[update below]
Steven Salaita, a prof at Virginia Tech, has a nice piece in Salon in which he rails on against the inane rhetoric in America about “supporting the troops.” He says that in America
we are repeatedly impelled to “support our troops” or to “thank our troops.” God constantly blesses them. Politicians exalt them. We are warned, “If you can’t stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them.” One wonders if our troops are the ass-kicking force of P.R. lore or an agglomeration of oversensitive duds and beggars.
Such troop worship is trite and tiresome, but that’s not its primary danger. A nation that continuously publicizes appeals to “support our troops” is explicitly asking its citizens not to think. It is the ideal slogan for suppressing the practice of democracy, presented to us in the guise of democratic preservation.
Democracy may perhaps not be suppressed as a result of this nationalistic rhetoric but the latter is certainly a prerequisite in bringing about this eventuality.
Salaita continues
“Support the troops” is the most overused platitude in the United States, but still the most effective for anybody who seeks interpersonal or economic ingratiation. The platitude abounds with significance but lacks the burdens of substance and specificity. It says something apparently apolitical while patrolling for heresy to an inelastic logic. Its only concrete function is to situate users into normative spaces.
Clichés aren’t usually meant to be analyzed, but this one illuminates imperialism so succinctly that to think seriously about it is to necessarily assess jingoism, foreign policy, and national identity. The sheer vacuity and inexplicability of the phrase, despite its ubiquity, indicates just how incoherent patriotism is these days.
Who, for instance, are “the troops”? Do they include those safely on bases in Hawaii and Germany? Those guarding and torturing prisoners at Bagram and Guantánamo? The ones who murder people by remote control? The legions of mercenaries in Iraq? The ones I’ve seen many times in the Arab world acting like an Adam Sandler character? “The troops” traverse vast sociological, geographical, economic and ideological categories. It does neither military personnel nor their fans any good to romanticize them as a singular organism.
And what, exactly, constitutes “support”? Is it financial giving? Affixing a declarative sticker to a car bumper? Posting banalities to Facebook? Clapping when the flight attendant requests applause?
Ultimately, the support we’re meant to proffer is ideological. The terms we use to define the troops — freedom-fighters, heroic, courageous — are synecdoche for the romance of American warfare: altruistic, defensive, noble, reluctant, ethical. To support the troops is to accept a particular idea of the American role in the world. It also forces us to pretend that it is a country legitimately interested in equality for all its citizens. Too much evidence to the contrary makes it impossible to accept such an assumption.
In reality, the troops are not actually recipients of any meaningful support. That honor is reserved for the government and its elite constituencies. “Support our troops” entails a tacit injunction that we also support whatever politicians in any given moment deem the national interest. If we understand that “the national interest” is but a metonym for the aspirations of the ruling class, then supporting the troops becomes a counterintuitive, even harmful, gesture.
The government’s many appeals to support the troops represent an outsourcing of its responsibility (as with healthcare, education and incarceration). Numerous veterans have returned home to inadequate medical coverage, psychological afflictions, unemployment and increased risk of cancer. The free market and corporate magnanimity are supposed to address these matters, but neither has ever been a viable substitute for the dynamic practices of communal policymaking. A different sort of combat ensues: class warfare, without the consciousness.
As in most areas of the American polity, we pay taxes that favor the private sector, which then refuses to contribute to any sustainable vision of the public good. The only serious welfare programs in the United States benefit the most powerful among us. Individual troops, who are made to preserve and perpetuate this system, rarely enjoy the spoils. The bonanza is reserved for those who exploit the profitability of warfare through the acquisition of foreign resources and the manufacture of weapons.
Supporting the troops is a cheerful surrogate for enabling the friendly dictators, secret operations, torture practices and spying programs that sustain this terrible economy.
Très bien. Read the whole thing here.
UPDATE: A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog has a valid response to Steven Salaita’s essay.
Not sure how valid the response was; “It is imperative that someone who opposes a war should still “support our troops” and offer them our thanks and gratitude for putting their lives on the line to protect the country.” One of the issues I have long had with the pernicious “support our troops” slogan is that the soldiers are “protect[ing] the country”. There have been precious few military engagements undertaken by the US that have anything to do with protecting the country, and many that have, in the long term, undermined it. Not that we should demonize those who serve, but neither should we presume they put their lives on the line (when they did — most troops serve far from any battlefield) to advance the nation’s interests. (It should be noted that the extent of maltreatment of returning Vietnam veterans is subject to debate, though it has become a conservative matter of faith that virtually all returning Vietnam vets were mistreated.)
When he wrote, “It says something apparently apolitical while patrolling for heresy to an inelastic logic,” Salaita approaches, but does not fully examine, another important truth — that support for the troops is apolitical. People froth at the mouth when, for instance, a professional athlete publicly supports same gender marriage, stating that sports should remain free of politics. Yet these same people do not see the flyovers before many major sporting events or the colors guards in attendance, etc., etc. as political statements, which they assuredly are.
DHM, your response to the reader is equally valid, if not more so. I don’t disagree with you.