Memes go to war(!), 'aestheticizing conservatism down', and other small matters.

Heading over to Michelle Malkin's website for my weekly dose of schadenfreude I saw the oddest logo:

Apparently Ed Morrissey and other right-wing bloggers are miffed at the name-calling that, in their view, passes for argument in some parts of the American Left. (Typing that with a straight face was difficult, I confess.) This is 'Captain' Ed's version of things:

Our friends on the port side of the blogosphere have had quite a time tossing around funny little nicknames for those of us who support the war on terror and use our blogs to express our convictions about it. We've seen the names here at CQ in the comments section -- the term "chickenhawk" has appeared more than once, and others in the blogosphere have assigned us to a unit called the 101st Fighting Keyboardists.

He then goes on to talk about his desire to 'do his part' in the War on Terror, saying that he 'spent weeks' looking for ways to serve his country in the wake of 9/11.

I resolved to use the skills I had -- writing -- to make the case for fighting a forward strategy against terrorists. Eventually that led me to this blog, but in the interim I argued for a continued muscular offensive against the Islamofascists that had murdered thousands of our fellow Americans.

Is that the same as military service? Of course not. The men and women of the military do the real fighting, and we salute them and support them by supporting their mission. [...] For many of us, we know that without presenting our arguments in the national forum, many in the media and the public will quickly overpower the debate and threaten the policies we feel give us the best long-term opportunity to defeat terrorism and the states that fund and shelter them.

To reclaim the epithet '101st Fighting Keyboarders' - a derisive term used against right-wing 'warbloggers' for reasons we'll get to in a moment - Morrissey decided to commission a logo, which you see above. He encourages fellow 'warbloggers' to wear it with pride:

[...] especially those who have a sense of humor as well as a sense of purpose. This way, the next time someone refers to you as a chicken hawk for your blogging, you can remind them that as a member of the 101, your talons are your best weapon and that feeding time is near!

Malkin links approvingly, as do plenty of other 'warbloggers'.

Unfortunately for everyone, explanation and clarification are still called for on the matter of the terms '101st Fighting Keyboarders' and 'chickenhawk'. On the one hand, there is (self-evidently) something disturbing about the tendency of certain Americans to call for their fellow men's children to fight in bloody war and castigate others for their 'cowardice' from behind anonymous blogs and the like; Morrissey himself may actually have tried to serve his country, which 'family obligations' (apparently his wife is chronically ill) made impossible, but he's a rare exception to the general skittishness that characterizes the most vehement war-supporters, from Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld on down. He does loop-de-loops to make the claim that blogging about Iraq is an important contribution to the 'war effort' - A+ for effort, but there's no substance to his claim, only an aesthetic appeal predicated on fantasy. Of course, by the same line of reasoning one should applaud draft dodgers for making the difficult moral decision to stay out of war and 'do their part' from home, but we'll leave that aside (along with the related, complex issue of the importance of 'nobility of intention' in pro-war conservative rationalization).

More importantly, I think Morrissey is displaying both unsurprising ignorance of the state of discursive play in the blogosphere's 'port side' (isn't the nautical terminology charming and gruff?), and surprising ignorance of the kind of shameful things his 'warblogger' fellow-travelers say on a daily basis. The pathetic thing about the '101st Fighting Keyboarders' isn't their unwillingness to actually go fight a war - it's the pervasive fantasy that they already are. This is widely understood among progressive blog-commentators, and yet this risible behaviour continues unabated since 9/11, from Hugh Hewitt calling the Empire State Building a front in the 'War on Terror' and equating working in an NYC skyscraper to serving in Iraq, to Michelle Malkin's constant warmongering rhetoric (cf. her latest 'cyberattack on blogs' post, which refers to the 'Internet Jihad' trying to cripple conservatives' freedom of speech), to Andrew Sullivan's casual elision of the difference between soldier and blogger, as in his recent explanation of why he likely won't see United 93:

