Mourners for National Guardsman Tristan Southworth started showing up an hour early at Hazen Union High School in Hardwick. By 9 a.m. on September 1, it was already 80 degrees. Red Cross volunteers hauled a cooler of bottled water up and down the murmuring, lengthening queue.

At 10, a third of Hardwick and Walden was filing into the gym: relatives and friends of the family, neighbors, storekeepers, doctors, former teachers and coaches, and townspeople like me, who didn’t know Tristan but still felt he was ours. His former classmates were there, too, the girls pretty in summer dresses, the boys awkward in suit jackets or wrinkled dress shirts over jeans — kids still spotty with acne, still thinking over adulthood.

Unlike Tristan, who was killed in a firefight in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, on August 22. He was two months shy of his 22nd birthday.

Tristan wasn’t a kid who joined the military because he had no other options. By all accounts he was a brilliant but self-effacing athlete, a good student, a teasing but generous friend and big brother. His parents could afford to send him to college; he attended for one year, in Colorado. Still, he signed up for the Guard as soon as he could, as a high school junior in 2006.

Everybody said Tristan Southworth died as he lived — selflessly, trying to rescue a fellow soldier — as if this lent sense, or logic, to his death.

As I took my place, standing at the back of the packed gym, I wondered how many others had come, as I had, unable to find meaning in the loss of this promising boy — or any boy — fighting to uphold a corrupt government in an unending war of choice half a world away.

The flag bearers appeared sure of the meaning. Grizzled and ponytailed, their black biker vests emblazoned with POW/MIA insignia, these guys were probably Vietnam vets; they had lost their own buddies in the defense of a corrupt government in a war of choice half a world away. And, who knows, maybe in the middle of the night they, too, have groped to understand why. But, standing at attention as the dress-uniformed soldiers and officers from three states marched past, their faces were proud and resolute.

Patriotism makes no moral distinctions among wars or deaths. Under the flag, all sacrifices are honorable.

Guard Chaplain Lt. Col. Calvin Kemp, the Vietnam veteran and resident of nearby Stannard who led the short, Christian service, seemed also to know the meaning. I tried to glean it as he read snatches of Scripture evoking the Lord’s protection, nations in disarray, grief and a kind of pious ambition.

The majestic 121st Psalm opened the ceremony: “I lift mine eyes unto the hills. From whence cometh my help?” — only rendered in an American vernacular version “I look up to the mountains. Where can I find help?”

“My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth,” the congregation — for now it was a congregation — answered.

Kemp read from Isaiah: “On this mountain He will remove the veil of grief covering all people and the mask covering all nations. He will swallow up death forever.” And Psalm 46: “Nations are in turmoil, and kingdoms topple … The Lord of Armies is with us. The God of Jacob is our stronghold.”

From the New Testament, he chose portions from the Gospel according to Matthew, and from Philippians: “…forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

All this culminated in his sermon, which Kemp called “Victory.” It was not about the kind of victory Tristan strove for in life — victory on the playing field or even on the battlefield. This was the victory wrested from death through the martyrdom and resurrection of Jesus Christ. “Don’t let your eyes trick you. Don’t let your aching heart deceive you,” Kemp said. “This is not a time of despair or hopeless defeat. This is a time for victory. This is not about death at all. It’s about everlasting life.”

The assembled bowed their heads for the Lord’s Prayer; they said amen.

I remained silent, part of me envious of a faith that could declare despair irrelevant and push aside politics to find fellowship. But another part of me was angry. In imagining Tristan’s soul someplace blissfully beyond place, how were we dealing with his shot-up body lying on a dusty Afghan mountainside near the Pakistani border?

Adjutant General Michael Dubie and Gov. Jim Douglas stepped up to this task. Dubie awarded Tristan several military honors, including a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart; Douglas presented Tristan’s parents with the Vermont Patriots Medal. Valor, honor, freedom: These were the words from which we were to glean reasons for Tristan’s sacrifice.

Outside in the white sunshine, the honor guard stepped smartly carrying Tristan’s coffin to the hearse. The other servicemen and -women saluted. A slender, dark-haired woman in jeans and a sleeveless shirt stood in the doorway and wiped her eyes — Tristan’s girlfriend. His grandparents held hands. His younger brother looked lost in his black suit.

The family was loaded into a school bus. The hearse pulled out, with the bus behind it, followed by a military convoy of black Chevy Suburbans and, slowly gathering from the parking lot and surrounding streets, scores of cars and pickup trucks.

On the way to the Main Street Cemetery, Tristan’s body passed the Memorial Building, its inside walls inscribed with the names of Hardwickians who had fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, the “War of Rebellion” and “the World War.” It passed the American Legion’s massive new granite memorial, depicting the weaponry of five wars on the front and listing the locals who served in World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and “The Gulf Wars and Other Actions” on the back.

It passed the big flags hanging from the telephone poles and the little flags stuck in the street signs and the flower boxes on the Main Street Bridge. It passed the red, white and blue garlands and the banner over the porch of the old Hardwick Inn, reading, “Our Hero, We Will Never Forget You. Rest in Peace.”

I didn’t follow on to the cemetery. The burial felt too intimate to include me, a stranger. Instead, I made a U-turn and drove back to our house. The New York Timeswas on the kitchen table, headlined by President Obama’s “withdrawal” of combat troops from Iraq, the closure of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the launch of a new phase, Operation New Dawn. On the radio, a BBC reporter said not much was changing on the ground. He called the events a “rebranding” of the war and said he’d already picked up an Operation New Dawn coffee cup.

Another lead story detailed revelations of corruption in the Afghan Bank, run by a close associate of President Hamid Karzai, who has declined to investigate his friend’s “unorthodox financial dealings,” including “lending tens of millions of dollars to himself.” On the same page of the paper, a small item reported the deaths of five American troops in Afghanistan on Tuesday, the day of Tristan’s wake.

