| Ira Chernus PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER |
The “Support Our Troops” Myths
Are you hoping those spineless Democrats in Congress will cut off the money for the war? Well don’t hold your breath. Even a stalwart liberal like Barney Frank demurs, explaining that “it’s a high-risk thing” -- a high risk to the Dems’ chances of winning next year’s election, because most voters clearly do not want war funds cut now. That includes a surprisingly big chunk of voters who oppose the war. They say openly that it’s a disastrous mistake, but they don’t want Congress to best thing it can do to end the war.
Though the
Bush administration can’t figure out how to win in
To believe
that one, you’ve got to believe several other myths.
Myth
one: The Bush administration does
support the troops. In fact, of course, they’ve shorted the troops on
everything from body armor to medical care for four years now.
Myth two:
The only way to support the troops is to put them at risk of death or grievous
injury and leave them there, for no good reason. If that’s “support,” then I’m
glad I’m not being supported.
Myth
three: Either we keep war funding at its present astronomical level or we won’t
be supporting the troops at all. In
fact, there is plenty of room to find a middle ground, to cut the funding by
some amount yet still give the troops what they need to stay safe.
These are
myths that are out and out falsehoods. Why would so many people buy into them? As
a historian of religions, I suspect that it has a lot to do with other powerful
myths that have always been woven around soldiers and the military.
Here I
don’t use the word “myth” to mean a lie, but rather the way we use it in my
field of study: A myth is a story that is
widely believed because it expresses people’s basic worldview and values. People
who live by a myth don’t care whether it is factually true or logically
consistent, as long as it gives them a way to make sense out of their world and
find meaning in their lives.
In an age when it’s hard to believe in heroes,
the mythic “GI” of the American media is someone people want to identify with
and emulate. When you can imagine yourself as the main character in the myth,
that’s when the myth really grabs hold of you.
I suspect that
is what’s happening to a lot of people who oppose the war but insist on “supporting
our troops.” They see their soldiers as
uniquely admirable role models. In the popular imagination, these soldiers are
ordinary youngsters (thus easy to identify with) who have extraordinary
character. They are “just plain kids” who have the kind of heroic virtues that most
kids don’t seem to have anymore -- unless they go into uniform.
The mythic
soldier’s virtues are all about caring for others -- buddies, the outfit, the
service, the nation -- more than self. After all, no one forces them to serve.
They volunteered. (The myth conveniently ignores the economic pressures that
drive people into the military.) And the news media give us an endless parade
of these uniformed heroes, all looking noble and handsome, telling us that it
doesn’t matter whether or not they approve of the war. “I made a commitment. I
have an obligation to serve. I have to do my duty,” is their constant refrain.
Identifying
with such selfless heroes lets ordinary civilians imagine that they, too, might
someday somehow rise to that higher level of virtue. It
lets them believe that in a world so saturated with selfishness, selfless
devotion to duty is still a possibility.
It also
lets them believe that somewhere in this chaotic world, there is at least one
institution where order still prevails -- where orders are given and carried
out, where someone is in control and everyone knows it, where the concept of
authority still means something. To people who feel that their own world is
spinning out of control, it can be awfully comforting to have these uniformed,
duty-bound heroes to identify with.
To people
who feel that their nation is saturated with selfishness and spinning out of
control, it can be equally comforting to see noble young people willing to
sacrifice themselves for their nation. “Our troops” seem to care more about
Of course
that’s the strange thing about this myth: It is most powerful when we identify
with heroes who are dead. It is usually displayed (especially in local news
media) when a soldier has died. So it asks us to imagine ourselves as dead,
too.
Death gets
to the heart of the military myth. The absolute finality of death can easily
give the myth an aura of absolute significance, making its messages seem like
the absolute, final truth. In a predominantly Christian country, the story of a
sacrifice of the innocent to save the rest of us (who don’t deserve it) makes
the virtuous cause for which they died seem sacred, too.
Indeed,
there is one theory that every war is a form of ritual sacrifice: We choose
some victims from among us to be sent to their deaths, so that the rest of us
can reap the psychological benefits. Just what those benefits are will vary
from one society to another (and from one theory to another).
My hunch is that the crucial swing vote—the
millions who know the war is wrong but want to keep paying for it—are getting a
psychological payoff from all those media reports of heroes, especially the
dead ones. By identifying with “our
(dead) troops,” the millions can believe that the messages of the myth, which
they want so desperately to believe in, are undoubtedly true.
Of course
everyone knows, at some unconscious level at least, that it’s wrong to send
others to their deaths to make us feel good. We owe the dead a debt. But those
who benefit psychologically from those deaths don’t want to stop the cycle of
sacrifice. So they have a simple solution: Let’s repay our debt to the already
dead by sending others to their death.
When
George W. Bush insists that we have to keep fighting -- sending more of “our
troops” to their death -- so that those who have already died won’t have died
in vain, the logic seems totally twisted to many of us. But within the myth, it
actually makes sense. "Our
troops" have to be funded, and sent into the jaws of death, so that we can
go on believing in our own, and
This all dovetails nicely with that other myth: We are
so virtuous that we send our troops to
Here on the homefront, it’s
easy to believe such a myth -- and to see the whole war as myth -- because the stories
about “our troops” are typically detached from any political context, as if
Sadly,
this explanation can be just as true, or more true, for the millions who know
no safety because they have loved ones serving in battle zones. Many cling to
the myth to give meaning to their sacrifice of emotional security, which might
otherwise be intolerable.
Understanding
the mythic meaning of “our troops” does not in any way excuse the irrationality
of funding a war that most Americans no longer want to fight. But it helps us
understand why the public clings to such an irrational stance. It reminds us
that, when it comes to war, political decisions are shaped as much or more by
irrational myth than by thoughtful logic.
And it
challenges us to think about how all Americans might be able to find a sense of
virtue, order, security, and national pride without sending anyone off to die
-- or to kill. If we could create a society that could manage that feat, or
even strive toward it, we would have a nation we could really be proud of.
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