The Poor Man: "I’m not very comfortable about making this connection, but reading this horseshit the day I find out about the death of David Hackworth really burns my ass. And it’s not just a fatuous Little Lord Fauntleroy keyboard kommando saying that people who said Vietnam was a bad war were the real reason we lost, although that’s not a very happy juxtaposition, either. I never even met Hackworth, I don’t know much about him personally, or what his political views were, and - not to put too fine a point on it - I don’t see much of a reflection of myself in him. (Much more of myself in Goldberg, I am sad to report.) But we live in a very cynical age, where when people use words like “honor” and “sacrifice” and “patriotism” and “commitment” you can comfortably assume they are bullshitting you. Politicians don’t just lie, they lie absurdly, they steal and threaten, they debase themselves and debase our country, and are applauded for it. Maybe all ages are like this, I don’t know. The point is, it is very important to keep in mind that there is a lot of decency in people, too, and that there are some people - not many, nowhere near enough, but a few - who can talk about “honor” and these other hollowed-out meaningless words and have them mean something again, because these are things they really understand and live. Which is not to say that they don’t fall short of perfection or do wrong and/or stupid things with the same frequency as the rest of us - of course they do, they’re human, and that’s the point. It’s so tempting and easy to just be horribly cynical about your country and/or people generally, and just say “fuck it, who cares, the world will get what it deserves”; but people like Hackworth who don’t throw up their hands and make some weary wise-crack but just keep fighting no matter how hard or futile the fight, because it is right, their example is our hope.
I have no claim on Hackworth, but he was a person who stood for something to me. And he was a man who was poisoned by the country he loved in a war he knew should never have been started, and that’s why he’s not around anymore. He was a generation or two before me. My generation, by contrast, offers Jonah Goldberg, copying out the same mimeographed war fanboy talking points from 35 years ago which kept us fighting that war for so many needless years, and making it that much harder to come to grips with and learn from that bloody mistake. This is not progress."