A week after the funeral, the banner has been rolled up and the flags taken down from the telephone poles. Beside the Legion’s monument, Old Glory is back at full staff.

“Tristan Southworth” has not yet been inscribed under the Gulf Wars section of the Legion’s memorial, where there’s room for only a few more names. More monuments will be needed, anyway. Since this one was constructed eight years ago, the U.S. has engaged in two more wars.

Originally published in Seven Days.

It ain’t all pretty, but 2009 looks a lot better than anything this millennium has witnessed so far. As in all things psychological and political, the signs point every which way. So here are my predictions — some grim, some gleeful, some substantiated and some woven of the holey cloth of dreams. Here’s to a really new New Year.

Class struggle, welcome back
“JUMP, you fuckers!” This placard, carried at a September rally protesting the financial industry bailout, may be too explicit for some of you random-acts-of-kindness practitioners. But its underlying sentiment is probably a healthy one.

Admit it. Unless you’re a hedge-fund investor laying off your gardeners or listing your yacht on Craigs-list, your heart is not flooded with compassion for the Masters of the Universe whose universe has suddenly deflated. You are not moved to tears by the suicide of Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, the financier ruined by Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The Villehuchets were so rich they lent money to Louis XIV; for such crimes many of them ended up on the wrong edge of the guillotine blade. Yet Rene-Thierry believed that the rich would forever get richer, and never pay.

Sisters and brothers, you are feeling a scintilla of schadenfreude, that slightly guilty pleasure in the misfortune of those who justly deserve it. Savor the emotion. The baby bankers throwing back $20 martinis in SoHo, the private-plane weekend commuters cluttering up Vermont’s woods with their 40,000-square-foot ski chalets, complaining all the while about their property taxes — these people’s needs and values have afflicted the rest of us long enough. Then crank your spite up to anger, a necessary ingredient of class struggle.

Not to worry, post-partisans. The U.S. isn’t on the verge of condemning Bill and Melinda Gates to the fate of the anciens Villehuchets. But when John McCain failed to convince voters that ending the Bush tax cuts would lead directly to Venezuelan-style communism, we may have witnessed Americans waking up to which side they are on. (Note to Joe the Plumber: I didn’t know Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, but I know you’re no Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet).

You’re a Wall Street investor? Me, too. Don’t let that confuse your loyalties. Your retirement fund is probably hovering in the high four figures. Sign a card, comrade. This year, we eat the rich.

Muddied green
If the rich, having faces, are not on your list of comestibles, you are in 2009’s avant-garde. Our food co-op is selling “artisan tofu.” Watch for the Gourmet Magazine feature on root vegetables.

But if designer rutabaga is the rage, its purveyors may be out of luck. Shoppers tell pollsters they are cutting back on organic veggies because of high prices. Magazine editors are deep-sixing their green issues. Hybrid-car sales are sluggish, while lower gas prices are boosting purchases of SUVs. Red (as in the deficit column) is shaping up to be the new green.

The lesson here is not that we should all build saunas, sit back and enjoy the Earth’s rising temperatures. It’s just that we can’t rely on consumer desire to save the oceans from boiling. Want gas-guzzlers off the road? Implement emissions standards that prohibit their manufacture. With climate-change experts and activists heading Obama’s new White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that just might happen.

The White House heats up . . .
It won’t satisfy aficionados of extramarital fellatio and cigar play, but when Michelle puts on that red dress, Mama, somebody’s going dancin’ tonight. The Obamas bring some much-needed mojo back to a household that has gone frumpy and depressed. And for America’s growing girls and boys, the First Woman is living proof that smart, strong and serious can be sassy and sexy, too. Abstinence only, RIP?

. . . and sells out
So Rick Warren, the “purpose-driven,” anti-gay pastor of California’s Saddleback megachurch, has been chosen to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. Is this trip to the dark side our new leader’s idea of crossing the cultural aisle? Or is it truly his first political faux pas? We’ll know after January 20, when he either pulls his own don’t-ask-don’t-tell or puts his money where his mouth isn’t and appoints some pro-equality judges. The question is how long queers will lie still and be sacrificial lambs to excessive ecumenicalism — and what we will all do if Obama doesn’t come to his senses.

Racism redux
This Christmas, Republican National Committee chair candidate Chip Saltsman sent committee members a little gift: a CD featuring “Barack the Magic Negro,” a song by conservative satirist Paul Shanklin of “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” In it, Shanklin regales listeners with an impression of Al Sharpton and ridicules not only Obama but also Snoop Dogg and Louis Farrakhan. Another highlight of the CD: “The Star Spanglish Banner,” an anti-immigration tune that begins, “Jose can you see . . .” And you thought the GOP had loaded neo-fascism, along with its cheerleader Sarah Palin, on a plane back to the permafrost. Dream on. Politico.com makes a good case that the flap over the CD could help, rather than hurt, Saltsman’s chances.

The new neo-atheism
Pastor Rick is giving that invocation. We still have not one but two prayers at the inauguration, not to mention one at the start of every Congressional day. The Washington National Cathedral, though it receives no government funding, is the congressionally designated “national house of prayer.” Conservative Christianity still exerts a deep influence on the politics of this purportedly secular nation. (Read Jeff Sharlet’s brilliant book The Family and shudder to learn how deep it is.) Still, there are signs that God may be taking a back pew in Washington. Obama has promised to nix the global gag rule, which prohibits reproductive-health providers in U.S.-aid-receiving countries from mentioning abortion to their clients. I’ve lost track of the number of times the word science has been spoken around Capitol Hill lately, uncoupled from its longtime companion, creation.

