From left to right
BY MIKE MILIARD

A year ago, I was locked in a boozy debate with my two hulking uncles — a recently retired Massachusetts state trooper and a Special Forces reservist. It was a scene we’d enacted many times: me, the liberal punk, as amusing quarry for a tag team of rock-ribbed conservatives — one who’s posted a lovingly framed photo of John Wayne on his wall, and another who relaxes to a cassette of artillery sound effects while driving his flag-emblazoned SUV.

I’ve never been the bellicose type. And I’d always disagreed, respectfully but vehemently, with my uncles’ reactionary beliefs. Even at 15, I clashed with them over the Gulf War, which I couldn’t believe George H.W. Bush rationalized so speciously. Their militaristic world-view was antithetical to mine. But something changed last September; by the end of that diabolical day, I agreed with Uncle Marine and Uncle Green Beret. I wanted revenge. I wanted to hurt whoever did that just like they hurt us.

Of course, I was hardly the only theretofore-peaceable person who instinctively thirsted for a vicious retort. But I was surprised and a little embarrassed by my about-face. To me, bumper-sticker shibboleths like THESE COLORS DON’T RUN and MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG had always been just that much mindless jingoism. Suddenly, though, I found myself agreeing with them in principle. I love sprawling, heterogeneous, fucked-up America. Right and wrong, this is my country.

Whatever lingering unease I felt about my sudden belligerence vanished when I began poring over the spirited, eloquent arguments put forth each week in the Nation and the Guardian by one of my favorite paragons of political integrity, expat Brit Christopher Hitchens. I’d always subscribed to his vigorous liberalism — a version that loathed phony Bill Clinton as much as I did while simultaneously skewering the inanities of the knee-jerk left. Hitchens’s polemics, mordantly funny and soaked in Johnnie Walker Black, were hugely affirming for me. The September 11 hijackers, he argued, weren’t acting on behalf of the world’s dispossessed, as some lefties would have it. Simply put, they were "fascists with an Islamic face." He couldn’t abide the propitiatory proclamations of the blame-America crowd, "the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals." Neither could I. Reading Hitchens’s railings in defense of his adopted nation bolstered my conviction that, for all its faults (and they are legion), America offers the world’s best example of openness and pluralism — and that it had to be defended perforce.

One year later, I’m still one of the "hawkish left," as it’s sometimes called by those who’d have us accept the immolation of more American civilians because Ronald Reagan’s reptilian Central American war games or Clinton’s repugnantly self-serving demolition of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant somehow mean we "deserve" it. But if I’m not as "liberal" as I once was, I’m hardly a conservative. Even if I initially, warily, supported the president, I’m now disgusted by how he’s gone on to cynically manipulate this crisis for his own political purposes. Same goes for Ashcroft’s Orwellian dictates. And I’m still on the fence about Iraq; even the "radical" rationale for invasion just put forth by Hitchens has me unconvinced. But I’ve never doubted that US soldiers are doing a necessary job in protecting this fine, flawed nation from the continuing threat of Islamic fascism.

This week my 43-year-old uncle leaves his wife and son and ships off with his fellow reservists for a year in Northern Afghanistan. As he does, I think of Hitchens’s writing in the Guardian last November: "It was obvious from the very start that the United States had no alternative but to do what it has done.... If, as the peaceniks like to moan, more bin Ladens will spring up to take his place, I can offer this assurance: should that be the case, there are many, many more who will also spring up to kill him all over again. And there are more of us and we are both smarter and nicer, as well as surprisingly insistent that our culture demands respect, too."