Discourse of the Good ol' Boys

So I'm reading about Cindy Sheehan and the counter demonstrations that are emerging in Texas both from news sources and on the blog blocks. It's interesting that we still refer to our soldiers as 'boys' who need their 'mothers' to bring them home. The language and general discourse surrounding this war - on both the pro and anti war sides - needs to be examined closely so as not to re-affirm the rigid roles and categories we've all worked so hard to distance from.

Discourse is described by Marita Sturken & Lisa Cartwright in their book "Practices of Looking: An introduction to visual culture"(2001). They state:

"The term 'discourse' is usually used to describe passages of writing or speech, the act of talking about something. Foucault used the term more specifically. He was interested in the rules and practices that produce meaningful statements and regulate what can be spoken in different historical periods. By discourse he meant a group of statements which provide a means for talking about (and a way of representing knowledge about) a particular topic at a particular historical moment. Hence, for Foucault, discourse is a body of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about something. In Foucault's terms, one could talk about the discourses of law, medicine, criminality, sexuality, technology, etc., in other words, broad social domains that define particular forms of knowledge and that change from any given time period and social context to another." (pp.93-94)

There's nothing like a war to deter social progress and restrict the discourse.

I'm not speaking to the 'freedom fries' phenomenon, nor to the rhetoric of 'WMD's' or the more recent (non)change to the title 'war against violent extremism', (though these would qualify as well) but rather to the everyday 'newspeak ' that is erasing fifty years of social progress.

I'm talking about underlying assumptions of social positions that are demonstrated in phrases like 'grieving mother' or 'bringin the boys home'. At some point, the soldiers - the 'sons' - need to take responsibility for their own choice of (in)action - and at some point, we need to stop laying all responsibility for the cultural morality on 'mothers'. Men are moral, girls are soldiers, and this whole discourse surrounding the war sounds like it is strait out of the 1950's.

If we continue to support the rigid roles proscribed by the Bushies and the right in this language choice and the contextual drawings that align with that language - we are all playing into the discourse, the 'newspeak' that has gotten us here.

Let's be careful - both left and right - not to fall into the use of Good ol'Boy discourse to describe the atrocities of this war, the pain of loosing daughters and sons, the dismay of a new live fascism in America, and try to remember that there has been much social progress since the close of the war in Vietnam and WWII.

Lest we forget...is not simply a statement about the conflict itself.

Let's not erode and erase another 50 years of social progress with the re-appropriation of an age old discourse that surrounds armed conflict. We've lost so much already - and I don't want to see us lose the social progressions too! (well anymore than is already gone)
We simply cannot be limited to calling this war 'un-good', describing our soldiers as 'boys' and hoping for a moral reaction from 'mothers' to bring a stop to it all.
I want peace for all human beings, not just for those whose discourse dictated role suites the current schema of Ol'Boy propositions.