Prozac nation
The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM-V, won’t be out until 2012. But this year the controversy will keep heating up over whether the bible of psychological disorders (and guidebook for insurance-claim arbiters) should include Apathy Disorder, Caffeine Withdrawal Disorder, Internet Addiction and a host of other dubious diagnoses. These days, new psychological illnesses are almost invariably “discovered” by pharmaceutical companies that just happen to have devised drugs to treat them. The plot thickens when you learn (as the Center for Science in the Public Interest reported last May) that more than half of the new members of the DSM-V writing group have ties to Big Pharma. As the manual gets fatter, and more former human discomforts are enshrined as disorders, there will be fewer of us who are not certifiable — that is, certifiable consumers of psychotropic drugs.

Revenge of the nerds
First, the improbable happened: Republican pundits defected when McCain chose a dimwit as his running mate. Then the unimaginable: A candidate was elected not despite but because of his gift for uttering elegant sentences describing subtle and informed thoughts. Then that glimmer of possibility became reality in a Cabinet composed almost entirely of class valedictorians. Could the intellectual be making a comeback? Book sales are down, it is true, but publishers may be shedding mostly those customers who buy books (especially books by the likes of Tina Fey and Jamie Lee Curtis) and don’t actually read them. Call it the audacity of hope, but I’m putting my money on a brand-new product line that will pull the publishing industry out of the ditch: books for readers, written by authors.

Mission accomplished
Reports from Iraq tell us the courts are travesties of justice and the prisons are torture chambers; freedom of speech and the press are nonexistent (the journalist who threw his shoe at Bush was allegedly beaten brutally and faces seven years in prison); and women are in purdah. In other words, the U.S. “liberation” of Iraq has produced . . . Dick Cheney’s “democracy.” Next year in Afghanistan!

This piece appeared originally in Seven Days.

“Here, brother, for you a flag,” sing the proud sons and daughters of Armenia, formerly the proud sons and daughters of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. “Look at it, three colors / It’s our gifted symbol / Let it shine against the enemy / Let Armenia always be glorious!”

Down in Harare, where the dictator is murdering his opponents, the people’s voices rise: “O lift high the banner, the flag of Zimbabwe / The symbol of freedom proclaiming victory / We praise our heroes’ sacrifice / And vow to keep our land from foes / And may the Almighty protect and bless our land.”

And here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the Star Spangled Banner waves over another chosen people: “Blest with victory and peace / May the heav’n-rescued land / Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.”

In every national anthem, the flag is glorious, the hills beautiful, the citizens courageous, free and blessed.

There’s a reason all national anthems are the same: Patriotism is a one-size-fits-all emotion manufactured of sentiments that everybody subscribes to — freedom, loyalty, honor, brotherhood — at least while they’re waiting for the ballgame to start. Problem is, once the first pitch is thrown, patriotism requires you to cheer for one team only.

These truths became self-evident during Independence Day week, when the American presidential campaign turned

into an America-love competition — or a tribunal on Barack and Michelle Obama’s allegiance to the fatherland and (yet another) 10-gun salute to the heroism of John McCain.

Obama stood up for wife and country in Independence, Mo.; an abbreviated version of his speech was published in Parade, alongside McCain’s own homily on patriotism. The pundits dutifully parsed the differences, and a few emerged. In Parade, Obama speaks of equality; McCain doesn’t mention it. Obama traces his love of and loyalty to his country to memories of childhood and family; McCain downplays “sentiments about place and kinship.” McCain’s manifesto has a military band playing in the background; Obama’s recalls choruses of “Up With People.”

But there are far more similarities than differences between these two patriots. Both men exalt freedom and sacrifice; both see the latter as necessary in defense of the former. Both laud their land’s wealth and power. Both equate loyalty to country with, as McCain put it, loyalty to “countrymen.”

Listening to Obama’s oration brought a lump to my throat. But my response was testament less to what he said or how he said it — the guy, after all, could make audiences weep reciting the ingredients on a Gatorade bottle — than to the power of sentimentality. Nationalism is the ideology of the banal, said Danilo Kis, who would retch in his grave to read the descriptor at the head of his Wikipedia page: “a Yugoslavian/Serbian writer of Hungarian/ Jewish-Serbian origin.”

Say “pride,” “Thanksgiving,” “hearts,” “Martin Luther King,” “gratitude,” and “renewal” all within 28 minutes, or put a child kissing a puppy on the TV screen. Either will reliably jerk tears of happiness. Patriotism is as buttery and sugary as apple pie.

******

As antidote to all these empty calories, I spent last week reading the great anti-patriots. Virginia Woolf, asked in 1938 how to fight fascism, wrote “Three Guineas,” in which she exhorted “[f]reedom from unreal loyalties . . . You must rid yourself of pride of nationality in the first place; also of religious pride, college pride, family pride, sex pride and those unreal loyalties that spring from them.”

Leo Tolstoy 40 years earlier called patriotism “stupidity.” “To destroy war,” he declared, “destroy patriotism.”

And in between, on the eve of the revolution that toppled Russia’s czar in the name of international working-class solidarity, the feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman penned “Patriotism,” in which she drew a bright line connecting patriotism and militarism. “Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate,” she wrote. “Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves better, nobler, grander, [and] more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others.”

Forgive Emma for simplifying; she was a polemicist, not a political scientist. But she got it basically right. Patriotism is by definition chauvinistic: My country and your country can’t both be the best. And chauvinism breeds antagonism, real or invented. The terrorists attacked us, George Bush keeps saying, because “they hate our freedom.”

Patriotism demands obeisance to all warriors. “For those who have fought on the battlefield under the Stars and Stripes . . . no further proof of such sacrifice is necessary,” declared Obama in Missouri. He named his opponent among those deserving automatic respect and implicitly chastised his supporter Wesley Clark, a warrior himself, for suggesting that getting shot out of a plane does not qualify a man for office.

