The Class Pass: America's blue bloods aren't bleeding

Katie McKy - Raw Story Columnist
Published: Saturday November 11, 2006

I met Frank Schaeffer through this article, which tells of his defection from the Republican Party. The backbreaking straw was an email circulated about Jim Webb, the former Marine, winner of the Navy Cross, and George Allen’s opponent in VA. The author(s) of that email accused Webb of being a pedophile because he wrote a passage about sex between teenagers. I wrote to Schaeffer. He responded. Our e-chat led to the following interview:

RS: You were a registered Republican born into a Republican family. You’ve now reregistered as non-enrolled (independent) in Massachusetts. Does this induce feelings of disloyalty in you?

FS: Not at all. My journey away from the Republican moniker began many years with my own departure from my evangelical background. That was a far bigger tear in the fabric of my life. I wrote my essay because Webb is the father of a marine serving in Iraq. As the father of a marine who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, my first outrage was a military parent defending a military parent and then it was a novelist defending another novelist. If Webb is a pedophile, then God is a pedophile, for there are scenes of masturbation, rape, pedophilia, and voyeurism in the Bible. Basically, it was the anti-intellectual anti-writer defamation that made me think that I have no place in a party that is Puritanical and pietistic. What they did to McCain reminded me of what they did to Thomas Paine. Rather than attack Paine’s ideas, they said that he had sex with cats. They said that he beat his wife. The same thing was being done to Webb.

RS: How has your political affiliation switch been received by your friends and family?

FS: That article of mine was picked by more than a hundred blogs the last time I checked. I ran out of patience checking. I just couldn’t keep track of the reaction. I received three kinds of responses. One was: “Welcome to the fold. We’re glad you converted.” The second was: “Get lost, you motherfucker, and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.” The third seemed to be from church ladies who quoted Bible verses that were intended to tell me why I should stay Republican. The weird thing was imagining the intersection of the last two types. The second type seemed to be from a Tourette Syndrome Conference and I wondered what they had in common with the church ladies. I was either a motherfucker or a Godless lost soul. I was reading them in juxtoposition. I was trying to picture what terrible thing I had done by leaving the Republican Party and where the cussers and the church ladies would meet in real life. I imagined a group of Hell’s Angels crashing Sunday School. But where they really meet is a shared hatred of the Other.

RS: What are the best options for bringing the upper classes back into the nation’s armed forces?

FS: For me, the first best option is to raise people to be conscious about it. Attitudes towards race and gender and rights didn’t begin in politics. They always began with writers and poets and musicians. Without Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it might have taken another 50 years to abolish slavery. With Oliver Twist, the consciousness of the Victorian reader might not have been pricked to do something about their poorhouses. So, the first step is to confront good people, to say that there is something fundamentally unfair about living in a culture that asks a few people to give everything while the rest are only asked to go shopping. I’ve spent the last 6 years writing opinion pieces and books to give people a glimpse of what it’s like to be a military parent of an active duty Marine.

Many of my friends don’t even know someone in the military. This is the president’s fault. He has tried to fight a war without bothering the influential people. He has never gone to one Ivy League School and asked people to volunteer. Neither have the people in the Democratic Party. I’m concerned with how we use our military as part of a class system. We expect people of one class to do all the heavy lifting while the upper class is never even asked to do any of the heavy lifting.

CEOs get paid an average of 360 times what their average worker gets paid and over 1000 times what their lowest worker gets paid without feeling guilty about it. Our country is looking more like the Persian Empire than a democracy. George Bush and the editor of the New York Times hate each other but they have something in common: neither has the portrait of a son or daughter in the military on their desk. They have the least skin in the game of anyone and this is fundamentally immoral, regardless of whatever you think of the war in Iraq; this is an issue of one class abusing another class in America. It’s the equivalent of taking all your money off-shore so that you don’t pay taxes while still living in America and reaping its benefits.

RS: Do you think that the lower classes are aware and agitated by the absence of the upper classes in the ranks?

FS: Yes. I’m no policy expert, but there is one area I’d set my expertise against anyone in the country. Having written many columns and books about George Bush’s war, I have heard from more military families in this country than anyone. They write to me: thousands of them. I can tell you with absolute certainty that the first feeling in the military is loyalty to other members of the military family. The second is pride in service, but the third is a rising level of fury. Fury is the only word I would use. The rest of this culture puts yellow ribbons on cars and gets photo ops with the troops, but never sends their sons and daughters to share the burden. It is not lost on the military families that they’ve been asked to do all the heavy lifting again and again. We are a nation of 300 million, but it is roughly 140,000 families who have been asked to bear the burden. However, out of 150,000,000 Americans in WWII, we raised a military of 8 million men and women. The troops and military families have a sense of being abandoned.

The rich no longer lead from the front. I hear again and again and again, “Where are George Bush’s daughters?” That question isn’t about those girls personally, but it symbolizes the frustration between the disconnect of the rhetoric and the absence of morality. A drill instructor doesn’t tell a recruit how to do something. He shows. A drill instructor is out in front leading. In Iraq, the captains and sergeants are dying with those that they lead. But in the Republican ranks, talk is about morality, but the actions are craven. There is the belief that people spat on the returning troops of Vietnam, but that’s wearing thin and being replaced by fury. I hear these sorts of questions: “Where the Hell are their kids? Our kids are getting shot at and they’re going Christmas shopping.” There’s rhetoric about how this being a war for civilization, but if that’s so, why haven’t we raised an 8-million man army?

The rich once served. Now, they rarely do. A philosophical shift started in WWI. A whole generation came out of WWI and realized that they’d been fighting a war that made no sense. From then on, the academic community started tipping toward a pacifist position, which was interrupted by WWII because it was regarded as a good war. Vietnam tore all that. In 1956, half the graduating class of Princeton served in the military. Now less than one third of one percent of the Ivy League serves. That’s where we are today.

RS: Since supporting the troops for many seems to mean affixing a ribbon magnet to their car, what does supporting the troops mean to you?

FS: The essence of the meaning is realizing that there’s no such as “the troops.” They are our sisters, sons, neighbors and uncles. They belong to us, regardless of our political position. That’s what supporting the troops means. It’s not yellow ribbons. It’s in your gut. It hits you in your gut when you read about a Marine who was shot. You do them the honor of not politicizing them in discussions for or against Bush. They are our people. The second thing means that we hold our elective leaders accountable who send these men and women to war and we demand good results. We vote for people who have some experience. You vote for McCain instead of Bush or for Kerry if you’re a Democrat. The highest offices in this country should be tilted in favor of people who’ve served. There is a study in our book, “A.W.O.L.”, where greater service statistically produces fewer wars. If you support your troops, you get serious about whom you elect for national office. They will send our kids to war. Voters better be damn sure that they’re not just a pretty face; that they’re elected because they were on Oprah. They should have hands-on experience. I want people who know the horror of waiting for that midnight call. I don’t want pretty, smooth-talking political animals.

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Frank Schaeffer is the author of Baby Jack and AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service--and How it Hurts our Country.

Katie McKy is the author of Pumpkin Town and It All Began With a Bean.