There are many ways to honor the sacrifices of the U.S. military this Memorial Day, but I recommend adding to your remembrances some reading about the ways the Pentagon and politicians promote a shallow and cynical exploitation of American service members in order to evade greater public scrutiny of the endless wars in which their sacrifices are currently made. For starters, I’d recommend this no-punches-pulled piece by Boston College communications professor Michael Serazio, titled “How Empty Displays of Sports Patriotism Allow Americans to Forget the Troops.” I had not previously been aware that Major League Baseball teams have been wearing camouflage uniforms on Memorial Day to honor the troops, as if catching a baseball were akin to catching a grenade (news flash: it’s not). Wearing a military-type uniform to honor service members strikes me as a surreal joke, not a sober homage; as Serazio puts it, it “cheapen[s] the commitment of [service members] to mere performance and play, when their occupation is anything but.” He also notes that the Pentagon’s insinuation of military themes into major league sports serves to “channel our patriotic fervor into contests with unambiguous outcomes and no untimely casualties” — a maneuver, not incidentally, that ascribes closure and meaning to military service that is belied by a series of catastrophic foreign policy decisions by our political leaders.
Successive presidential administration have learned that fetishization of military members’ sacrifice and suffering is the surest way to avoid scrutiny of the dishonorable and murderous wars they’ve been ordered to engage in, and to avoid the incendiary reality that the flip side of American casualties are vast numbers of foreign dead, including almost too many civilians to count. The truest way to honor the troops is to be damned sure they are never asked to risk life and limb in a war unless that war is absolutely necessary, and to insist that Congress has the cajones to actually pass a declaration of war when one is deemed necessary. Otherwise, the result is what we see now: an endless sprawl of forever wars, in places most Americans can’t be bothered to find on a map.