Obama claimed patriotism to be an “instinct.” But you aren’t born loving your country. Indeed, the candidate noted that this loyalty has to be taught (he mentioned civics classes). And in a world where economies and communications are boundary-less, where 67 million people are displaced or in exile and millions more migrate “voluntarily” for work, this education — or reeducation — is a complicated, sometimes brutal business.

Patriotism is the love of a “homeland,” and a homeland is usually assumed to be a state.

But to be accepted as citizens of an adopted “homeland,” migrants must demonstrate fealty to a state that punishes them for the very marginality and desperation that make them useful to that state’s economy.

Then there’s the project of creating new states. “[P]eople take them, homelands, from me, and give them to me if it occurs to them, and still ask me to love them unconditionally,” writes the novelist and essayist Dubravka Ugreiç, whose Yugoslavian passport has been replaced by that of her new “homeland,” Croatia.

Ugreiç chronicles the hellish years during which political opportunists, gangsters and war profiteers wrenched apart her once-united, multicultural nation and divided it into a bunch of new, mutually despising ones. Newborn patriotisms required the death and rebirth of histories: Books had to be burned, intellectuals, even travelers, renounced, and memories erased and replaced.

It was, Ugreiç writes, a “national mythomania” of “thousand-year dreams” held by heroic “races” — Serb, Croat, Slovenian, Bosnian, Albanian — each threatened by barbarian Others whose atrocities were so savage that self-defense necessitated “ethnic cleansing.” Years of terror, violence, poverty, displacement and lies drove people so mad that they were “ready to grab hold of the one and only truth they [were] offered, like a straw”: their new nationhood.

Ugreiç is having none of it. “I am no one. And everyone,” she writes. “In Croatia I shall be a Serb, in Serbia a Croat, in Bulgaria a Turk, in Turkey a Greek, in Greece a Macedonian, in Macedonia a Bulgarian.” She is, in other words, a cosmopolitan, citizen of the world.

I too am proud to call myself a “rootless cosmopolitan,” which, incidentally, was the fascist euphemism for Jew. But you don’t have to be Jewish — or rootless — to be cosmopolitan. To be a citizen of the world does not mean having no home or identity.

Rather, argues Kwame Anthony Appiah, a worldly Ghanaian-British philosopher with deep ties to both places, we can be “partial” cosmopolitans by assuming two commitments: an obligation to others beyond kith, kin and citizenship; and “[taking] seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance.” When the two ideals of “universal concern and respect for legitimate differences . . . clash,” Appiah writes in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, “cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge.”

******

On Independence Day, my partner Paul and I walked down the road to celebrate the 80th birthday of the farmer who owns or owned much of the land on our hill. We don’t share many political views with Wendell, but we appreciate his dry Vermont humor and the love with which he and his wife tend the trees and fields on the road. Wendell is different from us — we don’t always understand the practices and values of the other — but he is by no means a stranger.

After supper — a choice of meat or vegetarian lasagna — we gathered on benches and folding chairs at the top of the broad, sloping hayfield to watch fireworks. Most were red, white and blue. They made big noises — the rat-a-tat of automatic weapons, the whistles of missiles. But the grand finale was neither patriotic nor warlike. The explosions opened in slender silver and yellow petals, spreading almost silently down the sky. They didn’t look like bombs bursting in air. They looked like spider mums.

When the oohing and aahing was over, we all went into the house and thanked each other and said good-night. Then Paul and I walked home under the moon that shines on friend and foe this whole world over.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

The instant the ad hit the stands and screens, the blogosphere and talk media were aflame with outrage. Four thousand emails poured into the Times, calling the lame schoolyard epithet despicable, disgraceful and treasonous. Congress — including 168 Democratic senators and representatives — voted to condemn “in the strongest possible terms” MoveOn’s “personal attacks” on the general’s honor, integrity and professionalism (Leahy and Welch voted yea; Sanders nay). Clark Hoyt, the Times‘ purportedly unbiased Public Editor, allowed that, had it been up to him, he would have asked for the deletion of “Betray Us,” which he called “a particularly low blow when aimed at a soldier.”

First off, calling a general a soldier is like calling Bill Gates a programmer. David Petraeus is the boss, and the Times got it right the first time: He is a public figure, representing the U.S. Armed Forces, U.S. foreign policy and the war in Iraq. This means that, whatever he may feel personally, he is not a private citizen; legally, he cannot be libeled. In fact, just like other generals prosecuting corrupt policies (Curtis LeMay, William Westmoreland, Augusto Pinochet and Idi Amin come to mind), Petraeus is precisely the guy to dis. If he comes back from the circle of hell that is Iraq and reports that things are looking up, he is either a fool (which he isn’t) or a liar — the president’s liar.

What struck me about this “blow,” though, was its rarity. Far more typical these days is the other part of the Congressional resolution, which repeatedly recognizes, honors and respects “all members of the U.S. Armed Forces.”

“Americans rightly admire our troops for their bravery, dedication and integrity. The Marines, for instance . . . epitomize the rectitude of America’s soldiers,” read one typical blog in Capitalism Magazine, an Ayn Randist website. A Sunday Times book review by Iraq vet/lawyer/writer Phillip Carter began: “It’s hard not to like soldiers. The young men and women who make up our armed forces represent virtues we’d like to see more of in society: integrity, selfless service and loyalty to comrades and country . . . Spend enough time with them, particularly those serving in harm’s way, and you will inevitably come home admiring them, and maybe envying them as well.”

