No more global crusades, please

Support for the troops has healed old griefs, which is some comfort to Vietnam veterans who recall coming home to be blamed for an unpopular war. The sight of mostly blue-collar boys pulling on their country’s uniform has narrowed social divisions in a community split by wealth, says Laurie Wood, a local school principal and the aunt of one of the dead. Ideological differences have also been trumped, if not healed, by respect for the troops: although that change only took place after local boys died. The city votes Democratic at election time, but—this being northern New England—it has plenty of prickly independents and libertarian-tinged Republicans too. Starting during the Iraq war, some military families and supporters strung yellow ribbons from lamp posts and electricity poles, prompting other residents to say the city was being made to look pro-war. The argument lasted years and “really divided” South Portland, recalls the city’s chief administrator, James Gailey. A handsome stone memorial in the city’s main park, dedicated in 2011, is an “overdue” statement of thanks for military service, says the mayor, Tom Blake. It is also the product of a truce between the pro- and anti-ribbon camps, who were persuaded to back a monument as a compromise.

Yet some fear that reverence for the troops has dangerously dulled public curiosity. Ms Wood’s beloved nephew, Justin Buxbaum, found himself at war after signing up, aged 16, because without military grants “he didn’t know how to pay for college,” she says. Once in Afghanistan he died in an accident when a roommate’s gun fell and went off. That isn’t the story that people want to hear, she says, but the details matter less and less as time passes, being subsumed into an “amorphous” narrative about heroism. Many stopped paying close attention after Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were killed, she says.

Brigadier-General Campbell admits to being dismayed when he walks through American airports in uniform and strangers try to buy him sandwiches. Volunteer soldiers need no sympathy, he says. On the whole, he says, the people of Maine are more sensible than that, especially those who seek to join the armed forces, whose numbers have not fallen. Maine’s military recruits are asking to serve their country, but “not really signing up to some great moral cause,” the general says.

All America may need a dose of such pragmatism, if South Portlanders are right. They call their city more overtly patriotic than a decade ago, yet more cynical, too. For all Mr Obama’s assurances, many fear an untidy ending in Afghanistan, and further messy crises to follow. Whether fresh interventions might be justified divides them. In short, they will believe in the homecoming of the brave when they see it.

^{Economist.com/blogs/lexington}

From the print edition: United States

Дата добавления: 2015-07-19