Preemptive boycott

For the record, I want to mention that I hate bumper stickers.
Since I seem to hate most things, I’m sure that hardly comes as any sort of surprise, but I do hate them for reasons that are separate from my general disdain for all of creation.
Mostly I hate them because not only do I not care where your kid goes to school, I also don’t care how he or she is doing academically while attending the school that, as we've already established, I don’t care that he or she is attending.
I also don’t care that you like Harley-Davidson motorcycles, or that you’re a Wiccan, or that you think Xena, and not Bush or Kerry, should be elected President (And the fact that you’re stumping for support for a fictional character, portrayed by someone who’s not a citizen of the United States, to become President tells me that you’re an idiot.).
And while I think the information contained on a bumper sticker is useless anyway, how much more useless does it become, in the case of support for a candidate, after the elections and said candidate has lost? Basically you’re stuck with a sticker that says, “I Backed The Wrong Horse!”
There have been a couple bumper stickers in particular, though, that have been bothering me a lot lately.
In fact, I saw one vehicle that had both of the offending bumper stickers on it, though given the ideology behind both, it’s hardly surprising.
In any case, here’s the first one: Boycott France.
Umm…what? “Boycott France?”
How, precisely, would I go about doing that?
As Brian pointed out when I mentioned this at work, boycotting France would consist primarily of not buying expensive wine, cheese, or bottled water.
I assume that it would probably also mean avoiding travel there.
So, don’t buy expensive wine, don’t buy expensive cheese, don’t buy expensive bottled water, and don’t travel to France.
Damn, I must be some kind of “Super-Patriot,” as I’ve apparently been boycotting France my whole life! I preemptively boycotted the place.
The arrogance of such a statement just astounds me. “Boycott France,” indeed.
Of course, it’s worth noting that I’ve primarily seen this bumper sticker on the back of a Lexus, Mercedes, and various other comparably expensive vehicles.
It occurs to me, though, that given the way the French feel about us, wouldn’t it do more to piss them off if, rather than avoiding travel there, Americans just swamped the place with tourists? Just a thought…
The other sticker that bugs me states “Support President Bush and Our Troops.”
Does this bother me simply because I prefer the Brazilian Wax?
(Sorry, it was just a way of saying that I’m “Anti-Bush” in a really tasteless fashion, that I couldn’t resist.)
No, it has very little to do with my political beliefs.
It’s a matter of logic. Logically, I don’t see how these two things are related. How does support for President Bush translate to support for our troops, or vice versa?
In general, I don’t understand the rallying cry of “support our troops” in reference to the current military action in Iraq anyway. I don’t see that being opposed to such an action necessarily means that you aren’t supporting them, nor do I see that being in favor of our continued presence constitutes supporting them.
If anything, I should think that calling for them to be withdrawn, for their safety and for the sake of reuniting them with their families, would be much more supportive than calling for them to be kept in harm’s way.
Regardless of your politics or your feelings about the situation, logically, that just makes more sense to me, and I’d really like to know how support for President Bush translates into support for our troops.
Even if you do criticize the President for his decisions, or question the wisdom of our military involvement in Iraq, and even if you take to task the leadership of our troops stationed there, it DOES NOT logically follow that you are somehow questioning the integrity, bravery, or intelligence of the men and women, the actual “troops” in question, who are stationed there. I don’t hear anyone, not Michael Moore, not the Dixie Chicks, not anyone, proclaiming that our troops are uniformly bad, or that the soldiers stationed there don’t deserve our support. Hell, even the outcries and investigations into the abuses of prisoners focused not on the individual soldiers involved but on the military leadership that created an environment in which that sort of behavior was not only condoned but encouraged.
In any case, I guess the real question is what you mean when you say to “support” our troops. How does support for our troops manifest itself? By sending cards and letters of encouragement to soldiers stationed there? Helping out the family of a friend who’s been deployed to Iraq while he or she is away? Performing in the USO? Loudly speaking up in the media and saying that you think our troops are the greatest?
If that’s what’s meant by support, then, again, the question of how support (presumably in the form of votes) for President Bush relates to this comes up once again. The most vocal and rabidly anti-Bush pundit could still provide this kind of support to our troops.
My brother-in-law’s National Guard unit is being called up for active duty, and next month he’ll be starting an 18-month tour of duty that will, eventually, lead him to Iraq. I know for a fact that, in his view, the most supportive thing the American people could do for him would be to allow him to stay home and NOT have to miss his daughter’s high school graduation and almost her entire freshman year in college.
Make no mistake; my brother-in-law understands his duty, and will live up it, just as he did 14 years ago when he spent more than a year in Saudi Arabia as part of Desert Shield/Desert Storm, but the fact remains that he is human, in addition to being a soldier, and so naturally he has no desire to be shipped away from his family.
So, again, how does supporting President Bush support him?
Now, I’ve been more than a tad disingenuous for the purposes of making my point, and I do understand that the real message behind “Support President Bush and our troops” (Interesting that “our troops” seems tacked on like an afterthought) is that failing to step in line and accept the actions of the current Administration without question constitutes an attack on the brave men and women who are defending our freedom to disagree with those actions.
(I find it odd how frequently proponents of the Administration’s actions cite the fact that there are soldiers protecting our freedom to disagree while at the same time telling us that, out of respect for those soldiers, we ought to avoid actually exercising that freedom by criticizing military decisions.)
Still, and admitting that I do have my biases, I have opted to logically attack this position, albeit circuitously, and I think I’ve largely made my point. There is no connection between supporting the current Administration's policies and supporting our troops.
Not so, you say! When we attack the wisdom of the Administration’s policy in Iraq, we undermine the confidence of our troops. When we say that this foray into Iraq is pointless and will accomplish nothing, we tell our troops that what they’re doing doesn’t matter.
To that I can only say, “Too bad.” Whether or not the feelings of our troops are hurt by what we have to say about the actions and policies of the Administration, it is our duty as citizens, just as much as reporting to the front lines is their duty as soldiers, to speak out against what we see as bad decisions, and to question the wisdom of those decisions.
And ultimately, it’s up to each solider to decide for him or herself whether or not what his or her actions have value.
In the end, because the situation in Iraq is such that there is not, and will not be anytime soon, any graceful way for us to exit, it really doesn’t matter who we throw our support behind in this regard, as no matter who wins the election, for the foreseeable future we’ll have to continue to support our troops from a half a world away.
All that aside, there are all sorts of bumper stickers that annoy the hell out of me, and these are only two of them. As to what my principal objection to bumper stickers is in general…you know, I don’t really know. Maybe it’s just because when I’m behind a car these days I tend to be behind it for extended periods of time, like at a traffic light, which just sets my nerves on edge to begin with, and as I end up reading the same thing over and over and over again in that time, and day after day, since so frequently the same bumper stickers find their way onto many different cars, and I’ve just lost all patience for them.
Or maybe I’m just a crank.
Well, there’s no “maybe” about that one, I guess…