You don’t have to be a free-market warrior or War on Terror cheerleader (as Carter seems to be) to harbor undying devotion to Our Men and Women in Uniform. Soldier-love is held up as an antiwar sentiment, too. This leads to an ever-escalating contest over which side is more faithful to the beloved. A couple of weeks ago, Rush Limbaugh impugned military personnel who oppose the war as “phony soldiers.” Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean demanded he “immediately apologize to our brave men and women in uniform for undermining the sacrifices they make every day serving our country.” Dean called Limbaugh’s comments “un-American.” To gild this red-white-and-blue lily, the Dems posted a 2005 video clip on their website — headlined “New Audio of Rush Limbaugh Viciously Smearing a Veteran” — in which Rush expressed his support for the troops by calling Marine Paul Hackett a “staff puke” who “tried to hide his liberalism behind a military uniform” when he ran for Congress as a Democrat.

Troop admiration is also a good disinfectant for memories of Hanoi Jane and rumors of Vietnam War protesters spitting on returning vets. Old peacenik Bernie Sanders has carved out a politically useful niche standing up for veterans’ rights to compensation, health care, education and pensions. (By the way, sociologist and Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke put the spitting-on-soldiers myth to rest in 1998, when he combed every newspaper story, oral account and poll and found no evidence of spitting — except a few pro-war goobers aimed at protesters.)

Jim Currie, a professor at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., summed up the love fest on National Public Radio: “The reality is, you’re not going to find anybody today who’ll say they don’t support the troops.” Currie noted that it means a lot to the men and women in country “to know the American people are behind them,” to hear “we’re with you, we support you, we honor you, we admire you.”

*********

OK, I’ll say it. I don’t “support the troops.” ?That is, I don’t support them qua troops. I support them as people, just as I support — or rather, worry, grieve and rage on behalf of — the Iraqis: as people caught in a senseless, fruitless, apparently endless bloodletting.

But to speak of the virtues of soldiering is implicitly to ratify the values of militarism: that might leads to right. This helps perpetuate the war in Iraq, and all wars.

Being “with” the troops is not the same as honoring them. If I spent time with those Marines while they rousted cowering children from their beds at 4 a.m., I feel certain I would not admire or — of all things — envy them.

Part of me pities them. Does that sound patronizing? Read Walt Whitman’s accounts of the Civil War — far more visceral frontline reportage than anything Wolf Blitzer could accomplish with a full camera crew. It is a combination of admiration, gratitude and, yes, pity: ?”. . . all the men with this coating of murk and sweat and rain, now recoiling back, pouring over the Long Bridge — a horrible march of twenty miles, returning to Washington baffled, humiliated, panic-struck. Where are the vaunts, and the proud boasts with which you were sent forth? Where are your banners, and your bands of music, and your ropes to bring back your prisoners? Well, there isn’t a band playing and there isn’t a flag but clings ashamed and lank to its staff.”

Pity was a fine form of sympathy for the hordes of working-class boys whose blood was siphoned into the collapsing veins of Europe’s dying empires during World War I. And now, another dying empire chews the flesh of its own. Last month a Manhattan gallery exhibited Nina Berman’s photos of wounded Iraq vets, taken in 2003. One of her subjects has no legs, one no face or ears; several have no expressions on the faces they have left. The pictures recall Otto Dix’s drawings of hideously stitched-together World War I soldiers. Back then the chronic nightmare these survivors suffered was called “shell shock.” Now it’s “post-traumatic stress disorder.” But in both sets of images, even the men decorated with medals look less like heroes than victims.

There’s a difference, though, between World War I (and Vietnam) and the Iraq war. Then, the cannon fodder was drafted. Today’s fighters volunteer. In fact, it is this distinction that inspires the most admiration in those who admire the troops. To me, it’s the troubling part: They did not make the policy, they might not even understand the policy — who does, really? — but they have chosen to give their lives to it. There are other ways to serve your country, other ways to learn to fly a plane or earn a college scholarship. These men and women are not responsible for the war, but they are responsible for their part in it — even if they are only following orders. They have volunteered to follow orders.

There are some troops I admire: those who may have been duped into volunteering, joined the National Guard expecting to help in natural disasters, or even excitedly anticipated the adventure of battle, but who wake up in Baghdad or Falluja one morning and realize the whole thing is a crock and a crime — then desert or refuse another tour, or pour themselves into protesting the war. These are Rush Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers.” They are heroes to me.

I look at those Berman pictures and fervently wish our women and men in uniform to return home with limbs and sanity intact. But this wish does not translate into endorsing the values written in their sacrifice. Far from it: Their sacrifice is an obscene waste.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

The news was on our side. CNN polls that week showed support for the war at an all-time low: The number of Americans in favor had halved since 2003, while those strongly opposed doubled. Six in 10 believed Bush lied to get us into the war. Most people wanted Congress, not the president, to direct war policy.

The Democrats were pulling their caucus behind a withdrawal plan, in spite of a precarious majority in the Senate. And Bush was feeling the heat. On Monday, he would go before the American people to “plea,” as the press universally described it, for patience. His podium was set before a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt on a rearing steed. But on the front page of The New York Times Tuesday, Little George’s ink-dot eyes and wobbly-straight-line mouth made him look more like Charlie Brown on the pitcher’s mound than the Rough Rider on San Juan Hill. You could almost see a thought bubble blooming above his head, reading, “Sigh.”

And yet I didn’t feel like marching. What good would it do? I thought. Born in 1952, as the Korean War dragged on and the hydrogen bomb was being tested, I marched — or was pushed in my stroller — to Ban the Bomb. Vietnam followed close behind, then Cambodia, Desert Storm, Afghanistan — not to mention all the conflicts for which America supplied the arms and the advice and let the bodies of other nations fall.

