Over the weekend, MSNBC host Chris Hayes got pummeled by the right for saying this:
Hayes later apologized. Beinart defends Hayes:
I don’t share Hayes’ queasiness about the using the word “hero” to describe those Americans who died in Afghanistan and Iraq. In America today, where self-gratification is practically a national religion, there is something heroic about voluntarily placing your fate at your country’s service. But Hayes’ larger point—that in honoring the dead we should not surrender our critical faculties about war—is not only correct; it’s crucial.
For more than 10 years now, the Coulters and Dick Cheneys of American politics have used the pain and pride of a nation at war to cow those who might have questioned our post-9/11 wars. In 2002, many congressional Democrats were too afraid of Karl Rove to vote against authorizing the invasion of Iraq. In 2009, Barack Obama acquiesced to an escalation in Afghanistan about which he had grave doubts, in part because of the political pressure he felt from the military brass and their allies in the congressional GOP. And even now, with most Americans convinced that the Afghan War is a waste of money and blood, it remains perilous for a television host to use Memorial Day to ask why our troops are still dying there.
Freddie DeBoer likewise backs up Hayes:
I will simply say what I have always said about soldiers and the police: there is no such thing as praise that does not recognize the individual character of the person being praised. What our post-9/11 national conformity insisted was that we heap praise on the police, firefighters, and the military without any discrimination between individuals or any judgment of their particular characters. This, in fact, is not praise. It's actually a profound assault on the possibility of real praise; it denies the existence of moral differences and squashes all actual praiseworthy conduct into a homogeneous, bland affirmation.
Ari Kohen develops the most nuanced criticism of Chris Hayes to date:
Military service — and death in action, which was the subject of Hayes’ show on Memorial Day weekend — isn’t necessarily heroic. But it can be. And here’s Hayes’ problem: It’s not necessarily the case that calling someone a hero means lending full-throated support to the war in which the person acted heroically, nor is it necessarily the case that admitting that military service opens up a space for heroism lends rhetorical justification for any further wars. It’s possible to fight valiantly for a bad cause, just as it’s possible to act badly in pursuit of a just cause. And, most importantly, it’s possible to understand the value (and even the virtue) of military service without supporting particular military engagements; it’s not necessary to shy away from saying that something heroic is, in fact, heroic simply because you wish the context in which it occured hadn’t existed in the first place.
Paul Campos gets angry about the simplistic broadsides that dominated the backlash:
We live in a culture in which someone like Hayes cannot suggest, even in the most diffident, nuanced, and self-deprecating way, that automatically labeling every American soldier who dies in war a “hero” might be an oversimplification of a difficult set of moral and political questions without thereby releasing such a storm of indignation that he is forced to immediately recant such a terrible heresy.
The Dish debated whether American soldiers are automatically heroes here and here.
The Dish 