As conservatives are over-whelmingly chicken hawk cowards they know nothing of the military and didn't care anything about the war crimes committed by the Regime of the W(orst President in US History); what they wanted was jingoism, blood shed and the ability to yell at and threaten liberals.
Chris Kyle gave them that and like George Zimmerman, Ted Nugent, or any other conservative "hero", Kyle was beloved because he murdered enemies of the right-wing hegemony and conservatives got a vicarious thrill through his made-up heroics, i.e. Killing innocent muslims and claiming to kill blacks in New Orleans post-Katrina.
Perhaps, I'm being too harsh on Kyle, perhaps his embellishment/lying was a way of coping with his PTSD, with trying minimize the damage war does to ones mind, body, and soul. But, I don't believe so. The circumstances surrounding Kyle's death indicate he was entranced by guns and violence, and contemptuous of those he deemed weaker than himself.
Therefore, I think Kyle considered himself the next Alvin York, Audie Murphy, John Basilone, or Carlos Hathcock and needed to spruce up his ribbon bar. The truth is Pat Tillman was a American Hero while Kyle has more in common with Charles Whitman and he should be remembered in exactly the same way.
Equating killing with heroism is immoral, but I guess we have to convince our young people to do our killing for us somehow.
ReplyDeleteBut the Bradley Cooper-starring American Sniper was the highest-grossing film of 2014 in the United States. The free market has spoken. The public prefers the black and white fictionalized version of events in which the heroic Kyle kills the "evil doers".
ReplyDeleteDervish,
ReplyDeleteExcellent points. This how we know that John Wayne and Ronnie Raygun were such big war heroes, based on their big box office totals.
Anonymous, War Pigs retains its' significance today...
I've always been suspicious of anybody who talks up their war heroism and talks about how many people they killed. Maybe because when I was a kid I had a lot of relatives who had served in WW2. Some of them had... artifacts... in their homes that clearly indicated they'd been in combat. To a man none of them would talk about it. One of my great-uncles told me "there is no good in killing another man, only necessity." Then he would say no more.
ReplyDeleteSomeone who enjoys talking about killing other human beings is not someone fit for polite company, and is in fact someone with more than a few screws loose. Chris Kyle was such a man. I found the manner of his death to be quite unsurprising in the end.