As I laced up my walking shoes and filled my water bottle, I tried to bring a lifetime’s blur of peace marches into focus. Still fresh in memory was February 15, 2003, when a half million poured into the streets of New York, the mounted police unable to corral us into “free-speech” pens. That Monday, I opened my email to a cascade of jpegs. Along with us, 30 million people in 800 cities around the world had cried out, “No War in Iraq!”

A month later, after a Take Back meeting, we watched the bombs of Operation Shock and Awe falling on Baghdad. The TV screen was that now-familiar weird green of nighttime desert videotape; the explosions were silent. I remember thinking that to viewers tuning in after a gory evening of prime-time entertainment, it wouldn’t look so bad.

•••••••••

This time the demonstration was small, a couple thousand in New York, perhaps three times that in Washington. Some things had improved, notably the attitudes of New York’s Finest. One cop recited the route through a bullhorn as if he were a United for Peace & Justice marshal: “We march up Sixth to Fifty-Seventh. Then we turn right and go to Second Avenue . . .” At Fifty-Seventh, another officer cheered us on: “Only 11 blocks to go! Burn a hundred more calories!”

The evening news programs carried short clips of the events. The next day, the Times ran a tiny item in the Metro Section. And Bush reaffirmed his commitment to staying the course. If we pull out, he threatened, a “contagion of violence” will “engulf the whole region.”

Why march?

Some glimpse in the recent terrible news the signs of better news to come. After all, Iraq’s unremitting chaos has turned America against the war. Marxists used to call this “heightening the contradictions,” a process by which the desired end — back then it was proletarian revolution — is supposedly hastened; in other words, worse is better.

I tend to think that worse is worse, but in this case it’s hard to say what’s worse and what’s better: Saddam’s totalitarian tyranny or today’s Hobbesian anarchy? A partitioned Iraq, each region suppressing women and freedom according to its own interpretation of scripture, or an endless, fruitless American occupation, the “long war”? All are evils, some greater, some lesser.

Maybe I’m demoralized because I fear that the president is right. If we leave, we abandon Iraq to self-immolation. We may simply be betting, perversely, that if we stay, the same will happen: a bloodbath, only with American blood and treasure in the mix. Calling for peace, tout court, the left appears to be as much in denial about the aftermath of our withdrawal as the Bush administration was about the aftermath of our invasion. We don’t want to admit that U.S. policymakers can do little more now than make of a monumental catastrophe a merely enormous one. The Iraqis know this better than anyone, and they are as confused as anyone: In an ABC-BBC poll, half said they oppose the occupiers’ presence in their country, but only 15 percent want us to pull out now.

••••••••••••

So why did I march? The child of activists goes to peace marches as an adult raised Catholic goes to mass: ritually, whether she feels like it or not. My mother, who was there too, always told me that if we did not march, things would be even worse than they are.

Sometimes she complains, as I do, that the message is too complicated; the media images can’t sum it up. Some-times, like now, I wonder if it’s too simple. Still, the message must be sent: No. We do not consent.

It’s the message a group of pacifists sent last week when they sat in at Congressman Peter Welch’s Burlington office, demanding that he oppose the Democrats’ bill to fund military operations in Iraq while imposing deadlines for withdrawal. These seasoned activists knew that the vote would be complicated for Welch. To oppose the bill would be to side not just with antiwar progressives but also with anti-withdrawal Republicans. The activists must have known, too, that immediate withdrawal could not pass the House, much less the Senate.

Welch voted for it, and the protesters condemned him. But their message went deeper; its provenance and future are longer than this appropriation, even than this war. They were rejecting all the options on the table, because none was good enough.

What is to be done? It is not, in the end, the job of a protest placard to spell out a policy plan. So I carried my poster — Take Back the Future for Peace — and, alas, I will carry it again and again.

I marched, and not just because I’m afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. I marched to tell the world that we must create more to choose from than greater and lesser evils.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Say the word and emotions rush forth. I’m not just talking about the love and guilt that moved 152 million Mother’s Day cards off the shelves last year. As an email from Jane Williamson of Ferrisburgh’s Rokeby Museum reminded me, motherhood is more than personal. It’s symbolic, religious . . . and political.

“The original call for Mothers Day was as a day of peace,” Williamson wrote. Its founder was the suffragist and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, who broadcast her “Proclamation for Mother’s Day” in 1870.

“Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage / For caresses and applause,” declared Howe. “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn / All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. / We, the women of one country, / Will be too tender of those of another country / To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

Women’s peace movements still echo these sentiments. Anti-Vietnam War women reprised the Lysistratan refusal to make love with warriors, with a more sex-positive spin: “Girls say yes to boys who say no” (to the draft). Earlier, in 1961, Women Strike for Peace assumed the mantle of child-savers in calling for a nuclear test ban. Their “Pure Milk, Not Poison” campaign publicized the radioactive element Strontium 90, which would be released by nuke tests into soil, and then grass, cows, milk and children.

This Mother’s Day, Code Pink is evoking a sisterhood of mothers, beyond nation or ideology, whose breasts beat as one in resistance to violence. The Pinks are writing letters to Laura Bush, “to appeal to her own mother-heart” to ask Hubby to bring the troops home from Iraq.

*******

If your response to Code Pink’s tactic is, As if, you have located the crack in the theory that women have a special instinct, and therefore a special responsibility, for peacemaking.

Back in Howe’s Day, this idea was unproblematic. Everyone, including women, considered the two sexes to be different species. A female body, they thought, rendered every woman naturally nurturing and home-loving: potentially a peacemaker.

Modern feminism, or one strain thereof, smashed that assumption. This strain — cultural critic Kate Stimpson called us the “minimizers” of gender — insist that men and women are more alike than different, and biology isn’t destiny. If woman is not born but made, then woman and man can be remade, by history.

