For people who follow what the major opinion-makers say, Sunday, October 14, was a giggle. In the New York Times, the woman who did more than anyone else to ruin Al Gore’s chances in the 2000 election, Maureen Dowd, had Stephen Colbert write her Sunday column. Why not? He does have a new book out – I Am America (And So Can You!) – and he makes his living doing his dead-on parody of personality-driven political opinion shows like Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor. Cool. Let the irony roll!
In that column she handed to Colbert she does note that Colbert had been saying things like “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream is driving a bulldozer into The New York Times while drinking crude oil out of Keith Olbermann’s skull.” She couldn’t resist handing the column to him, so he penned “I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!).” Great fun was had by all, as the Colbert persona hit the Times hard –
Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.
There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.
Frank Rich’s Sunday column, by the way, was on our use of torture and ended with this –
Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.
Colbert satirizes those who find such opinions laughable, by being them – and taking things to their logical conclusion. It’s a method as old as Jonathan Swift’s 1729 pamphlet “A Modest Proposal” (”A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick”) – the Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling children born into poverty as food for rich Englishmen. See the SCHIP business, of course, for the modern analog.
Nothing new here, and it’s not like no one notices who ends up looking bad. As Phil Nugent comments –
By now, it’s clear that “We don’t torture” is going to be George Bush’s equivalent to “I am not a crook” or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” – an embarrassingly transparent, obviously untrue statement that the speaker never would have even made in the first place if he hadn’t been obligated to deny something that everybody had already figured out was the case.
But you do need someone like Colbert to point out the absurdities – by assuming the smug and narrow persona of the defender of foolishness and ranting on and on. Great fun was had by all. Well, not by all – some conservatives actually “get” what Colbert is up to and don’t much like the fool he conjures up. The rest assume he is on their side – but just a little strange. The joke is on them.
But some things just aren’t funny, and some opinions cannot be satirized very easily.
The front page of the same Sunday’s Washington Post brought us A Wife’s Battle (”When Her Soldier Returned From Baghdad, Michelle Turner Picked Up the Burden of War”) –
Michelle Turner’s husband sits in the recliner with the shades drawn. He washes down his Zoloft with Mountain Dew. On the phone in the other room, Michelle is pleading with the utility company to keep their power on.
This is a long background piece by Anne Hull and Dana Priest on veterans suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It’s distressing, and angered the war supporters. But the basics were clear –
As thousands of war-wounded lug their discharge papers and pill bottles home, more than a quarter are returning with PTSD and brain trauma. Compensation for these invisible injuries is more difficult and the social isolation more profound, especially in rural communities where pastures outnumber mental health providers.
… Michelle thinks Troy’s anxiety and depression are worsening, and she tells anyone who will listen - her pastor, doctors and counselors at VA. His speech is sometimes soupy from mood stabilizers. The meds give him tremors. He used to cut the grass and bring home a paycheck, but now he stays inside like a perpetual patient. His memory is shot, and he relies on Michelle for everything.
There’s the basic array of symptoms – hearing loss, tremors, obesity, depressive disorder. It’s just PTSD, along with the bureaucratic bullshit –
The VA concludes that Troy’s worsening condition merits an increase of his disability rating to 70 percent, raising his monthly check to $1,352 a month. According to VA, he doesn’t meet the criteria for 100 percent because his impairment is not “persistent,” with “persistent delusions” or a “persistent danger of hurting himself or others.” He is still able to perform his own hygiene.
From Michelle’s point of view, Troy can hold a toothbrush, but he can’t hold a job. “Even at 70 percent, you can’t raise a family,” she says. She has a year to appeal the rating.
But there is good news: The VA hospital in Martinsburg finds a bed for Troy in the PTSD residential rehab program.
… Troy is allowed to come home on weekends, so Michelle makes the four-hour round trip to pick him up on the first Friday night. On Sunday, he refuses to go back. He says he has been through it before. Michelle pleads with him to get in the truck but he won’t, and he loses his spot in the program. … “Other people got wounded, and all I got was a mental thing,” he says. Michelle raises an eyebrow. “It’s still an injury.”
“I think about that doctor down there,” Troy says, referring to a psychologist at Fort Stewart who suggested he was faking it. “Plus, the fact that guys are missing arms and have bullet holes and everything else. Ain’t a scratch on me.”
This is difficult – the VA won’t give him full benefits and one doctor there tells him he’s just faking it. What can the war supporters do with this?
See “Raven” at “And Rightly So!” with this –
How does one decipher whether a person is truly mentally ill, or is exploiting their battle experiences to their fullest advantage?
How do we know if Troy is the person he is because of the battlefield experiences, or if he is choosing to be this person because others are enabling him? Since we’re not hearing from Troy’s pre-war family and friends it is difficult to really know what he was like prior to his tour in Iraq.
I’m very skeptical of Troy’s “problems” and so should others who read this article.
He is capable of rational thought and he is making choices. He choses to swallow pills and watch TV in the dark- to shut himself in… to refuse medical/psych care and, I really wonder - the required services that would make him a better person.
When we enable some people to be the worst they can be, they take advantage and do just that.
Compare and contrast – from that Post article –
Troy’s problems started after his tour. While he was on home leave from Fort Stewart one weekend, Michelle found him sitting on the bed with a bottle of pills. He said he couldn’t go back. Michelle drove him to the Martinsburg VA hospital, which shipped him to Walter Reed for three weeks of psychiatric care.