And yet, I will not see this movie, whatever its merits. The trauma is still too close. That day is still etched in me, as in all of us. It was a specific, unique trauma for those heroes on the plane; but it was also an emotional devastation for anyone who loves this country. Do we want to revisit their and our own traumas as entertainment? Perhaps this is cowardice, then, that I feel; and seeing it again would stiffen my spine against terror, and remind me of what we still owe the victims and the heroes of that day. But the years since, and the atrocities still committed by the Jihadists, have not diminished my or, I suspect, many other people's desire to fight our enemy with vigor and precision. My spine hasn't softened against al Qaeda. If anything, I want to defeat what they represent more now than ever. [my emphasis]

Sullivan doesn't even pretend to want to fight the war; he builds up his own feeling of self-worth by taking 'every little bit helps' to its illogical conclusion and embracing his inner Cold Warrior. It's as much a John Le Carré fantasy as anything else - the enemy is among us! He's on the Internet, using our phone system, pirating our movies! He'll bomb us the instant our upper lip unstiffens!!

John Holbo hammered this home in what I think is one of the finest bits of writing the 'blogosphere' has ever produced: his post on David Frum's Dead Right, in which he takes Frum and his fellow wingers to task for (to coin a phrase) aestheticizing conservatism down:

Far more interesting, actually, is the matter of feeling – not thinking, to be sure – that good social and cultural aesthetics will produce good economics. Just get the right sort of people – i.e. the people that appeal to conservative sensibilities – and somehow the economy will be fine. If you like it, call it natural. After all, if it wasn't natural, why would you like it? As Empson says: 'while he is like this he is Natural and that will induce Nature to make us prosperous.'

[...]

Frum cleaves to a radically elitist conception according to which, ideally, a narrowly-conceived set of social and cultural ideals are imposed on a potentially recalcitrant and resistant population. Why? Because he has the philosophical clarity of mind to see that the alternative is unthinkably terrible: a radically elitist conception according to which, ideally, a narrowly-conceived set of social and cultural ideals are imposed on a potentially recalcitrant and resistant population. Nothing that fits that description could possibly be good, obviously.

Holbo is talking about cultural/economic conservatism, but the same fantasy-projection is essential to the 'warblogger' outlook as well: if we just wear our ten-gallon hat and chaps and privatize Social Security the ragheads won't dare mess with us again! Even if they bomb us a couple of times (which they're bound to do because this war will never really end), that's just part of the cost of being from the greatest nation in the history of the world, the only country enlightened enough to see that diplomacy never works, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, EXEUNT OMNES. You can see the casuistry at work in the back half of that dream: we can't let ourselves lose, but since we've posited annihilation as the only way we're going to win and we're not the 'kind of people' who annihilate (unlike those pussy-ass Arab motherfuckers) we can't actually win, and when you get down to it it's all because of the 60's, because we couldn't stay the course and clean house in Vietnam, because the conservative hegemons aren't conservative enough...

Criticism of the '101st' is criticism of the bloodlust and barbarism that characterizes so many warbloggers' self-representations and chest-pounding. It's not actually about war, it's about shared fantasy and a feeling of affirmation. It's a religious belief. As TBogg puts it:

Now a gaggle of NoticeMe!NoticeMe! bloggerettes are signing up so that Captain Ed will link to them and, oh the sweet smell of Pajamaline cash that may someday also be theirs.

