The Sacrifice

TomDispatch:

They

...grew up in places with vanishingly small populations but even those who didn't came from places you're likely to have heard of only if you grew up there yourself. As Lizette Alvarez and Andrew Lehren put it, in examining the last thousand American deaths in Iraq for the New York Times:

"The service members who died during this latest period fit an unchanging profile. They were mostly white men from rural areas, soldiers so young they still held fresh memories of high school football heroics and teenage escapades. Many men and women were in Iraq for the second or third time. Some were going on their fourth, fifth or sixth deployment."

All you have to do is look through the most recent of these Pentagon announcements of deaths in Iraq to find more evidence of that parade of places you just haven't heard of: Vassar, Michigan (pop. 2,823), Paris, Tennessee (pop. 9,763), Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 5,470), Tamarac, Florida (pop. 55,588), New Castle, Delaware (pop. 4,836), and Vancouver, Washington (pop. 157,493).

This isn't new. You could say, in fact, that here, as elsewhere in the American experience of war in Iraq, the Vietnam analogy seems to apply, at least to a degree. Historian Chris Appy in his book Working-Class War comments:

"Rural and small-town America may have lost more men in Vietnam, proportionately, than did even central cities and working-class suburbs… It is not hard to find small towns that lost more than one man in Vietnam. Empire, Alabama, for example, had four men out of a population of only 400 die in Vietnam -- four men from a town in which only a few dozen boys came of draft age during the entire war."

But in the present all-volunteer military at the height of an increasingly catastrophic, ever less popular war, this trend toward sacrificing the overlooked young from overlooked American communities seems especially pronounced.

It's expecially striking if you travel there. Small town America, not the suburbs and exurbs, but the infrastructure in little towns tucked away in the hills and plains that 50 years ago served a strong agricultural base look and feel as ramshackle as slums in an industrial seting. The lifestyle is marginally better because of the lack of crowding, but the poverty and ignorance of the world is largely the same. Such youth are loaded guns themselves, full of energy and hostility to a world they misunderstand.

Digby posts on the nature of the conservative mindset that produces and depends on a lifestyle that victimizes the unwitting to do the unthinkable:

There are always a smattering of Republicans who don't follow the party line on a particular issue like stem cell research or mental health coverage. When you look beneath the surface it's always because they personally know someone, usually a family member, who would benefit from the program. (You can often see this in national emergencies where they suddenly clamor for federal help after disdaining the same requests by people in other parts of the country and constantly voting against such measures on a programmatic level.)

I think this is one of the defining aspects of conservatism. They have a stunted sense of empathy and an undeveloped ability to understand abstract concepts. It makes them unable to fashion any solutions to common problems, which they blame on "poor character" because they cannot visualize themselves ever being in a vulnerable or unlucky position through no fault of their own. Until it happens to them or someone they know, in which case they never question their philosophy as a whole but merely apply a special exemption to whichever particular problem or risk to which they have personally been exposed.

Empathy is not some altruistic concept. In fact, it's quite selfish and designed to make humans better able to survive. It allows a person to walk in another's shoes so that they might have an inkling of what it would be like if that person's experience became their own. It is necessary to understand how to head off problems that you might someday have to confront and it is certainly necessary to fully understand other necessary concepts such as justice, fairness and love.

I'm not drawing any conclusions from this, but it's interesting. It seems that when they test psychopaths, they find that they can't understand abstract concepts. I'm just saying.

This is why fundamentalism draws so heavily on the uneducated and depends on so much disinformation. It produces a pool of cheap inexpensive labor motivated to follow the Word. It is a vicious cycle the oligarchs depend on to make Empire.