What's So Special About Veterans? | This Can't Be Happening!

Independent - from myths and places that "mow us all down."


I remember to this day a lovable old codger who used to revel in making provocative political statements to me at one of the coffee bars nearby, one that unfortunately burned down last winter. The territory of North Jefferson county is such, that once a "free and clear" business burns down, or is closed, years may very well pass by, in a long staggering back up on its feet before a complete recovery takes place. Many fail to ever make it back up and survive. Insurance, a luxury graced upon those indebted to bankers, is usually seldom held by the business owners, clawing and skinflint their way to small town prosperity.

The old guy, who like me, would never be considered by "the natives" as a local, since he had the audacity of moving here from Arkansas over fifty years before, lived and worked till he could make a retirement with his wife on a old farmstead patch of land just outside of town. I, being more unwholesome, came from the Neosho River valley down in southeast Kansas and while Arkansas was out of my element and range - we both, the old codger and I, shared an uneasy but humorous connection in our alien status among the much vaunted and highly over-rated "locals" graced with a generational namesake or bequeathed a familial legacy of a name.

Yes, only a family name.

I tell you this because usually when some holiday approached, a bitterness would surface between us, a strange public ritual would be engaged, where a lack of prowess is thrown about, and some weird male pissing contest would take place among the brethren at the coffee bars. Even at Christmas, a holy of holies of American holidays, when making desirous calls of "peace on Earth, good will toward men" is expressed ubiquitously from nearly every beer sopped tavern and church filled advert stuffed county newspaper - militarism rears it's vainglorious head among the generations in Jefferson county, Kansas.

What strange times we live in where war and conquest of foreign lands is trumpeted as the highest form of bravery; making heroes of whole legions of grocery clerks, freight dock apes, truck drivers, busboy waiters, pulpit pounding preachers and mostly anybody with a MOS file at some far-off underfunded VA hospital. Such is the mighty mythic power of folklore and provincial gossip etched, one would think for all eternity - like the prayers muttered each and every holiday, held by the high-minded leaders of our villages over names etched in stones on some carved idol to nationalist bayonets, the great shedding as a baptism of blood and guts, for flag and country, a most deafening cry against the very "peace on Earth, good will toward all humankind" it is pure falderol!

And now I hear the old codger is laying in a local nursing home, still addicted to a steady diet of cable television and Fox News fed war propaganda; lies, lies, lies - and still more lies devised by the best of Madison Avenue publicity designers. He may not be with us, the living for much longer. However, during his best of times, he would murmur again his most favored phrase to engage me, "mow'em all down, mow'em all down with a machine gun."

And then he would chuckle.

I hold no malice for the old codger, as a matter of record, I love him and want him to stay on this planet to tell the more important lessons he learned over his long life. Tales of smart work, labor lost and gained, the true treasury of survival during hard times without a glimmer of hope, but sheer determination - a life long scratching out an existence without a chance in Hell of making it - not so much of surviving a war, as much as living an honest life amidst savagery; whether it be in time of battle or more likely, in commerce and capital - for surely enduring the rapacity of a hard worked life is more than the momentary ferocity of gun play and explosion.

Surely there must be more than being a veteran and that is why I am proud to introduce Dave Lindorff's controversial and insightful essay, What's So Special About Veterans?