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The
Real Mission of the Uniformed Ghost at the Border
By GREG MOSES
These three sentences prove why Generals
are not paid to determine political policy:
"The border should not
be militarized," said National Guard Chief Steven Blum at
Thursday's press conference in Austin. "We made a conscious
choice not to use the National Guard as a police force. We should
intervene to save lives, not to take them."
If the plain speaking General
were paid to make policy, we would stop at the first sentence
and scrap the deployment of National Guard to the border.
In the logical transition that
Blum makes from police to military between sentences two and
three, his propositions make it seem like the real function of
a police force is to take lives not save them. Again, this kind
of plain speaking would have policy consequences quite different
from the ones being made by politicos. Especially if we add to
the consequences of police work the entire network of jails and
prisons, we could ask, are the police saving lives or taking
them?
The third sentence on its own
terms suggests sending the Guard to rescue people from the border
desert, preventing the summer death toll from climbing with the
heat. But as if to interrupt the startling revolution inaugurated
by his logic, the General gives us three more sentences to hear.
"This is not a military
mission," Blum said. "This is not militarizing. This
is not an invasion."
Here, with his thrice repeated
invocation of the great Hegelian "this", the General
switches his propositions from universals to existentials, proving
Hegel's thesis that "this" can be anything, anywhere,
anytime.
In "this" the General
speaks just the facts: he is not commanding a military mission,
his troops are not militarizing anything, and (presumably since
the Guard will keep to this side of the Rio Bravo, etc.) this
is not an invasion.
Is it the general's fault that
he is speaking exactly from where he has no real business being?
And isn't it only a matter of time before this happens to any
other general in the USA?
Added Paul McHale, the Pentagon's
assistant defense secretary for Homeland Defense: "We would
send the wrong message to our friends and neighbors to the south
to have a large, visible buildup along the border."
Back to universals. A border
buildup would send the wrong signal. You have to supply what
follows. Are we not sending troops to the border? Yes we are.
Are they not visible or large? In this question lies the crossroads
to our logical challenge.
If the military force is visible
and large, it will send the wrong signal to "our friends
to the south." If we are not sending the wrong signal, "our
friends" should try to see it as invisible and small (and
there is a case to be made for this along a line that stretches
a couple thousand miles.)
But the military deployment
of 6,000 troops, half of whom will stand guard along the border,
must be visible and large enough for something. Otherwise, why
is the Pentagon's man standing here? So let's leave aside for
now the likelihood that we are sending the wrong signals to our
friends.
If the troops being deployed
by the Pentagon are not police, and if they are not military,
then what are they large and visible enough to accomplish? And
however we answer the question, don't we already have the marks
of a demoralizing mission from a military point of view? Another
nonmission with a nonpurpose that troops will be ordered to do?
In fact, the troops will be
large and visible enough to stand as uniformed symbols of something.
But what? What is being signified in this pure surface of a nonmission
in uniform? Collective fear? State identity? Here we begin to
see a psy-ops borderland where (in the language of Slavoj Zizek)
the real meets reality right along the line where we make our
existence into what we need to be.
To answer the question of what
this mission is, one must ask the egos of the people for whom
this signifying is taking place.
Which brings us to the saddest
part nearly, because the saddest thing isn't the need of millions
to see this pure image of the uniform standing between self and
the Other. One hardly expects to be free of "friends and
neighbors" such as these, who know that they need it.
The saddest part is the indifference
of millions for whom, even in times instructive as these, the
haunting by this pure, uniformed symbol only serves to ask why
we have failed to speak the truth: you're dead, now go away!
Note: Thanks to Austin American-Statesman
reporter Mark Lisheron for these quotes taken from the Friday
paper. They echo KVUE's live television report from Camp Mabry:
the military is not militarizing.
CounterPunch
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