Liberals Aren't the Victims
A link took me to the Tarantula Brothers Emporium (http://www.cafepress.com/tarantulabros), where left-wing bumper stickers and T-shirts can be bought.
I perused BUSH LIED, SOLDIERS DIED and HELP! I'M TRAPPED IN A RED STATE! and WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFINS (with an image of an American-flag-draped coffin) and I HAVE NO PRESIDENT, but felt finally unhappy with all of them, and wondered why.
Eventually it occurred to me: even the angriest of these messages are emphasizing American losses in Iraq, as though the measure of the calamity is number of dead U.S. soldiers. Even I HAVE NO PRESIDENT, which I like, speaks to American progressives's sense that they have been wronged.
The real victims of the Bush presidency's imperial ventures are not U.S. soldiers or domestic liberals. The real victims are Afghani and Iraqi civilians, dead by the hundreds of thousands.
If I designed a bumper sticker, it would say AMERICANS TORTURE PRISONERS or AMERICA HAS DEVASTATED IRAQ. The needless deaths of a thousand American soldiers -- and the maiming of many thousands more -- pale beside this greater enormity.
I feel very strongly about this.
I perused BUSH LIED, SOLDIERS DIED and HELP! I'M TRAPPED IN A RED STATE! and WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFINS (with an image of an American-flag-draped coffin) and I HAVE NO PRESIDENT, but felt finally unhappy with all of them, and wondered why.
Eventually it occurred to me: even the angriest of these messages are emphasizing American losses in Iraq, as though the measure of the calamity is number of dead U.S. soldiers. Even I HAVE NO PRESIDENT, which I like, speaks to American progressives's sense that they have been wronged.
The real victims of the Bush presidency's imperial ventures are not U.S. soldiers or domestic liberals. The real victims are Afghani and Iraqi civilians, dead by the hundreds of thousands.
If I designed a bumper sticker, it would say AMERICANS TORTURE PRISONERS or AMERICA HAS DEVASTATED IRAQ. The needless deaths of a thousand American soldiers -- and the maiming of many thousands more -- pale beside this greater enormity.
I feel very strongly about this.
posted by Gregory Feeley at 4:41 AM
5 Comments:
I have been feeling similarly, both about the Iraq conflict, and about reportage about the tsunami victims. I grieve for the 36 American deaths--but in the face of hundreds of thousands dead and many more injured, orphaned, and likely to die of disease or hunger, leading news-reports about the disaster with the number of American deaths is senseless.
I have yet to see a political bumper sticker that adequately expresses my feelings about this war.
You can make your own political buttons and bumper stickers, but to be intellectually honest, sometimes you have to write so much text that they're hard to read. It's the limitation imposed by form.
My bumper sticker would say something about
How I feel is too complex to write down on a bumper sticker, but I also don't really feel like having to talk to you about it.
"ush Lied, People Died" would have been more inclusive, but "...Soldiers..." is quite an adequate refutation of "Support our Troops" (which, as Russ Holt notes, this Administration conspicuously does not do.
I grieve for the 36 American deaths--but in the face of hundreds of thousands dead and many more injured, orphaned, and likely to die of disease or hunger, leading news-reports about the disaster with the number of American deaths is senseless.I've always been bothered by the focus on American deaths, too. It's as if we think people can't be compelled to care unless they have the American figures. Is this true? I hope not, fear so, at least some of the time, for some folks.
I sometimes fear that until we can get most people to believe that the entire planet is real, and not just our own corner of it, we're not going to get anywhere.
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