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This won’t be a fun column. Jesse Macbeth has
got my panties in a knot this week. I just lied. I don’t
wear panties. But, if I did, they’d be in a knot.
If I did, they’d be knotted ALL THE TIME.
Jesse Macbeth’s lie is bigger. Jesse claimed
to be a veteran of the current Iraq War. He appeared
in videos and wrote stories online claiming that he’d
witnessed and participated in atrocities there. His
stories were picked up by various organizations opposed
to the war and they circulated them further, believing
them to be true.
How aggravating is Jesse Macbeth’s lie? Let’s
add it up.
One way that Jesse’s lie is aggravating (as
in “aggravated assault”) is that the anti-war
movement has been discredited by accepting his claims.
Good intentions don’t justify mass killings.
We don’t need to catch our military in deliberate
malicious acts of murder to know that their presence
in Iraq has given rise to needless carnage. But it is
human nature to want to simplify a moral picture by
finding clear villains. The villains aren’t individual
soldiers pulling triggers. The villains are the politicians
who put them there knowing that war is sloppy and always
kills more civilians than anybody else. The villains
are the super-majority of the American people who went
along with the patent lies, which were far more obvious
than Jesse’s, and allowed the politicians to get
away with starting this war, claiming the people’s
support. The guilt belongs to
a couple hundred million cowards, each of whom
only needs to bear a tiny bit of guilt to add up to
one monstrous wad of shared guilt.
All of that is meaningless to a people who are so
utterly ignorant that they STILL think 15 Saudi nationals,
two citizens of the United Arab Emirates, one Lebanese,
and one Egyptian constitutes 19 Iraqis. How do you explain
to people that crushingly stupid that discovering Jesse’s
lie shouldn’t deter the antiwar movement?
I’m reminded of events in connection with the
’84-’85 Ethiopian famine. Con artists toured
America posing as Ethiopians, complete with fake African
accents, pretending to be personal witnesses to the
suffering and who were now in America to raise funds
to help their less fortunate brethren. Instead, they
raised funds to help themselves. Irrespectively, the
famine went on, and roughly a million Ethiopians died.
Irrespectively of Jesse Macbeth, the Iraq War continues
to be unjust.
Jesse’s lie also adds aggravation to the fake
vet phenomena. The VA knows there are thousands of American
vets who are homeless. But every time someone turns
out to be scamming the system, falsely claiming to be
a vet, it discredits the thousands more who aren’t
faking it.
If fewer than one out of a hundred of the people claiming
to be homeless vets turned out to be lying, that would
be enough to convince almost every American that they
all are lying, because almost every American is too
lazy to learn the difference between 1 and 100, or between
1,000 and 100,000.
Jesse Macbeth has personally aggravated me. He claims
to have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Maybe he does.
Just because he hasn’t seen combat doesn’t
mean he can’t have PTSD. I know this personally,
because I have PTSD and I haven’t seen combat.
Only, I prefer not to call it Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder. I prefer to call it Post Traumatic Stress
You Could Have Seen Coming, If You’d Been There
And Experienced The Trauma Yourself. When I have to
tell people I have PTSYCHSC, IYBTAETTY, the question
always comes back, “Oh, so you’re a vet
then.” I’d love to be able to simplify the
moral picture, and say yes, if it were true. It sucks
having to say no, I’m not a vet, but I’ve
got a story of repeated incestual rape and vicious beatings
that will put your lunch off.
Now, thanks to Jesse, I can expect the question to
be, “Oh, so you’re pretending to be a vet,
then.” Thanks loads, Jesse.
Sound off and read more: http://www.drwesb.blogspot.com
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