So it's Memorial Day, when we honor American veterans.

And that is a Good Thing.

But I still think the constant refrain of commonly expressed sentiments such as these, from the President, are unsound.

"Those who have died in the Civil War, World War I, World War II and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts fought for freedoms, which come at great cost and will survive only as long as there are Americans willing to defend the nation against determined enemies, he said."

This is doxa, not truth.

And it is dangerous doxa at that, since the incessant assertion that the American military is by its nature always involved in the business of protecting American "freedoms" against external threats exerts what Bourdieu calls a "censorship" effect. It discourages any sort of rational discussion of the role the military plays now, and ought to play in the future, in American society and abroad.

To state that the US military is not necessarily or even remotely the primary, best, or even appropriate mechanism of guaranteeing American liberties, much less spreading them around the globe, is to utter a kind of secular blasphemy, despite the fact that such statements as the one above from Bush are, quite obviously, at best extremely reductive and at worst mendacious bullshit. This is because of the thoroughly mystified concept of "freedom" or "freedoms" inherent in orthodox patriotic discourse.

Um... and shit. The point is that nobody ever gets specific about exactly what "freedoms" are at stake when it comes to the role of the American military viz Teh Enemy. This is because nobody "official" really wants to talk about the actual reasons the military gets sent halfway around the fucking world to blow shit up and get shot at. It's much easier, even compulsory, to simply talk the pretty talk.

Fuck that shit.

I mean, let's look at the words and then at the facts: "Those who have died in the Civil War, World War I, World War II and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts fought for freedoms, which come at great cost."

What, no mention of the Merkin Revolution? Pity, since apart from perhaps WWII that's the only one out of this list where the doxa might have anything to do with reality. And even there, if we are going to define "freedom" as the right of the individual to make certain choices as opposed to others in terms of how they will live their lives (I'm even granting here a 21st-century internetty libertarian notion of agency, which I ordinarily sneer at as an absurd fairytale -- see, I can play nice!), unless we concede that modern Britons live under the Tony Blair-ian jackboot... well, it's a bit of a wash. Britain had already developed strong notions of individual rights; indeed, that's why the Revolution was possible in the first place. So if the Colonies had never gone hat in hand to France, why, even today you'd probably still have the legal right to bulk-email penis enlargement spam to a multitude of strangers.

Because as soon as we begin to consider the case of specific as opposed to rhetorical "freedoms," it is clear that no external "enemy" has ever posed nearly as much of a threat to them as have home-grown political and cultural interests. Let's take "freedom of speech," and run down Bush's list: did American troops in these wars really fight and maybe die to preserve the right of US citizens to freedom of speech?

Civil War: Granting that Northern troops really fought to end slavery, well, it did do the slaves some good in this area. Slaves did not have freedom of speech. But it is only sporting to note that the Confederate troops also very much fought to "preserve freedoms," as they saw them. I should dearly love to ask Our Leader some pointed questions in this regard: are the War of Northern Aggression dead included in his salutations on this sacred day? Why or why not? Beyond that, the amount of freedom of speech subsequently granted to former slaves and their descendants has been unquestionably greater in theory than in practice. But let's be charitable: GRADE: B+ WWI: The Espionage Act. Needed because the Kaiser was a-coming. I don't think so. GRADE: F. WWII: The Good War. Nazi domination of the American Heartland would have sucked. But it was never likely. This may sound harsh, and is not remotely an argument against the Righteousness of the cause, but if the US had stayed out of WWII it would not have materially diminished the amount of freedom of speech enjoyed by Americans. On the other hand I liked Band of Brothers because it had the Office Space dude in it. GRADE: B KOREA: What the fuck did this have to do with the capacity of Americans to speak their minds? GRADE: N/A VIETNAM: See Korea, only much more of a fuckup. GRADE: N/A

Not a great transcript. The best that can be said for the role of the American military in protecting American freedom of speech is that it exists and is big enough to deter any malevolent foreigners from invading us and depriving us of our God-given right to beat off to hot & cold-running digital porn. The military does not need to be as large as it is to accomplish this, though, and certainly if "preserve American freedom of speech" were the genuine as opposed to the rhetorical mission of the armed services, soldiers and sailors would nowadays face a wholly negligible risk of getting their tits blown off.

So, no, neither I nor anyone else owes anything significant to any member of the US armed forces when it comes to my exercise of free speech -- not historically, and not in the present.

The simple fact of the matter is that the US is not at any genuine risk of invasion by a foreign enemy. To the extent that we have foreign enemies nowadays, they are pretty pissant next to the Soviet Union. And while the military surely has a role in dealing with the threat posed by stateless terrorists, that role is wildly overstated and misunderstood.

Nuclear weapons largely made large standing armies obsolete: that's why the Cold War was cold. Such armies are still obsolete. It's no knock on the soldiers in Iraq now to say that they are being asked to do something they were never trained for, couldn't possibly have been trained for (you! the 19 year old from North Carolina! Go be a cop in Fallujah! WTF?) and cannot possibly accomplish. Humpty-Dumpty, you know. They're a 19th century tool in a 21st century global political context. "Stupid" does not begin to cover it.

But back to the point.

The cold truth is that not a single one of the Americans who have fought and died in Iraq have done anything at all to protect the "freedoms" of a single American citizen. And the colder truth is that without a profound rethinking of the whole point of the American military in this new century, it will be far less a guarantor of our democracy than a permanent temptation available to those inclined to seize it for illiberal ends.