Did anyone else catch Jessica Lynch’s father’s news conference the other day? What an unabashed hick. You can’t get much more “Wyst Vajienya” than that. I doubt we’ve seen a more reluctant national public figure since the Kentucky truck driver who brought an end to the Beltway Sniper’s reign of terror over DC and northern Virginia.
A couple of weeks ago I made mention of those unfashionable folks from previously mentioned unfashionable places who don’t necessarily have straight teeth, pressed pants, morning espresso, prestigious degrees or even degrees at all and still somehow manage to get by happily. And how.
They’re the ones make this country go, and it’s in times of crisis when all the pencil-pushing in the world won’t get the job done that I notice it the most – kind of like now. I read about 19- and 20-year-old soldiers every afternoon before I sit down to edit feeling awfully weak, helpless and humble, perched comfortably behind a keyboard while old high school classmates save the world.
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Everyone’s seen the maps of the 2000 presidential election, broken down by county, with localities carried by Bush in red and by Gore in Blue. The result is a huge sea of red dotted in blue by major metropolitan areas. Politicos on both sides of the aisle analyze “Red America,” or “Flyover Country,” versus “Blue America,” “The Porn Belt,” what have you. Madison is shown in blue on those maps, but we might call it “Teal Territory.” Nader didn’t win here, but that blue should be at least tinged with a healthy helping of green.
Yet the anti-war “in crowd” in Madison has fallen shockingly silent lately. Let’s give credit where credit is due, but I’m not sure if there’s much to complain about right now. The Iraqi people don’t seem too eager to do so — and they still have plenty to complain about. An immediate need of food and water might make the list. Right now it seems they’re a bit preoccupied welcoming the release of their 6- to 15-year-old children from the gulag. Incidentally, the flyovers were there, too, throwing open the lock.
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A friend of mine commented last week that every “good” war needs a good hero, especially an everyman hero; this one is no exception. Of course, no war is good, but certain wars are right. The American Revolution had its Paul Revere, the Civil War its Clara Barton, World War I its Alvin York (of West Virginia), World War II its Jimmy Doolittle and a thousand others.
Tragically, we seem to forget Korea in its entirety, much less its faces. Vietnam, it seems, never had a popular hero to be forgotten. Many of these decorated heroes tucked their spit-stained uniforms in a trunk and went back to the factory or the farm. Others came home, threw their medals back to Congress, married rich and got elected to the very same body. Either way, the popular consciousness reflected popular consensus: The war wasn’t “right.”
So what of this war? Twenty days in, Baghdad will likely insist we were “right,” maybe even a little late. Sticking to the theme at hand, this war’s brand of hero is short and a little unconventional: a 5-foot-5 woman whose only ambitions were to serve her country and to go on to teach kindergarten.
Well, it appears she got what she bargained for. Jessica Lynch is younger than most of us, and she probably signed up the reasons so many of our generation cite: to defend their country … and to pay for school. Funny how those themes run hand in hand at the recruiter’s table. You don’t fight outnumbered with a side arm to the edge of death for scholarship money.
This much we know: This young woman is flat-out tough — tougher than me and tougher than most of you, man or woman. That quality doesn’t get a lot of play anymore, though I can walk down Library Mall and show you plenty of women who are plenty liberated. I can’t show you many liberators.
So, why then, don’t we see the picture of the smiling Jessica on the front page of, say, the National Organization for Women’s website or something like it?
A search of www.now.org for “Jessica Lynch” yields exactly zero hits. Visitors are instead treated to a featured pictorial link to “thetruthaboutgeorge.com,” where the reader’s eye is first drawn to a monologue explaining how “Piece by piece, Bush is tearing down the progress women and other disenfranchised groups have made over the last 35 years, ensuring that rich white males and giant corporations will rule the U.S. for generations to come.”
Somewhere they left out that subjugation by house arrest and the burqa won’t rule Afghanistan for generations to come. Probably took the early flight to Augusta this week; I hear there’s a golf tournament going on …
Odd, isn’t it, that this and other groups of similar strain took to the front lines in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, filed a thousand lawsuits and spent thousands of dollars to put women in the Citadel, on the front lines and in uniform, only to abandon their charges once the shooting breaks out?
Jessica Lynch proves to us what the militant feminists won’t admit: This war is revolutionary in more ways than one. Not only has the United States assembled the most powerful conventional military force in history to engage in an act of liberation, unprecedented in history, but the U.S. Armed Forces are doing it with more women behind the wheel and the trigger than the world has ever known. This is a unique phenomenon, and we wouldn’t be winning without them. The women’s movement won one when they put the Jessica Lynches of this country onto the battlefield, and it took them about a generation to get there.
Then a neo-con with a backbone got “appointed” president and the strongest of strong women became, well, “unfashionable.” NOW that is tragic.
Eric B. Cullen ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in political science and history.