs to be free to become itself and, for whatever our secondary failures were in what we refer to as Free Love, it is this failure in our responsibilities to subsequent generations, by allowing Dick Cheney and PNAC/1% to do this to all of us, that we should honestly own our part of and NEVER FORGET.