Opinion:

Perspectives...

Charles Pierce, a guest author of the Altercation weblog on MSNBC.com, discusses the Rene Gonzalez column written in the University of Massachusetts Daily Collegian about the death of Pat Tillman that has caused so much heartburn on the Right wing side of the blogosphere. I think there are some very valid points in this commentary.

The column took some bizarre (and marginally grammatical) hacks at the late Pat Tillman. It took less than a day before the piece was blowing all through the media wind tunnel, even though far more people denounced the column than ever would have read it 10 years ago.

I mean, honestly, I know there’s no economy of scale in the new media marketplace. But, after all, this was nothing more than the blithering of a graduate student in a college newspaper, the kind of thing that usually gets stapled to a telephone pole beneath flyers seeking lost house pets and handbills advertising some music club. I feel quite safe in saying that Rene Gonzalez’s constituency can fairly well be found between the “R” and “Z” keys on his computer. Nevertheless, to hear the punditocracy rave, you’d have thought Gonzalez was somewhere between Thomas Paine and St. Paul on the scale of earthmoving polemicists.

(I pause here to mention that cartoonist Ted Rall – who is to the American Left what goats are to ballet – has inflamed folks with a cartoon covering much the same ground that Gonzalez did, and has far less of an excuse for arrant nonsense than should be granted the latter.)

The reaction to Gonzalez’s piece had everything to do with the desperate need of the modern pundit to be beside his/herself – which, in most cases, is one too many. However, the reaction was not aimed at the expression of an opinion, but to the very existence of that opinion itself, anywhere, even in the most dimly lit corner of the collegiate media. The overwhelming impression was that Gonzalez had offended against a brand new icon – that he had blasphemed more against the use people had decided to make of Tillman, than against Tillman himself, who never wanted to be more than an ordinary soldier, and died bravely as just that. And who now is having done to him in death everything that he disdained while he was alive. This is a modern media culture utterly unprepared for what happens when a war begins to go sour.

Unkind souls – not me, certainly – might suggest that Gonzalez’s opinions were no less nutty than many of those spouted by the Wall Street Journal editorial page between the years 1992 and 2000. Souls even less kind – not me, surely -- might ponder whether or not the opinion of a president that God put him in office to fight evil, or the opinion of an attorney general that the Republic is threatened by nekkid statues, might both have more of an effect on the polity than the artless maunderings emanating from some garret in the Berkshires.

Pat Tillman died a soldier. A good friend of mine who is also one said he would have been happy to have commanded him, and that’s good enough for me. At his memorial service on Monday, Tillman’s family spoke with great passion against turning their lost son into a marble statue, so I will pay them the respect of not doing that, and of not using his death to score cheap political points, and to remember amid all the wild talk, that iconization can be the worst form of forgetting.

We also need to remember there are far more soldiers than Pat Tillman. The vast majority of those have given up just as much as Mr. Tillman, but what they gave up cannot be measured by money. They have given up time with their families, they have given up being present at the births of their children, and many, far too many, have given up their very lives just as Mr. Tillman ultimately did. Focusing on Mr. Tillman runs the risk of neglecting the heart-rending sacrifices made by the hundreds of thousands who are performing military service in anonymity.