{"id":6333,"date":"2014-10-20T11:46:19","date_gmt":"2014-10-20T18:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/franklycurious.com\/wp\/?p=6333"},"modified":"2014-10-20T11:46:19","modified_gmt":"2014-10-20T18:46:19","slug":"flag-decals-yellow-ribbons-and-pink-bracelets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/franklycurious.com\/wp\/2014\/10\/20\/flag-decals-yellow-ribbons-and-pink-bracelets\/","title":{"rendered":"Flag Decals, Yellow Ribbons, and Pink Bracelets"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PinkI’ve loved John Prine’s first album<\/a> since I was a kid. One of the (many) standout songs on the album is, “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore.” It’s an anti-war song for the Vietnam era. The line following the refrain is, “They’re already overcrowded from your dirty little war.” But I don’t have much a visceral connection to the Vietnam War. So what has always spoken to me is the use of signifiers to represent which “side” you are on in complicated issues that really do not lend themselves to simple binary positions.<\/p>\n

The best example of this is the yellow ribbon. These usually go along with the jingoistic slogan, “Support the troops!” I’ve given this a lot of thought and the reasoning behind this slogan goes something as follows, “The troops have to do whatever the government tells them. Therefore, supporting the troops means supporting whatever the government tells them to do. Therefore, support the war you commie bastards!” The yellow ribbon, just like the flag decal before it, is meant to shutdown debate.<\/p>\n

The other side of it is that the yellow ribbons allow people to feel good about “supporting the troops” in a theoretical sense but to not do so in a practical sense. We have a long history of lavishing money on defense contractors while low-level military personnel live in near poverty. We go into war with high tech, whizbang devices (that made some rich guy even more rich) but without basic body and transport armor because<\/a>, “As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” And, of course, after the wars, the military personnel are largely forgotten. The conservatives who were so keen on “supporting the troops” tend to forget about the former troops and their needs.<\/p>\n