"If we really care about peace, we must stay strong. If we really care about peace, we must, through our strength, demonstrate our unwillingness to accept an ending of the peace. We must be strong enough to create peace where it does not exist and strong enough to protect it where it does. That’s the lesson of this century and, I think, of this day.”
- President Ronald Reagan, Memorial Day 1986, Arlington Cemetery
* *To read the text of Pres. Reagan’s speech, go to this week’s FYI.
May 30, 2012
By: Linda Case Gibbons
Boasting a roster of abrasive personalities known for their acerbic comments about all things conservative, you need a score card to keep track of who is suspended from the network lineup at any given time.
Is it Ed Schultz for calling Laura Ingraham a "right wing slut,” Al Sharpton for saying Republicans are like Hitler and are prepared to kill African-Americans, or the dear, departed Keith Olbermann just for being Keith Olbermann?
This self-touted "place to go for progressives” cable channel limps along in the ratings, but is well worth the price of admission nonetheless.
On Memorial Day 2012 it was easier than ever to get peeved at MSNBC and Chris Hayes in particular.
On the day reserved to honor fallen war heroes, Hayes took the time to attack war in general and war heroes in particular.
This host said what could be expected from someone on MSNBC’s payroll -- in this case a Brown University graduate, son of a community organizer, defender of Occupy Wall Street protesters and husband to an associate counsel for Barack Obama.
"Why do I feel so uncomfortable about the word ‘hero’? Hayes said. "I feel uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war…I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that’s fallen and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that.”
Yeah, maybe you are.
And then, true to the drill, he trotted out the perfunctory apology to save his job, all the while managing to avoid really saying he was sorry at all.
He started out:
"As many have rightly pointed out, it’s very easy for me, a TV host, to opine about the people who fight our wars, having never dodged a bullet or guarded a post or walked a mile in their boots.”
Okay. Now here’s the non-apology part.
"Of course, that is true of the overwhelming majority of our nation’s citizens as a whole. One of the points made during Sunday’s show was just how removed most Americans are from the wars we fight, how small a percentage of our population is asked to shoulder the entire burden and how easy it becomes to never read the names of those who are wounded and fight and die, to not ask questions about the direction of our strategy in Afghanistan and to assuage our own collective guilt about this disconnect with a pro-forma ritual that we observe briefly before returning to our barbecues.”
The backlash of "how dare he’s” to his original statement were many and swift, touching on everything Hayes should feel and say about his country and fallen soldiers, but which he doesn’t and won't and never will.
After all, this guy’s ideas are fully formed. He’s a thirty-something man, a father and a husband. When it comes right down to it, why are we giving this brat the satisfaction of his fifteen minutes of fame by talking about him at all?
Granted, he may speak more eloquently than Al Sharpton and use fifty-cent words, but the disconnect from reality is the same, although I have to admit listening to Sharpton is more fun. Yesterday, for instance, the reverend was at it again.
"It seems like they (Republicans) act as though, some wiping out of people, some of the right-wing, is all right, it’s not all right to do to any innocent people. If you had war and people that’s one thing, but to wipe out innocent people just because of who they are like what was done in Hitler’s Germany or what was done to Native Americans is not justifiable,” Sharpton said.
(Sigh)
And this man will receive a prominent seat at the Democratic National Convention this year.
Why does he get away with it? Why does Sharpton, a man who is unable to form a complete English sentence, have his own "political” show on TV? Why does he rush to place himself at the center of every racial controversy in the country? Good question.
Why do any of them get away with it?
This televised, political "Ship of Fools” would delight author Katherine Anne Porter because it fits her novel’s theme so perfectly. Her book describes profoundly disappointed passengers seeking a kind of utopia "without knowing what to do next.”
Let’s be honest. People like Hayes or Ed Shultz or Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donnell believe they are superior to you and me, a trait they share with President Obama and the liberal left and you can take it from there.
They will not concede that no one wants war, but sometimes it is necessary. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as putting a flower into a rifle barrel.
But they know better and are better than you and me.
They will not concede that we all want clean air, efficient energy. They know better and want to show you they are better than you or me.
They are like little kids who sneer at their elders and act out about everything. And no one has at this point sent them to their rooms without dinner.
There is no balanced approach to any issue and there are never, never any solutions. And there never will be.
It’s okay with me that MSNBC is there for Occupy Wall Street and liberals and progressives. But when Chris Hayes uses his "apology” to speak for me? Uh uh.
I have no "collective guilt” about the wars in which America has been involved.
I also have respect for those who stepped forward to protect America, all of them, not just the "individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that…”
So I do disagree with Chris Hayes and subscribe to President Regan’s approach to America and its fallen heroes as expressed in his 1986 Memorial Day Address at Arlington Cemetery.
"All of these men were different, but they shared this in common: They loved America very much. There was nothing they wouldn’t do for her.
Regarding those who fought in Vietnam:
"They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam – boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march.
"They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.”
They stood for something.
So the Chris Hayes’ of the world can debate, "War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing,” while someone else is out there fighting for Hayes' right to exhibit his "fashionable skepticism” or debate the "efficacy of the battle.”
And when all is said and done, it’s okay with me if he tells us he admires his father whom he said did his first community organizing "for people who had trained with Alinsky.”
But what puzzles me is that while unable to call soldiers killed in battle "heroes,” Hayes has no problem saying, "My parents are totally amazing, heroic figures.”
Well, actually that’s okay with me, too. At least he loves his mom and dad. That’s something, isn’t it?
Hold the line, America.