Parade envy

One of the dumbest, most mean-spirited little screeds ever to appear on the op-ed page of an otherwise respectable newspaper popped up recently down at the LA Times. If I link to it, whatever little bit of extra traffic that might get them could be construed by them as encouragement, however slight, to engage in more of this kind of behavior, so I'll just give you this little squib, quoted by Steve Gilliard at The News Blog:

I DON'T SUPPORT our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car. Supporting the troops is a position that even Calvin is unwilling to urinate on.

I'm sure I'd like the troops. They seem gutsy, young and up for anything. If you're wandering into a recruiter's office and signing up for eight years of unknown danger, I want to hang with you in Vegas.

And I've got no problem with other people — the ones who were for the Iraq war — supporting the troops. If you think invading Iraq was a good idea, then by all means, support away. Load up on those patriotic magnets and bracelets and other trinkets the Chinese are making money off of.

But I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.

And it continues that way for about another 500 words. Steve Gilliard then goes on to do something I'm not prepared to do myself: He takes the author, Joel Stein, seriously enough to reply:

Why would you support the troops? Because, for many of us, they are our families. They didn't choose to go to Iraq and no one asked them about Afghanistan. The deserve our support, because like firemen and police officers, they do a job for the rest of us that we ask them to do. It is our collective fault when they are misused. You cannot assign away your responsibility all that easily.

Second, they don't just fight for the people who supported the war. If Mr. Stein wasn't a smug fuck, he'd read Stars and Stripes and see American soldiers, in Iraq, oppose this war. They serve because they have to, but they didn't stop thinking.

Actually, when I shared this tidbit with longtime reader/correspondent James the Elder, he fired back a note in much the same vein:

Stein is quite the fellow, isn't he? Of course, he is the perfect rep for many of the members of the administration and for that matter the American public. Talk about the love of the troops but don't really pay them an appropriate salary. A cop gets more than a grunt. Cut VA bennies, especially if you are wounded or better yet if you can't see the wound. Don't let them move into your neighborhood.

Sorry, I just find that attitude very crappy. Makes me think of Dick "I had other priorities" Cheney. On the other hand, Stein is, unlike the other guys, being out front about the whole thing. That is a little different. I suppose it is tough when you have a life of privilege and just don't understand when others don't.

Can't really fault either one of them for the substance of their replies to this stuffed burp; I certainly agree with them. But I think that, by pointing out the ways in which he's wrong, they're both giving Stein too much credit. He's not a worthy interlocutor. He's much too shallow for that.

We're talking about a person who's apparently making a living as a Moe Rocca knock-off: A desperately ironic, faux hipster (as signaled by the occasionally disheveled hair and funny glasses), who manufactures short, stupid but clever-sounding, deadpan pop culture opinion-oids wherever they'll pay him scale for it--at places like "VH-1: I Love the 80s" or every other countdown-clip show on VH-1, MTV, E!, or even CMT. Surf those channels on any evening during a non-sweeps month and you've got a 50-50 chance of flushing him up. (Trivia: Actually, at least one of those sightings was Rocca, not Stein--which only goes to make my point. Come to think of it, has anyone ever seen the two of them in the same place at the same time?)

His opinion about the Iraq war is really of a piece with his opinion on whether "Dukes of Hazzard" was better than "Starky & Hutch," or his thoughts about the Rubik's Cube craze or the "dream season" of "Dallas."

Let's do all ourselves a favor: Scrape him off and get back to work.