politically incorrect

As wretched as it is to admit it, I actually feel sorry for Private Lynndie England and her yo-yo cohorts. I abhor what they did. I am appalled and ashamed for our country. Yet, I don't really blame them. Sure, everyone's good at yelling "but what about the Nazi's! Were THEY just following orders?", in shocked, apoplectic tones. Well, yeah, unfortunately, they were. (I can hear my Jewish grandmother spinning in her grave from 2000 miles away.) To understand what these moronic kids -- and I stress kids -- did, one has to think about the culture they did it in. No, not culture as in first-person-shooter videos and Quentin Tarantino flicks, but culture as in Military. We've all seen some approximation of military life in the movies, so we know enough about boot camp to know someone will probably be yelling "maggot" in your face at one point or another. Not having personally endured or witnessed boot camp, it's about all I have to go on -- but then again, it doesn't take a huge leap of faith to realize that you've got to get people willing to die somehow. At what point does one desensitize to "maggot" being yelled in their face? Or how about any of the other vague humiliations and discomfort one suffers through in boot camp? Or to hell with boot camp, how about just high school? Flash back to Columbine, a direct result of bullying. Think back to your own childhood, and tell me you weren't once -- not even once, on one side of that equation or the other. We are programmed, in our culture, to band together in a pack, and then do whatever the leader of that pack asks of us, good or bad. Remember the lessons of Lord of the Flies? And lets notice, for a moment, that the women in the pictures -- particularly the aforementioned and infamous Ms. England, are recieving the majority of bile from the media. I guess the fact that it's particularly unladylike makes torture even more unpalatable. The American people are loath to believe women are capable of this sort of behavior, so whenever there's an example of women being bad, it trumps all of the nasty males in the immediate vicinity. (Case in point: Aileen Wuornos, the lone female "serial killer", has been the subject of numerous movies & television shows, while literally hundreds of male serial murderers languish in relative obscurity.) Again, none of this makes their actions right. At any point, an exemplary human being would rebel, would say no to participating, even if ordered by a commanding officer. (Which is, most rational people believe, what probably happened.) An EXEMPLARY human being would. We all like to think that WE are, of course, that exemplary human being. And until being faced with a similar situation, we all bask comfortably in the luxury of being able to believe that we are -- we would NEVER go along with something so base, so horrible. But then again, we aren't frightened 18-year-olds from Podunk, Alabama, who have just had our wills broken through basic training and the horrors of war, are we? What mortifies me are the shoes. The countless people standing around in those photos, watching one grinning soldier after another take their turn at posing. It was sport, it was playtime. What haunts me is the grinning, the mugging for the camera, unselfconscious, as if it were just another snapshot. But, really, truly, what mortifies me are the shoes. That's a lot of shoes. Shoes standing around, watching silly attrocities. Shoes that didn't walk to someone higher up, or if they did, they were ignored. Because someone higher up -- one Donny-boy Rummy, has known about it for months, if he didn't just plain out order it. But all that, that isn't the real reason I feel sorry for those idiot kids. I feel sorry for them because their lives are ruined. They are going down in history for NOT being the exemplary human being, and for all we know, they may even have tried. They are the low men & women on the totem pole, and because of it, they are taking the fall. And why? Because they were poor, or wanted an education, or felt they had no other choice but the military, and for whatever reason, they didn't have the moral fortitude to refuse to participate in some very bad behavior. They are being punished for being pack animals, for giving in to the evil desire, innate in all of us no matter how you protest, to punish the weaker and protect our position, like chickens pecking the runt. They'll be court martialled and ridiculed, be jailed and denied jobs, all because they betrayed what we fear most about ourselves. Worst of all, for not being exemplary, for being merely the low end of average, their lives will be stained with blood. Not only the blood of the hapless Iraquis they leashed and sodomized, but with the blood of Nicholas Berg, and the countless that will no doubt follow him. They just ratcheted up the hatred a notch around the world. And no matter what the Bush administration would have us believe, it's not our Freedom that they hate us for.