What IS it good for again?

War.

Politics.

Systemic Misleading and Betrayal of Public Trust.

Casualties — your friends and mine. People’s children.

The most important heroes war breeds aren’t on the battlefield, if you ask me — they’re in the other skirmish, the Information War that happens in the shadow of every “deployment”, hiding in the foxhole of sanitized language and sniping any rogue reporters that come into view.

In this war, media conglomeration and the epic economic influence of the corporations who now depend upon continuous conflict to keep their wallets fat have functioned as a nearly-unbreakable shield for the fighters on the government’s side of the infobattle, the Truth War, the fight that’ll determine the content of both the past — how history is written — and the future.

In the last great illegal, unjustifiable war, the last moneychild of the “military-industrial complex” so feared by Wilson and Jefferson particularly, there were many heroes in the infobattle. Infiltrators and spies, rebels and freedom fighters. Like Daniel Ellsberg. Because of him and his very real sacrifices, people knew that the government had lied when we went to war, knew it in spite of the stranglehold Nixon kept on such information, and that knowledge changed the American view of our government forever. (Perhaps not enough, but that’s a separate argument.)

Who, do you think, are the heroes this time?

I will say this (though my instinct is to duck as I type it): The heroes are not the soldiers, as a whole. There are soldiers beloved of me too — living and not — and the job they do is dangerous and brave. But danger and bravery aren’t what make heroes.

Heroes, particularly, do not harm people solely because someone in power tells them to — it’s just not in the job description. When I say “heroes”, I mean people, like Daniel Ellsberg, who defy the all-powerful bad guys, taking on great personal risk and loss to do so, for the benefit of the people who would otherwise be powerless. That’s a hero, and that doesn’t mean a soldier can’t be a hero, but simply being a soldier doesn’t make you one, popular rhetoric aside.

But I’m casting around in my mind, and I don’t think I know about the heroes in this war, and that bothers me. There almost certainly are some, but are they so beleagured and outgunned that they’re doomed to obscurity?