Unfortunately TBogg then goes on to make a juvenile, disgusting remark about Catholic priests, reflecting a misunderstanding of the scope of the pedophilia problem among priests, a comment the more depressing for how typical it is. His point about 'Me too!' bloggers is well taken, however: there's guilt at work here, an easy way out of the essential apathy re: world affairs that struck the nation near the turn of the century (only in America is it called 'war' when you campaign against Tinky-Winky, the Teletubbie with the handbag). All this breast-beating and logo-designing might be a fun day out for right-wingers, but it glides right by a major problem: that the conduct of the 'War on Terror' and its spinoff, the Iraq War (and its probable sequel, the Iran Something-or-other), has been atrocious and incompetent not in spite of the bloodthirsty fantasy-play enacted by warbloggers and the like but because of it. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their brethren in the White House are afflicted with the same zeal and the same habit of equating 'boldness' with 'rightness'. Rick Perlstein's speech about conservatism post-Nixon, in which he points out and derides the rhetorical maneuver of assuming conservatism and only then selectively matching policy ideas and moral justifications to it, rather than the other way around, could easily be adapted to talk about this defensive self-justification on the part of warbloggers and their ilk, who assume moral rightness and then evaluate correctness of action on that basis, rather than (y'know) actual correctness. A small army is a great idea! We need more troops! We shouldn't retreat! We should let the Iraqis govern themselves! We'll pay for it with oil! ANWR oil is better! It's not even about oil at all! Respect our troops! Retired troops should keep their mouths shut! Leaks endanger our nation! Leaks are vital to our security! Buy Danish! Ban provocative TV! Freedom of speech is an absolute moral right! Dissenters should be shot! This woefully inconsistent set of ejaculations rests on a firm commitment not to liberty, not to Christianity, not to stability, but to boldness - to being Butch.

This is not a comment on conservatism but on a common mindset among 'warbloggers' - you know the type. They're a club, and unfortunately (as with the Dan Rather mess during the 2004 election, in which Rather took the fall for a story that was merely correct but in support of which forged documents were stupidly used by CBS) they're kind of important. Emphasis on 'kind of': Pajamas Media, for instance, has failed to bear fruit, at least in part because it's run by fools and demagogues and provides no interesting or original content.

The '101st Fighting Keyboarders' fancy themselves soldiers in the war to end all wars. They interpret criticism of 'the war' (broadly defined), of the shifting rationales for war, of the fantasies and neuroses that underpin it, as betrayal - of this country's 'ideals' and 'values' and other self-serving ahistorical notions. (On May 1 check your local calendar for expressions of other, all-too-often forgotten American values. I'm not sure I can take time off work, but I'll serve my country by blogging about the demonstrations. Solidarity through trackback! And so forth.)

In any case: best of luck to them with their logo and their jargon-reclamation project. I had a whole separate post brewing, about the media politics/culture involved, and the ways memes like 'chickenhawk' get shuffled around and redeployed over time, but that'll have to wait. We've got episodes of NewsRadio to watch, courtesy of Netflix, and after that a party to attend. My country, 'tis of thee I sing!

Comments

[Evil Otto]

Dear God, man, get a frikkin' sense of humor.

[Wax]

'Waaah! Your analysis of our unfunny "joke" isn't funny!'

There are many, many, many responses to my posts that I disagree with but don't find stupid.

Regrettably, Otto, yours is not one of them.

[This response has pushed a little bit further the boundary of how mean-spirited I'm willing to be to strangers.]

[EdR]

I find it interesting how the supposed keyboardists can only support the war effort as bloggers. The soldiers are doing all the real fighting and the keyboardists present who's views, the soldiers or their own? Malkin representing the views and speaking on behalf of our soldiers? Guess it's not so shocking, just another typical scenario these days.

[Evil Otto]

Regrettably, Otto, yours is not one of them.

Oh, dear, I'm simply crushed. I'll nip off and kill myself at once.

[Wax]

Now don't do that! It's just a blog post.

I was needlessly churlish. I do apologise for lowering the tone, though I maintain both that (1) I was being funny and (2) that's a dumb response.

[Dirty Sanchez]

The commander-in-chief of our military is a civilian. This was by design by the people who created our country. This is generally considered a good idea by people who aren't drooling morons. Yet every time our country is at war, there is this constant criticism of the political leadership for not being part of the military.

You aren't being shot at, so what's there to worry about. The casualties? Let's bump the number up to 5,0000. That represents 0.001675% of our total population. Somebody wake me up when it becomes statistically relevant. Around 0.2% will do.

[Wax Banks]

I don't know if you know this - and indeed I'm a little embarrassed to point it out - but Mr Sanchez, your nickname ('Dirty') is also a euphemism for a sex act involving poo.

I just don't want you to feel made fun of, is all, when The Kids point it out to you. It's an unfortunate coincidence, nothing more. If your name wasn't Sanchez it wouldn't be a problem I'm sure.