It’s difficult to put in words how infuriating Trump’s pardons of the Blackwater Nisour Square scum are.
And then, when you finally manage to see these dangerous fools given the barest minimum punishment needed to ensure they serve as a warning to future dangerous fools, your boss - who is a hopelessly stupid fool himself with only the most cartoonish and moron-grade understanding of your craft - undoes all that in an instant for no reason other than his foolish whim, making a hollow mockery of you and the labor and suffering you and yours had devoted to that work.
And, mind you, this is completely leaving out the contempt and disrespect for the murdered victims of these scum, who deserve more justice than to have their lives and deaths thrown away again by a fucking coward who ran away when it was his turn to risk his precious skin.
That's what these pardons mean; the exact opposite of what Trump believes.
They mock and sneer at every murdered civilian and at every good US troop who did their work honorably and well. They make America small and weak.
It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and their impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and their impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.
~ Hugh MacDiarmid
I can't avoid noting that the McDiarmid poem was written about, of all the bizarre subjects to produce such a bitter polemic against soldiers-for-hire, the BEF of 1914!
ReplyDeleteDude was a truly out-there guy; Scottish Nationalist, Anglophobe, WW1 medic, communist, erly fascist sympathizer (before Mussolini made it obvious...). It's worth remembering that before our (and I include Britain in "Our") knee-jerk "support the troops" fervor the professional soldiers in Britain (and in the US, before WW2) were used to crush popular risings and break strikes. The tradition of "a scoundrel in a red coat" used to run deep in the working class both here and in Britain.
(Some day I will do a "Battles Long Ago" about Blair Mountain 1921, when the UMW went toe-to-toe against the Forces of Capital (and Billy Mitchell and the USAAF...) for the coalfields of West Virginia.)
But the BEF? Seems like a petty sort of grudge to carry against a bunch of guys who, regardless of what they and their ancestors had done domestically, were doing what their political masters had asked of them. It reminds me of the little verse inscribed on the monument to the British dead of Lexington and Concord:
"They came a thousand miles and died
To keep the past upon the throne.
Unheard beyond the evening tide
The British mother made her moan."
There's a difference there. That's no soldiering for pay, and McDiarmid gets it wrong, I think.