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July 10, 2007

A Mother's Grief is not Narcissism

A few days ago, the mother of a Marine on the verge of being deployed wrote a heartbreaking letter to the Washington Post in which she recalled Lego sets, basketball games, a touching moment with her son at her father's funeral, and some other special moments. She called her precious son "a pawn in a senseless conflict" and wonders whether he will return home "unchanged by this experience," or return with "wounds that will not heal." And she wonders whether we, as a nation, will do all we can for him when he comes home. It is truly a mother's cry. Unless you're Michael Ledeen, who cynically views it as a "primal scream" that is "All About Me."

She's upset, and who can blame her? She's doubly upset since she thinks the war is senseless, and I understand that. She's triply upset because she wrote a Master's thesis some years ago at Columbia about Iraqi Kurds, and there she begins to lose me. And then she tells us about the view from her old office (of Arlington Cemetery), and about her grim feelings when she hears flyovers for the funerals there. Indeed, the whole thing is not about him at all, but about her. Her feelings, her politics, her history. There's really nothing about him at all (nor about his father, for that matter), except for dark thoughts about what might become of him. He'll be changed (of course he will), maybe he'll be wounded (the odds are against it, but yes, he might. He might be killed, as he well knows). In short, both she and her Marine are victims.

Not. He chose freely, he was not compelled to join the Corps. Why did he make that choice? Surely not because his mom told him to. And surely not, as so many would have it, because he's from the underclass and has no other way to earn a living. But he, the Marine, doesn't get a word. We get her memories of his early childhood, but nothing about the current man.

Narcissus running wild as he so often does in our world.

Ledeen is part idiotic and part dead-on accurate. The idiotic part is that he doesn't understand that the letter is supposed to be all about the mother and her motherly fears for the well-being of her son. I'm a little shocked he can't see this.

Ledeen's accurate observation is that chances are, her son is ready and willing to go to war and is not focused on his mother's tender sentiment right now - in fact, that sentiment could be laying a major guilt trip on him that he does not need right now. He'll miss his mama, of course, but he'll never miss her the way she misses him. In fact, he won't even comprehend the way she misses him until he has children of his own. For now, he's a tough, trained Marine. He's ready to do his duty for his country, to serve with his fellow Marines, and if necessary, to die in the process.

But that's his story, not his mother's story. And it is perfectly legitimate for a devoted mother's heart to break when her son goes off to war and to struggle with how to express and deal with her grief and fear. It's hard enough to send your children off into the big wide world, but to combine that with sending them off to war is the stuff of nightmares. So that's my take on Ledeen's post.

Chris Kelly at the Huffington Post has a less generous take on it. He paraphrases Ledeen thus:

Real patriots -- like the thin yellow line of heroes at the National Review Online -- have just about had it with the "mothers" of the "soldiers" in actual "combat." These dizzy dames are always complaining when we "kill" their "children." Can't they just shut their traps and get with the program?

And then Kelly asks a really great question: "Why can't liberals question the war -- it'll hurt the troops -- but conservatives can attack the soldiers' mothers? And why do they find attacking the mothers so irresistibly delicious? It can't just be because it's taboo. It's got to be something deeper than that. How else do you explain the Cindy Sheehan obsession?"

Kelly compares the number of times the National Review Online attacks Sheehan, a soldier's mother, as compared to references to other anti-war figures and Bush critics and finds it attacks Sheehan 274 times – more than all the others combined.

It's kind of reminiscent of the special hatred on the right for the 9/11 widows.

Like Kelly, I don't understand it. But I do understand that it's incredibly mean to attack grieving family members when their loved ones are paying the price for decisions that are made by politicians, whether those decisions are right or wrong.

Posted by Becky at July 10, 2007 04:34 PM