POLITICS OF GRIEF

During the Vietnam War, many activists sought to poison support for the conflict by denouncing veterans as “baby killers,” as if every grunt were one of Kerry’s “Winter Soldiers.”  Like other excess of the time, the taunting of traumatized young men returning from a war zone backfired, tainting the legacy of the anti-war movement.

How well they’ve learned.  Today, many opposed to the war in Iraq adopt the opposite approach—they “support” our troops, remind us of the sacrifices made by our fighting men and women.  The mainstream media keeps a running tally of fatalities (with a morose fascination of the 1000^th death), ABC News’ Nightline recites the names of the dead, while Michael Moore sells books comprised of correspondence from soldiers who feel betrayed by Bush.  It is an effective tactic, one that tries to set the Right’s support for the war in conflict with its propensity to lionize America’s warriors.  And depending on the context, it can be sincere, meaningful or—too often—deeply cynical.

This photograph shows a young woman holding her five month old baby.  The father of that child has never seen his daughter, nor will he.  Last April, First Lt. Doyle Hufstedler, 25, of Abilene, Texas, died when an IED near Habbaniyah destroyed his vehicle.  The photograph illustrated a recent Scripps Howard News Service story highlighting the fact that 900 children have lost a parent in our current conflict, including six mothers, leaving behind 10 children.  As we look at the joy on Leslie Hufstedler’s face, we admire her courage—grateful that it relieves us of experiencing the true depth of her pain. 

What the image doesn’t—and can’t—convey is why her husband died, for what purpose.  Photography—the visual media in general—is ill-suited for conveying the abstract thoughts and concepts that provide context for images.  The once-living soldier’s face, the flag-draped coffin, the brave war widow make us feel profound worlds of grief, but beyond that grief there is no narrative, no meaning.  Like a fetish, the image constantly returns attention to itself.

Opponents of the war know this.  They seek to decouple the conflict in Iraq from a larger narrative that might provide meaning to soldiers’ deaths.  Lacking their own narrative (during Vietnam, they claimed participation in global anti-imperialism; today, they are reduced to “No Blood for Oil”), they focus on images of sorrow and loss with accusatory, prosecutorial, intent.  See?  These are the costs of your war.  They are right, of course.  And thousands of grieving Americans, for whom no concept of duty or pro patria or “democratizing the Middle East” justifies their loss, agree.

And yet I wonder what effect the Left’s politicization of grief will have on our soldiers and, more importantly, suffering families.  Politics are by nature one-sided, and to use America’s sorrow as an attack on the Bush Administration is to transform that sorrow into an instrument of outrage.  When the guns fall silent, and the protesters move to other causes, outrage, too, fades away.  Leaving the bereaved with--what?

The Gettysburg Address, Sir Edward Lutyens’ monument at Ypres, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial at Washington did not seek to diminish the war which claimed so many lives.  Instead, they sought to represent the tragedy of the soldiers' sacrifice, and in so doing connect us with something profound and deep in the human soul.  Political outrage, in contrast, reduces that connection to sloganeering.  When, after the Iraq War is over, we revisit Fahrenheit 9-11, will we still feel the anguish of Lila Lipscomb—the Bush supporter whose son was killed in Iraq—or will her grief seem tarnished, cheapened by the filmmaker's mendacious agenda? 

I have no real problems with the Scripps article, or with its use of Laurie Hufstedler’s photograph.  (The “People” magazine-ation of this war, however, is troubling). Rather, I have difficulties with what the website Daily Kos did with it.  “Another facet of Bush’s legacy,” Markos Moulitsas Zuniga posted over a link to the article and photographs accompanying it.  Yes, yes, j’accuse.  But the photograph is more than that.  It represents a widow's sorrow, softened by the promise of continued life.  To reduce that image to ideology is parochial, crude.  Zuniga’s lapse, of course, is minor (Michael Moore’s less so) and yet it represents, I think, the effects of much of the Left’s ”concern” for the troops:  tragedy exploited for political ends, grief diminished by ideology. 

Doyle Hufstedler died in a war that many of the people reading these words support:  To us, his death is honorable and tragic—and, because of that honor and tragedy, meaningful.  It is important that we keep these notions of honor and meaning alive in our thoughts and the in public discourse.  As Lincoln articulated in the Gettysburg address, how we judge a war’s purpose, in the end, determines whether we view our soldiers’ sacrifices as tragic and meaningful—or wasted and outrageous. 

UPDATE:  Blackfive lets us know the kind of response our soldiers are receiving today.  Indeed, this is not Vietnam.