On the other side of the divide are the “maximizers,” who argue that women are essentially, and extensively, different from men. What to do with the difference? Reclaim it from denigration, celebrate and use it in activism, art, spirituality or sex, often separate from men.

Now, minimizers know, too, that women’s social position does make us different. With rare exceptions, such as Condi Rice, we’re barred from the rooms in which foreign policies are crafted and wars prosecuted. Meanwhile, we’re stuck with all things domestic, from laundry to education. You don’t have to be a fan of wymmin’s music festivals to want to promote the homely values that are trampled at the front lines. Besides, there’s fine antiwar imagery to be found around the house: In 1981, women protesting the installation of U.S. cruise missiles at England’s Greenham Common disabled a military vehicle by sticking a potato in its tailpipe.

You can also reject the idea that having a womb makes you peaceful — or assigns you the job of peacemaker — while recognizing that doing motherhood may teach peacemaking skills. The feminist Sarah Ruddick argued that mothers’ daily resistance to hurting the small, powerless and often annoying creatures in their care constitutes a practice of nonviolence. Mom could teach the U.N. a thing or two, Ruddick suggested.

*******

Julia Howe’s “The Proclamation for Mother’s Day” may seem a curious emanation from the pen that produced “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” only eight years earlier. With its “fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel,” its “Hero, born of woman, crush[ing] the serpent with his heel,” and the rest, the Hymn is hardly “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

But Howe’s life was long; she joined nearly every monumental political struggle of America’s 19th century. The wife of a man who may have helped finance John Brown’s insurrection, she wrote the Hymn to embolden Union soldiers to “die to make men free.” Then, surveying the post-war devastation, she disavowed violence as a political solution.

In the 1890s, Howe abandoned pacifism to support the Armenians, who were being slaughtered by the Turks. She died in 1910. Perhaps World War I would have changed her heart again, as that imperialist bloodbath birthed a new internationalist pacifism.

Howe, incidentally, had six children. Motherhood made her neither belligerent nor pacific. Or maybe it made her both.

Other cultures embrace this contradiction. Kali, the Hindu mother goddess, is both life-giver and destroyer; she wears a necklace of skulls on her blood-smeared breasts. The Aztec Earth goddess Coatlicue, about to be slain by her progeny, popped another son from her womb to whack his wicked siblings. Cybele, the incestuous Greek deification of Mother Earth, had an all-male cult that culminated its rituals of dancing, drumming and sword-clanging with self-castration, cross-dressing and the assumption of female identities.

I leave you to deconstruct that last one. But if Cybele’s pagan trannies were trying to get into a peace group, they needn’t have removed their testicles at the door. Men, said Ruddick, can “mother,” and end wars, too.

So let’s find another date for Julia Howe’s day of peacemaking. After all, isn’t Mother’s Day supposed to mean less work for mother?

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Connelly headlined the column “In Memoriam.” Trying to squeeze in as many as possible, he listed only the soldiers’ names and ranks. He set the column in agate type, a small point size generally used for classified ads. Within several weeks, he was able to print the names of all the Americans killed in Iraq through Memorial Day.

Each week, Connelly — who has owned the paper with his wife, Susan Jarzyna, since 1986 — would go to the Web to download “another chunk” of the Department of Defense casualty reports. Reading the details of the reports, which include not just the soldiers’ names and ranks, but also their hometowns, armed-forces divisions and circumstances of death, had an effect on Connelly: “They became real people, not just names.” These people came from a place, maybe like Hardwick, where each had a family, a pet, a best friend, a hobby. And each suffered his own, unique death.

“As I was doing it,” Connelly told me, “I had this real emotional sense of loss. I felt sad. I wanted to share that with readers.”

So the Gazette started printing all the information Connelly downloaded. He abandoned the agate for a larger type. It was a newspaperman’s humble homage.

Then, on September 22, 2005, the realness got realer. Specialist Scott P. McLaughlin, 29, of Hardwick — 1st Battalion, 172nd Armor Regiment, 42nd Armor Division of the Vermont Army National Guard — was fighting outside Ramadi when a sniper’s bullet pierced the seams of his body armor.

Scott and Nicole McLaughlin had only recently moved to Hardwick. They had a baby daughter, Molly, and a 6-year-old son, Tyler. McLaughlin had enlisted in the Marines after high school, then returned to Vermont and joined the National Guard. Before shipping out, he worked as a laser-cutting technician in Middlesex. He was an active member of Living Hope Fellowship church. He loved strawberry shortcake and fishing — he went fishing on his wedding day, in his tux.

That week, Connelly dedicated the column to Scott McLaughlin. He set the announcement inside a black border. Then he resumed the ordinary lists.

Until last week.

Just six months after Scott McLaughlin’s death, the Gazette ran a second black box, for another Hardwick family burying one of its own. This time, it was National Guard Specialist Christopher Merchant, a volunteer with Company C, 1/172nd Armor, who later transferred to Task Force Saber. Merchant was killed on March 1, in an attack on Iraqi police headquarters a few miles outside Ramadi. He died instantly after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, according to the National Guard. The press release added, “He was wearing his full complement of Individual Body Armor and Kevlar helmet.”

Merchant, born in Burlington, was the father of three daughters and a stepson, ages 9 to 14. He was a fan of the New York Yankees and Star Wars, and an excellent bowler and baker; he attended St. Norberts Church. Only two months before leaving for Iraq, he had been hired as a custodian at his alma mater, Peoples Academy in Morrisville. His mother Janet worked in the cafeteria.

“He volunteered to go to Iraq with the hope that he could make a difference, so his son would not one day have to go to war,” wrote his wife, Monica, in a public statement. His friend Colin Mlcuch expressed a similar sympathy. “I think [Chris] joined up when he saw what was happening to the soldiers there. He saw a lot of young kids dying too young.” Merchant was 32.

