An empty regard

From Sunday's New York Times (a paper I rarely quote these days, but which occasionally still prints something worth reading):

No symbol is more sacred in American life right now than the military uniform. The cross is divisive; the flag has been put to partisan struggle. But the uniform commands nearly automatic and universal reverence...

The new cult of the uniform began with the call to “support our troops” during the Iraq war. The slogan played on a justified collective desire to avoid repeating the mistake of the Vietnam era, when hatred of the conflict spilled over into hostility toward the people who were fighting it. Now the logic was inverted: supporting the troops, we were given to understand, meant that you had to support the war. In fact, that’s all it seemed to mean. The ploy was a bait and switch, an act of emotional blackmail. If you opposed the war or questioned the way it was conducted, you undermined our troops...

As the national narrative shifts from the war on terror to the specter of decline, the uniform performs another psychic function. The military is can-do, the one institution — certainly the one public institution — that still appears to work. The schools, the highways, the post office; Amtrak, FEMA, NASA and the T.S.A. — not to mention the banks, the newspapers, the health care system, and above all, Congress: nothing seems to function anymore, except the armed forces. They’re like our national football team — and undisputed champs, to boot — the one remaining sign of American greatness...

The political scientist Jonathan Weiler sees the cult of the uniform as a kind of citizenship-by-proxy. Soldiers and cops and firefighters, he argues, embody a notion of public service to which the rest of us are now no more than spectators...

In many respects, the U.S. is treading down a path that was familiar to the old Soviet Union -- that of a large nation with heavy-handed but increasingly ineffective government, whose one pride and joy was its showpiece military.  If patriotism is indeed the last refuge of scoundrels, we can count on our current political class to trot out the uniformed "heroes" more and more in an effort to distract from the other very real problems of our nation.  Those problems can only be solved when the rest of the citizenry becomes reengaged in the defense of their nation... against ALL enemies: foreign and domestic.