Posted on 07/07/2005 11:51:19 AM PDT by fight_truth_decay
Happy birthday America, you suck. That seemed to be the sentiment of National Book Award winner James Carroll in a July 5 Boston Globe column. "After the fireworks, the music, the rhetoric of freedom -- what then? The party is over. Can we think about what, exactly, we were celebrating?" Carroll asked. "Today's date puts the question of how high-flown American ideals square with the quotidian reality of what the nation is becoming." Carroll ended by wondering: "What kind of nation does our flag fly over now?" He answered: "Not a less innocent one, because American innocence was never the truth. Not one less reluctant to go to war without a good reason, because we have foolishly credited bad reasons in the past. But now the nation lacks even that. As our President demonstrated last week, we have become a people who wage unending war -- killing and maiming our young ones and theirs -- without being remotely able to say why." In between, he declared: "The American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes."
CUT
....But what about today? In assessing post-celebration realities of the national moment, it may help to recall that America has never been an innocent nation, which is seen in its having constantly sought to appear as one. Indeed, the planting of the flag in self-affirming virtue is how the hallowed standard comes most readily under fire. The most poignant honoring of the flag of which I know is the US Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, the magnificent bronze rendering of the famous Joe Rosenthal photograph of five weary leathernecks and a Navy medic raising the flag on Iwo Jima....
The Iwo Jima image is sacred precisely because the men lifting up the fallen flag are all but unable to do so. The extremity of their exhaustion, their nearness to defeat, the horrors of what they have been through and of what awaits them are all implied in the painful stretch of limbs, in the rough gear of armored clothing, in the absolute investment each has made in a symbol of something better than himself. Even as the valor of what they did on one beachhead after another is properly honored, the American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war. To raise the flag at Iwo Jima was to lift the transcendent symbol out of the total hell that the war had become. Few if any men who survived it came home speaking of virtue.
As much as the defeat of militarized Japanese fascism was a victory, the war was also a tragedy, and the Iwo Jima image of desperate men around the flag acknowledges that, too. A new American tragedy is unfolding in Iraq. Not even its supporters pretend to see glory in this war now, and who imagines anything like "victory" any more? But if an iconic American image of the Iraqi struggle emerges, it will probably not resemble the Iwo Jima statue because amputation and mutilation have become hallmarks of the GI experience of the "improvised explosive devices" that ambush them....
The "bursting in air" of July 4th is an implicit glorification of war. On the day after, can we think of those combat survivors who will carry the real cost of the Iraqi war in their bodies forever? And how can we think of those American daughters and sons without thinking of their even more numerous Iraqi sisters and brothers?
What kind of nation does our flag fly over now? Not a less innocent one, because American innocence was never the truth. Not one less reluctant to go to war without a good reason, because we have foolishly credited bad reasons in the past. But now the nation lacks even that. As our president demonstrated last week, we have become a people who wage unending war -- killing and maiming our young ones and theirs -- without being remotely able to say why.
END of Excerpt
For Carroll's July 5 column in full: www.boston.com
I have trouble celebrating a country so fully engulfed by a cultural revolution led by communist PC liberal idiot homosexual panty-waisted faggots like the author of this article. Good thing the so-called revolutionaries that infiltrated us don't have a man's worth of testosterone in the whole bunch of them because it's going to make it that much easier to go through them like the proverbial feces through a goose when the counter-revolution comes.
See you soon girly-boys. Don't soil your knickers.
Filled with loathing, and it shows. You're correct. And his self- and others-directed loathing passes for serious commentary in the Globe.
When he says "because of us," I wonder who the "us" is. The radical self-hating guilt-plagued left?
It sure as hell isn't America.
Radical Islam chooses to make war on us because they hate us. Carroll and his ilk might deserve that hate, but I sure don't, and neither does America.
and his Dad was an Air Force General!!!! read his bio via HWA , a lecture booking agency , what an America-hating POS , left over from the 60s [they all give each other "work"]
I'll attend with you , the ceremony being the crossing of swords!! LOL!!
James Carroll: "The "bursting in air" of July 4th is an implicit glorification of war."
What is implicit is that on every July Fourth patriotic Americans celebrate America's colonists' victorious revolution in 1776 with picnics and fireworks!
Carroll asks, "What kind of nation does our flag fly over now?"
Our flag flies over a brave and civilized nation - a constitutional republic which under attack by terrorists, leftists and the ACLU.
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