I have a confession to make: I kind of wanted to feel sorry for Lynndie England. The journalists who wrote about her could barely disguise the politely-coded references: Trailer. West Virginia. Sheep farm. Night shift on a chicken processing plant. By the time a British legislator started referring to England and her colleagues, including Sabrina Harman ("former assistant manager at a Papa John's restaurant"), as "smirking jezebels from the Appalachians" -- not to mention "The Lynndie England Song" with its references to incest and "bootshine," posted by an "Anna" as a comment on my blog -- well, I'm surprised the New York Times didn't just up and call her "white trash."
For every soldier set to make a professional career out of the military, there's another, probably many more, who joined -- well, just to get out of a backwater town like Fort Ashby, West Virginia. Or, like some of my students, just to be able to finish college. Or, one suspects, because Burger King wasn't hiring that day and they just wanted to get a decent job that paid a little over minimum wage.
This should in no way be read as a defense of England's actions; my previous posts should make that clear. But it merely underlines the U.S. Army's reliance on the working class, regardless of race (yes, I know about those DOD statistics on military casualties) to fight a war to protect the freedom of the bellicose brood of chickenhawks in the Bush administration, i.e., people who bent over backwards to get themselves out of military service. Nothing like sending out the poor folks to do the dirty work.
England and her fellow torturers -- and dammit, everyone else around them (Tony Taguba didn't call it "systemic" for nothing) -- should be punished. (I can't see how pulling a naked prisoner by the neck with a leash could be "at the wrong place at the wrong time," not to mention her obvious glee. You can't stage that smile.) But the outrage concerning the photographs of the tortured should not be allowed to eclipse the fact that civilians and soldiers -- Americans and Iraqis and the other members of this ragtag coalition of the willing -- are dead, and that the Bush administration should be held responsible as well.
So yes, I think I feel a little ounce -- just a tad -- of sympathy for Lynndie England. She must, of course, face the full consequences of her actions; "I was only following orders" wasn't acceptable at Nuremberg, and it similarly isn't acceptable here. But I can't help feeling that she is something of a scapegoat as well, and the real war criminals get to retire on a Texan ranch.
Good work limpia-man. Yes on the outspoken- and heartfelt-ness.
I said early on England and all them were disposable kids. Disposable at home disposable in Iraq. Disposable.
And they're disposable because...because they do the things disposable people are expected to do. Like drunken Indians and lazy niggers.
Trailer trash is the only identifiable minority it is still perfectly acceptable to step on in public, though it's maybe shifted one click under total acceptance. Economic racism how's that?
Most of those trailer trashes are descended from the Scots and Scots-Irish who were driven from their homes by English sheep tycoons. Into nomadic poverty and hillbilly refuges, from whence the mining cartels made short shrift of a lot of em. But that's too far back in the past to matter huh?
Now they've traded a cheap nylon uniform and a shit-wage "service" job and not enough money to live on, for enough to eat and a place to stay and a uniform and...yeah. Bullets coming and going.
And bombs and stuff.
And a place in the phalanx of greed-thug gangsterism.
Right on Mr. Wily Filipino.