The Brain of the Chickenhawk

by Bob Wallace



I used to wonder how to define cowardice. I don't anymore. Cowardice is not running away when you're scared. Everyone has a breaking point. I'd never hold it against anyone if he ran. Under the right circumstances, I'd run. Right time, right place, everyone would.

Cowardice is when people insist that others fight while they won't fight themselves. To use the phrase popular today, they're armchair-warrior chickenhawks. Want some names? Rush Limbaugh, William Kristol, Max Boot, Jonah Goldberg, Dick Cheney. Every one of them went out of his way to avoid military service, yet now urges – no, insists! – others to fight and die.

Limbaugh is one of the more amusing of the chickenhawk cowards, since the persistent rumor is that he declined military service during Vietnam by claiming he had a cyst on his butt. How can he not be embarrassed about this? Yet recently on his program he was calling the generals in Iraq "George McClellans" for not moving fast enough for his taste.

George McClellan was a Civil War general who was reluctant to send his soldiers into battle, claiming he needed more men, training and materiel. Yet the eternal combat virgin Limbaugh, sitting on his former cyst and thousands of miles from the front, possesses the ignorance, arrogance and cowardice to try to direct military operations from behind a microphone.

Then we have Dick Cheney, who avoided Vietnam with five deferments, claiming he had "other priorities." Sounds like he was almost hysterical about not joining the military.

These men are deserving of nothing but contempt. They're cowards, all of them. They think they are so intellectually and morally superior to everyone else that it gives them the right to reduce other people to the status of things. That's why they can so casually send others to die, while they won't fight. They think they're indispensable, but believe those they urge to die are expendable.

The graveyards are full of people who thought they were indispensable.

If anyone's expendable, it's these neocon armchair-warrior chickenhawk cowards. Removed from power – which will happen someday, when people finally see through them – life in the US, and the world, will improve.

These people's problem, ultimately, is hubris, which I believe is the basis of almost all crime, and is a crime itself. Hubris is one thinking he is so grandiose it gives him the right to run roughshod over the rights of others. People afflicted with hubris believe, to repeat what I just wrote, that "they are so intellectually and morally superior to everyone else it gives them the right to reduce other people to the status of things." Hubris is thinking you're indispensable.

Hubris is an old sin, not only the worst but probably the first. It's the sin of Satan, who thought he should be God and didn't mind killing anyone who got in his way. Do the people in the current administration think they are god-like? If they don't, why are they so hell-bent on sending others to fight and die while they won't go themselves?

How do these people turn out like this? Is this what power and privilege does to the weak? Is this what happens when the naive and innocent gain political power? Is it what happens when people don't grow up?

Sometimes I think that Robert Bly had it right. Bly a dozen or so years ago wrote a book called Iron John, about the lack of modern initiation rights for males. In some ways it's a vague, meandering book written by a much-too-chatty poet, but his main point is right on the mark: these days there are no initiation rites for young men.

In the past, in nearly every culture, these rites were performed at the age of 12, initiating the boy into manhood. Today, we send 12-year-olds to middle school, and then wonder why society and schools have such problems with them.

Is this lack of initiation rites the problem with these armchair-warrior chickenhawk cowards? Are they still in some ways 12 years old? They've never grown up, maybe? They're trying to prove they're men by starting wars? They're trying to overcome their childishness and become men by murdering innocent people?

I recently saw Donald Rumsfeld raise his arms in a cheer when he heard about American victories in Iraq. He looked like a middle-schooler at a football game. What is he, 71 years old – and has never grown up? And he's proud the US demolished a fourth-rate country like Iraq? What sort of childish megalomania is that?

Maybe all these chickenhawks need to taken out in the woods and subjected to the ritual death and rebirth that all cultures visit on their 12-year-old boys. Then maybe they would be transformed into the men they're trying to be, and without starting unnecessary wars.

Maybe one of the purposes of these ancient rites is to overcome childish hubris. Thomas Hobbes made the oh-so-accurate observation, "The evil man is the child grown strong." An adult understands hubris and fights against it in himself. Children don't even know what it is.

I think these rites are a really good idea. Imagine Limbaugh, Boot, Goldberg, Perle, Wolfowitz...all of them, sitting in the woods, smeared with chicken blood, feathers in their hair, beating tom-toms and dancing around a bonfire. If George Bush had gone through something like this, maybe he wouldn't have graduated college at age 29 (and this from a man who didn't have to work a day in his life!). Or maybe, even today, he wouldn't be a little boy still trying to impress Daddy.

Then they can say, "At last, we are men." Then, with their heads on straight, they'll cease to be bullies and cowards, and won't be so eager to send soldiers into quagmires.

It's either that, or we'll continue to be ruled by kids in adult's bodies.



May 27, 2003

Bob Wallace [send him mail] is the author of I Write What I See. Please visit his Shameless Book Promotion Page. And here is his Page Full o' Fun.

Copyright ? 2003 LewRockwell.com

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"Limbaugh is one of the more amusing of the chickenhawk cowards, since the persistent rumor is that he declined military service during Vietnam by claiming he had a cyst on his butt. How can he not be embarrassed about this? Yet recently on his program he was calling the generals in Iraq "George McClellans" for not moving fast enough for his taste. "

But it's only cause I tried to sign up before the "don't ask, don't tell" policy went into effect. They wouldn't let me join because of my flagrant homosexuality.

Yorur repressed homosexuality is showing again.

Rush was telling the truth; the cyst on his butt was his brain.

Prove that Rush has a brain.

I'm headed out to bugger a young chap, and then off to the pub to get pissed!

He doesn't have one anymore - he sat on it too long and the cyst burst.

Gone just like my colon and sphincter. Gone from years of perverted indulgences.

I've been fucked up the ass so many times that when I fart, it sounds like someone exhaling.

www.kobehq.com

I'm mentally unstable.

Don't you care?

...here Rushy, here Rushy, come here ya little coward.

...but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse."

John Stuart Mill

never heard of him.