He was sent back to Fort Stewart and returned to duty, a reality he could not cope with. Twice he tried to commit suicide and was hospitalized at Winn Army Community Hospital before being medically discharged for PTSD in 2004. After 13 years in uniform, Troy got nearly the lowest disability rating possible, a $11,349 severance check and no benefits.
Here a reaction, from Jillian at Sadly, No! –
You know, I’ve had jobs I’ve hated before. I mean really, really hated. And I have taken mental health days by calling in sick once or twice in my life. But I can’t recall ever attempting suicide in an effort to get out of going to work. Perhaps in Raven’s world, this is a sign of a malingerer. But when normal people hear a story like this, their first thought isn’t “ooh, what a faker!” - their first thought is “this is a man who is really suffering.”
I love this new version of conservatism. There is nothing too base, too venal, too cold-blooded for them to say. There is no one they won’t smear, no reputation they won’t seek to tarnish, no depth to which they will not sink in order to destroy anything that interferes with their pet narratives about how they think the world works, whether it be “government insurance is socialism” or “the Iraq war is a war for civilization and therefore worth any sacrifice (as long as it’s not mine).” Anything - absolutely anything at all - is acceptable, except for even the barest hint of the thought that they might actually be wrong about something in even the slightest measure.
And if there is nothing too base, too venal, too cold-blooded for them to say, then what good would a Jonathan Swift be to us now, or a Colbert?
Jillian continues –
The only good thing for us is that, as reality becomes ever more obviously divergent from the bizarre pictures of it painted in the minds of people like this, the ranting that comes from them becomes ever more obviously foul and disgusting. It showed in the howling brigades’ smears of Graeme Frost, and it shows here. There is hope that, if most people really are not baying monsters at heart, but decent individuals, the increasing levels of bile coming from those who actually are baying monsters will start to drive the decent people away from them.
That could happen, but the faithful thirty percent (or less) will continue with such talk, as Digby notes, and there is a reason they will –
The political activists who metaphorically spit on the troops today are on the right.
This is going to be more common as we come up against the government’s responsibility toward our military and the brainwashing these selfish right wing creeps have undergone for the last twenty years. I don’t think they’ve ever contemplated the fact that their patriotic reverence for the troops might conflict with their anti-government philosophy. After all, the military is a government program. And there are going to be veterans who need the government’s help for the rest of their lives.
So if government programs are bad (see Ronald Reagan), then they have to rant against the Veterans Administration here, and talk up “taking personal responsibility.” It figures, and anyone can clearly see that in one of the comments at Sadly, No! –
The liberal mindset is what causes PTSD. Boys being raised to men without a strong male role model, and having a false sense of what life is about is causing our young men to go to war and come home freaked out.
Digby –
That’s an excellent diagnosis, no doubt endorsed by the experienced doctor shopping medical expert Rush Limbaugh. But it doesn’t really hold water since combat stress has been around since cave days. In WWI they called it shell shock. In WWII they called it battle fatigue. In Vietnam they called it PTSD. Whatever it’s called, it’s one of the most common war injuries of all.
Of course conservatives who “take personal responsibility” for their lives never succumb to such a thing, unless you watched that new Ken Burns documentary on WWII, with this statistic –
One out of four Army men evacuated for medical reasons in Europe and the Pacific suffered from neuro-psychiatric disorders. There were many names for it - “shell shock,” “battle fatigue,” “combat exhaustion.” The office of the U.S. surgeon general sent Dwight D. Eisenhower a study by two soldier-psychiatrists that found “there is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat.’ … Each moment … imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure. Psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds.” Army planners determined that the average soldier could withstand no more than 240 days of combat without going mad. By that time, the average soldier was probably dead or wounded.
Digby – “I don’t think all those soldiers in WWII had liberal single mothers who didn’t know how to raise proper children, do you?”
So have the right wing opinion-makers and the bloggers jumped the shark here? Digby wonders –
As much as these movie-addled children love the glory they think other people dying confers upon them, the horror of war is actually very real. And the reality affects those who fight it directly, not those who sit in judgment between trips to the mall. Many men and women who have been involved in this thing, regardless of their politics, are injured in body, mind and spirit. But these cheerleaders on the right apparently aren’t willing to put up with any veteran who doesn’t hide all feelings of ambiguity, pain or disagreement. They are already calling them “phony”, mentally unstable or malingerers in the right wing noise machine. It’s not likely to get any better.
This war has always been a movie to them. And these people like their entertainment to be simple black and white battles between good ‘n evul. Soldiers with problems or misgivings about the war are uncomfortable shades of gray, participants with moral authority who actually donned the uniform and threw themselves into danger and yet they behave in ways that can only be understood as “liberal” - the enemy. Some will even need help from the government and many will think they deserve it, even as they say they are now against the war they fought. How would a John Wayne cartoon deal with that?
The Iraq War Vets are coming back to a country in which many of the military’s most ardent defenders demand they never allow anyone to see what they have been through or speak views that might force armchair generals to face the fact that war is not a game and that the American military is made up of real human beings instead of figments of a Hollywood screenwriter’s imagination. They fought for Rush Limbaugh’s fantasies. What a terrible thing to do to them.
Colbert will face a bit of a challenge dealing with all this. Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way – “There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” But it is not very funny.
