Guest blogger Christian Parenti--a correspondent for The Nation and an author who has reported from Iraq and Afghanistan--happened upon a small turd in the New York Times yesterday. I had initially overlooked the enormity of the piece--since after all it does refer to Senator Ted Kennedy without overtly depiciting him officiating a gay wedding whilst fumbling in an angry drunken stupor for the detonator on his suicide belt--but Parenti recognized it for what it was: a fetid bit of nothingness which yet provides a kind of tiny porthole view of a metonymic "dingleberry" suspended from the asshole [sic] of the Death Machine. Parenti writes:

Have you read “Flags of Our Sons,” the August 4 NYT op-ed by someone named Billy Shore?

At first glance the little essay is just a heartfelt homage to the quiet sacrifice and dignity of everyday Americans who simply do as asked, and do not ask why.

A mere vignette by some unknown do-gooder seems inoffensive enough– after all it doesn’t even make an argument. But the lack of an overt argument is the essay’s worst offense, its most manipulative tactic, the essence of its crime.

So fawning, mawkish and corny is the op-ed’s tone --you can almost hear the author panting as you read it-- and so jingoistic are the images it invokes, that the piece actually veers off into neo-fascist iconography.

In classically fascist style the piece estheticizes politics – rendering them non-rational, reducing them to the "common sense" of one’s gut.

In Riefenstahian fashion, Shore deploys all the most offensive nationalist tropes so as to simultaneously mask and smuggle in a twisted politics of warmongering.

Consider the amazing amount of Norman Rockwell-style jack-booting that Billy Shore packs into one little fluff piece: the flag, the coffin, the soil into which it will go (Arlington); the earnest politician; the dignity of the family, the grieving mother, the stoic could-be-a-vet father; the sanctity and homoerotic thrill of the Marine dress uniform; a perceived offense to the grieving mother from an overweight loutish man; the blind loyalty of military camraderie; the flimsy sacrifice of a rich person giving a solider his first class seat; the subservient applause of the claque in coach.

It’s all so emotionally coercive, so politically masochistic that it's almost ridiculous. But this
sort of politics by way of de-politicized esthetics does much to shape political thinking. What is really being venerated in Shore’s cloying little nursery tale is war and nationalism.

And then the last line! Billy Shore, hopped up on false humility, goes off to work “wanting only to be worthy.”

What a load of shit that is.

Worthy of what?

You want to kill Hajjis? You want to join up?

What? What is it you want to be worthy of, Billy?

Hey, maybe it's time for you to head back to the $250-an-hour dominatrix to have your soft, flabby white ass whipped hard.

The brand of folksy pseudo-Americana on display in “Flags of Our Sons” is a favorite of the self–hating blue state yuppie. NPR overflows with the same crap: the dowsing for authenticity. Those slow-spoken, imitatively twangy, trope-laden interviews – “How is everything in Palatka, Mrs. Jones? Are People enjoying the fish fry this year?”

It’s the thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another school of yuppie liberal slumming, the disingenuous search for “the soul of the regular folk.”

Not only is Shore’s writing contrived and clichéd – it reeks of the faux earnestness mustered by seventh graders in essay contests – but the op-ed’s political assumptions are obscene.

We benefit from the war in Iraq? The troops killing and dying there “serve” us?

How?

There were no WMD in Iraq, nor was there any link to 9/11. Now our soldiers are being maimed and killed. Our taxes wasted on corrupt contracting. We have incurred the wrath of Muslims the world over. We have helped to kill tens of thousand of innocent Iraqi civilians and the whole thing is clearly ending is a horrible, open-ended civil war.

The US soldiers in Iraq – some of whom I count among my friends – are not serving us, the people of the US, as Billy Shore claims. They are being used and abused as pawns by an Administration that has lied at every turn and is now stuck in a war it is unable to win and
unwilling to lose.

Lame cutesy Americana is part of what keeps that death machine rolling.

Having said that, I now return to other tasks, my only aim to be worthy.