This Is Not News

So somewhere before dawn on Thursday I was roasting a turkey breast for dinner later that day. While I was waiting for the bird to be done I was reading Daily Kos, where a bit of a shouting match developed between a few commenters and diarists over the use of the term “trail of tears� in contexts other than the forced exodus(es) that claimed many Native American lives in the 1800s. The argument itself seemed to open some other festering issues inside the community, but what struck me was a comment that there are Narive Americans who observe the fourth Thursday of November as a National Day of Mourning. Then later Thursday night we were watching Survivor, where the contestants are camping in a Mayan ruin, where two contestants won a reward challenge to go to a natural hot spring by answering trivia questions about Mayan culture, and where for the immunity challenge contestants had to answer questions based on a story from Mayan folklore – an ancient civilization, rendered extinct and eventually turned into entertainment to sell ad time.

It was definitely a day of some cognitive dissonance. I had to acknowledge to myself that the life I have – with luxuries and opportunities that so many other people on this planet would find unimaginable – is in some part the product of severe injustices committed in the past, injustices whose effects have not been ameliorated but rather compounded over time. But I also pushed that thought out of my mind to focus on the next task I wanted to accomplish. I don’t know if there’s a truly satisfying way to resolve this kind of moral conflict on an individual level. But I’m having a sneaking suspicion that what I have been doing isn’t enough. This is one I’m gonna need to think about some more.

The political news this weekend is probably the firestorm around Democratic Congressman Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania calling for a redeployment of the troops in Iraq. Murtha may be from my home state, but he’s from the western side of the commonwealth, so I have only been vaguely aware of him up to now. Kagro X at The Next Hurrah had a terrific post pulling together the reasons why his voice on military matters holds so much weight.

Clearly there was an impact because Republicans in the House tried to pull a maneuver Friday night to either embarrass Murtha or force other House Democrats to disavow his position and support the war. The stunt went haywire. Murtha had suggested that Congress pass a joint resolution calling for the orderly redeployment of troops and a continued use of diplomacy, which would include introductory language that established the reasons for such a move. House Republicans instead offered a one-paragraph sense-of-the-House resolution simply calling for the immediate termination of operations in Iraq. Again, for the parliamentary distinctions, check out Kagro. At one point, a newly-elected Representative from Ohio named Jean Schmidt quoted a Marine who asked her to send a message to Murtha that “cowards cut and run, Marines never do.� Thing is, Murtha is an ex-Marine. The House was in an uproar until Schmidt retracted her remarks.

Now, I’m not sure how this is all going to play out over the next few weeks. Public support for the war is clearly dropping, but I just don’t know if it’s going to have any effect on the government’s decisions in the short term. What I have found interesting, as yet another example of history repeating itself, is the way opponents of the war are characterized as disrespecting our troops and aiding the enemy. (Check out this post from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo for another example.) There’s a particular incident about Jane Addams, one of the leaders of the settlement house movement and a major progressive force at the turn of the century, that Jean Elshtain cites in her book Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy and which I frequently think about these days.
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