Love Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

I was listening to Democracy Now's story today about Tomas Young, the wounded Iraq War veteran whose angry letter to Bush and Cheney has been getting a lot of attention lately, when I remembered the above meme, posted to Facebook last week by one of my right-wing acquaintances there.  The meme annoyed me, but for some time I couldn't think of what to say about it.  "Thank him for what?" was my first thought.  But that wasn't enough: I had to think of what I should say to a veteran.  Something not accusatory.

Today I realized that what I should say, and what I think almost all Americans should say to someone who fought in either Afghanistan or Iraq, is simply I'm sorry.  Sorry for letting you be sent over there.  Sorry the antiwar movement wasn't able to stop Bush and Cheney's evil plans.   (Those who supported the war should apologize for that.)

By chance I also happened yesterday on a 1960 discussion, now available online, of Robert Heinlein's notorious sf novel Starship Troopers.  I haven't read all the contributions yet, but Damon Knight's startled me.  This part:

To a dedicated pacifist, "War is horrible" is a basic premise and is interpreted literally.  It follows that no recognizably human being could be a professional soldier.  But professional soldiers exist.  Therefore they must be essentially depraved and brutalized people.  When professional soldiers are depicted in fiction as being normal human beings, the pacifist's whole position is threatened; and he screams.  So would you.

I'm not a pacifist myself, dedicated or otherwise, but I'm alert to the use of "pacifist" as a straw man to distract attention from the issues when war is being discussed.  I have not read much of the literature of pacifism, a lack which I suppose I should rectify but doesn't seem all that important to me, because (as I argued in the post I just linked) the real question is whether a specific, given war should be fought, whether the default answer to that question should be (as it normally is) "Yes."  The burden of argument, I insist, should rest on the person who advocates bombing anyone else into the Stone Age, not on the person who opposes going to war.  But that goes against every instinct of civilized life.

My lack of literacy in pacifist studies is relevant now because I can't say for certain whether or not avowed pacifists hold that "professional soldiers ... must be essentially depraved and brutalized people."  I have never seen this asserted (though I welcome citations if my readers can supply any).  The only time I encountered such a suggestion (though not by pacifists), I argued against it.  Since Knight's accusation is so similar, rhetorically, to accusations generally made against opponents of war (they spit on our troops!  they want us to be overrun by the dirty Reds!), I think it's safe to dismiss it.  I can't imagine such a defense made of mundane-fiction books about war; those I've heard of or read don't depict soldiers as essentially depraved -- not all that surprising since they are often written by veterans.  It's the governments they serve, the men and women who run those governments, who are depraved, as we see over and over again.

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

A friend linked to an article at the HuffPost that began,

"Never try to teach a pig to sing ... it wastes your time and annoys the pig."

My voice teacher had this quote by Robert Heinlein on a sign in her studio.

I've also seen that quotation ascribed to Mark Twain, and I think it's likely that Heinlein got it from Twain; he often expressed his admiration for the old man, even made him a character in one of his early stories, though he preferred not to think too much about Twain's fierce anti-imperialism and anti-racism.

I might have liked Heinlein's maxim when I was in high school, and a lot more unsure of myself and my place in the world. But now I think it's evil. Seriously. And why? Because not many people try to teach a pig to sing; the quotation is meant to apply to human beings, and it assumes that you know in advance who the pig is. I'd like to think this is too obvious to say, but in reality you don't know that. By the time someone has shown their inability or refusal to learn from you, you've already broken the maxim.

Surfing over the Internet, I've been surprised to see how many different ways this adage has been interpreted. Maybe I'm taking it too literally. In the HuffPost article above, I couldn't figure out why the author included it. To one writer it means that "there are times when you just can't reach certain people. You can shout 'til you're blue in the face, but that pig is never going to sing!" To one self-styled skeptic it means that there exists "a strange race of people who believe in angels but not in germs ... a carnival freak show of intellectual, rather than physical anomalies ... [who] almost destroyed my faith [!] in human reason. ... I tried to understand them, but I failed." Who is the "pig" in that example -- the incomprehensible people, or the one who failed to comprehend them? Several writers interpreted after the fact: the people you were trying to reach weren't interested in learning, ergo you were trying to teach a pig to sing. I suspect that most often it's an after-the-fact, ass-covering, sour-grapes excuse for one's own failure. As Xeroxlore in hierarchical organizations, it's popular among lower-level flacks who've been assigned jobs they want to claim were impossible to begin with; and often enough they may be right. But the maxim turned up, described as "silly" and "just for fun," on this page of inspirational Quotations About Teachers and Learning, which I find disturbing.

Herbert Kohl, the teacher and writer, once wrote an article called "I Won't Learn from You: Thoughts on the Role of Assent in Learning", about some reasons why some people refuse to learn things that someone else things they have to learn. In many cases that might be reason enough right there: someone is trying to impose his or her will on you, without regard for your interests or even your needs. Kohl believed "that such not-learning is often and disastrously mistaken for failure to learn or the inability to learn." Rather than engage other people's wishes, interests, and needs, how comforting to dismiss them as mere pigs who shouldn't have been allowed into your classroom in the first place.