Recently, some members of a student club that opposes military recruitment at Hazen Union School placed an ad in the school paper, the T-Bone. It was a photograph of a graveyard; its text began, You can’t be all you can be if you’re dead. The ad pointed out, “There are other ways to get money for college,” and urged students to “think about it” before signing up. Recruiters regularly set up tables in the cafeteria, distributing pens and other souvenirs to students who show interest. To reach its enlistment quotas, the Army has admittedly targeted working-class communities like Hardwick, where jobs are few and many families cannot afford college tuition. After the ad ran, a raft of letters hit the Gazette. A few writers supported the students, but most were angry.

By contrast, the Gazette has not received one letter about Connelly’s “In Memoriam” columns. Only a handful of folks have even mentioned them to Connelly. One person was appreciative. Another, who served in Afghanistan, asked if Connelly meant to make a political statement. Before the editor could answer, his interlocutor answered his own question: “I guess it’s whatever politics you want to put on it. It’s up to the reader.”

U.S. deaths in Iraq have reached 2300, including 23 servicepeople with ties to Vermont — two from Hardwick, a town of 3200. An estimated 15,000 to 32,000 Iraqi civilians have also been killed. We don’t know their names.

Since Memorial Day, the editor’s space in the Hardwick Gazette has become a serial memorial. Connelly has not missed a week of listing, except the first of the year, when the paper customarily shuts down publishing. But the Gazette can’t keep up with the war in Iraq. “In Memoriam” is three months behind.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

One commitment you made was, literally, to move your body out of the room and into the street, voices and fists poised for raising.

It still thrills me to be on the barricades, inside a beast of many bodies. So I signed up to join United for Peace & Justice’s September 24 march on Washington to end the Iraq war. The papers might report a crowd a tenth its real size, the TV news give equal time to the 39 counter-demonstrators. The government would likely ignore us. (Leaving town, Dubya averred that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion.) But we would have an effect — a crucial one, now that fear and disaffection are the Bushies’ best weapons.

If nothing else, a demonstration tells its participants they are not alone. The people united shall never be defeated. Solidarity forever. This knowledge enables them to make those slogans true.

It can’t happen online. Howard Dean and MoveOn’s Eli Pariser claimed during the 2004 elections that they’d invented a virtual political community unlike any in history. When it came to mustering the teams and tabulating the canvassing sheets, though, live kids and union members did it the old-fashioned way.

After the elections, I attended a MoveOn “meetup,” where little groups across the country watched a computer map light up with other meetups, then watched Eli talk, then voted on what to do next (repair voting machines? save the environment?). There was no way to discuss how to accomplish anything. Eli would get back to us.

And from time to time, he drops me an email, to which I respond, or not. MoveOn turns out to be a communications tool, not a community. And in what community it does create, activism is like online dating. No hard feelings.

As for the former cyber-candidate, he can still be found on the web, making wishy-washy statements for the Democratic Party.

On September 24, I didn’t make it to Washington. My group, Take Back the Future — about 40 writers and artists from New York, my part-time home — boarded a reserved Amtrak car in Penn Station at 6 a.m., alongside a clutch of Queerleaders from Burlington.

At 6:15 we budged — 10 yards — then backed up. Every half-hour after that, a conductor offered information, much of it contradictory, about faulty wires in the tunnel, repairs, consolidation of trains. Each dispatch ended with the assurance that we’d be on our way in 20 minutes.

The Queerleaders took out their garbage-bag-plastic pom-poms and cheered (“U-G-L-I! They ugly. Uhn-uhn, they ugly! G-R-E-D! They greedy. . .”). Someone called Amtrak on her cell and learned that a power line was down in New Jersey, halting all southbound travel. This was news to the conductor.

A rumble was rising among us. Factions were arranging car rentals. Our affinity group, which in various incarnations had marched together for 30 years, needed to act.

At 9, I stood on a seat and tried to quell rumors of a conspiracy any more sinister than the Repub-lican Party’s to overthrow the U.S. government by privatizing it out of existence. By 9:10, we had consensus. The Amtrak people, through no fault of their own, couldn’t be trusted. More delays were inevitable. We’d reach D.C. in time to catch our train home.

By 9:30, with our bagels wrapped and signs in English, Spanish and Arabic retrieved from the overhead racks, we had disembarked and started organizing. Some of us talked up the would-be protesters in the terminal. Others called the press. The Queerleaders ducked into phone booths and emerged with pink hair and pleated skirts.

By 10, 60 marchers were on Seventh Avenue and 34th Street, chanting, “Money for trains, not for war!” Shoppers stopped, drivers honked. The New York Times sent its guy, NBC its gal. Writers for The New Yorker and London’s TLS were on our train; they took out their notepads.

That night, NBC gave us equal time with the 300,000 anti- and 39 pro-war marchers in Washington. Next day, the Times ran a photo of our signs and a quote to the effect of “Money for trains, not for war.”

“Joining” MoveOn or another online activist group is like using an Apple computer or wearing Nike shoes — what brand manager Douglas Atkins calls “joining a brand.” The brand sends an email promo, you type in your name, press Send and, presto, you’ve fulfilled your civic duty. An auto-reply arrives, thanking you for your opinion — a receipt. The “community” is as big as a consumer demographic, and no bigger than an email box.

Hannah Arendt wrote about the oikos, the forum in which speech becomes “deeds.” The web, we are told, is the forum of the future. But too often, online speech swallows itself; it can’t emerge as deed. In a train, a terminal or on the street, bodies meet to act. This form may seem to take us back from the future. But, on the ground, we can seize the day — to take back the future.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.