Some of you might have been following the exchanges I've had in recent days with a blogger named Jake. Jake is good folks. He is in training to become a Special Forces operative - a Green Beret, if you will. And apparently, a bard, of sorts. His blog sometimes expresses opinions that are, um, a little right of center. But he's thoughtful about it, and - unlike some others - he's prepared to listen thoughtfully to other views. Especially when those views update our understanding of the underlying history and sociology for an event or opinion. And (lest we forget) he is one of those who has sworn (or affirmed) to defend our right to choose to waste away in front of American Idol, and to die - yes, I said die - in that defense if necessary. So, he gets my respect. And my arguments.

Like about al-Zarqawi and his habit of beheading captives with dull knives. Barbaric, right? We would never do any such thing, right? Um, no. We have on our consciences a minor little event in Kansas called the Pottawatomie Massacre, in which a gentleman by the name of John Brown and his associates grabbed five pro-slavery Kansas settlers more or less at random and, in the words of James M. McPherson, “coolly split open their skulls with broadswords�. Pictures at 11 – or there would have been if this had happened in 2006 instead of 1856. Hey, waitaminute, isn’t John Brown the abolitionist martyr, who died because he was trying to free slaves? The one that John Brown’s Body, the song sung to the tune that later became hitched to the poem The Battle Hymn of the Republic, is about? Yes, the very same. And if you’d lived in Virginia in 1859, you’d have called John Brown a terrorist. And you would have been right. But Virginia didn’t win the Civil War …

So I’m going back-and-forth with Jake on topics like this, and I find myself reflecting on several things. Like why so many of us are so riled up about our involvement in Iraq. And at the same time are obsessed with “supporting the troops� over there. Wondering how one can “hate the war but love our soldiers�.

Y’see, back in the Vietnam era, it was harder to have discussions with active-duty soldiers like the ones that Jake and I are having now. No, not because we didn’t have the Internet back then. My God, how did we cope? But because such discussions demoralized the troops. Or were thought to. Facts are dangerous things, even in a country that preaches “liberty and justice for all�. “Liberty� includes our willingness to acknowledge facts; for instance, that we, as well as they, have been known to use dull knives. Or weapons of mass destruction. And, “liberty� includes our willingness to use such facts to beat on our soldiers who, in the Universal Soldier ethic that was current during the Vietnam era, are as much responsible for the atrocities of war as our Presidents. An ethic that is a direct descendant of the principle established in the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, in which the individual soldier was held responsible for his actions; the “following orders� defense was not allowed. This, I think, was how many of us used our liberty in the Vietnam era. And we lost the war.

So am I trying to turn Jake into a hippie? Hardly. I don’t choose to use my liberty in this way. My point in arguing with Jake is not “You’re wrong, stop shooting� as it was in Vietnam, but rather “We have given you this job. Do it. Do it well. And while you’re doing it, remember what it is We the People claim we stand for.� Liberty. And justice. For all. Everybody. US and non-US. The ability to discuss, freely and openly, what the facts are and how they apply. To act on those discussions, whether the actions are wise or stupid, accept the consequences for those actions, learn from them, and go on. The idea of basing a Government on this principle was radical in 1776; have we forgotten that Lincoln, and practically all of the great American leaders who preceded him, called our form of government “The Great Experiment�? The idea is radical now – for our current opponents all (to my knowledge anyway) consist of people and groups who would stifle any such liberty, whether the excuse is a God or a demagogue. Who fear any such liberty, lest their special privileges be infringed.

It takes a long time, and hard work, to learn how to live “liberty and justice for all�. We the People have hardly perfected it. It took places like Germany and Japan, and even our own Southeast, a decade or more to learn it under our tutelage, perfect or less so, after a war. Germany had to have two cracks at it – the first time they wound up with Hitler. Bzzzaaat. But it’s the thing we have to sell. The idea that you can have personal liberty and still run a functioning society, indeed a society that, for all its paint chips and rust spots, runs better than anybody else’s. How else did we get to suck up all our own energy sources and most of the rest of the world’s as well, eh? The hope for it has sustained many a population under a despot’s domination. Populations that now have a (more) republican form of government, and are doing well by it.

Maybe that’s at the core of the disquiet over our current leadership’s management of things. Why some of us, myself included, continue to “obsess� over Abu Ghraib. Over Guantanamo. For if our message to the rest of the world is “liberty and justice for all�, we ought to be in good shape. If, however, our message is “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss�, we’re in trouble.

Which one of these does it look like to you?

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.