The Pakistani Spectator

American travelers abroad experience something I call a “McDonald’s moment.” We will be walking along, noticing all the ways our surroundings are quite different from home, and we will turn a corner, and there is a McDonald’s restaurant, and there is a statue, or a picture, of Ronald McDonald (the official McDonald’s clown), and we will say to ourselves, “Ah, I know that clown!” Recently, I had my own McDonald’s moment right here on The Pakistani Spectator. I tremendously enjoyed the excellent interview of Pakistan’s brave patriot, Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa Agha, and I followed the comments with interest and admiration, when one of the later comments (You’ll have no trouble guessing which one!) brought me this remarkable sense of recognition – “Ah, I know that clown!”

I grew up in the 1960s in the US, so my first memories of political controversy revolve around the Vietnam war, and protests against that war. The pro-war forces naturally hated the anti-war point of view, but it didn’t stop with simple opposition and reasoned argument. Instead, there was a common general sentiment among all too many of the pro-war folks that anyone opposing the war just didn’t deserve to be called an American, and should pack up and leave. There was a popular bumper sticker (a slogan people glued to that backs of their cars) at the time that summed it up: “America: Love It or Leave It!” The general idea from those with this sentiment was that somehow criticism of the war or of the military was unpatriotic, almost treasonous, and the critics didn’t deserve to call themselves American, and were wholly undesirable citizens. One of those supposedly-unpatriotic critics was John Kerry, the Democratic Party candidate who opposed George W. Bush for the presidency in 2004. Although Kerry fought heroically in the Vietnam war, risking his life repeatedly, and winning several medals, and although George W. Bush, on the other hand, used all legal means to avoid service in Vietnam, remaining comfortable and safe in the US during his service years, and although almost all Americans now agree that Vietnam was a dreadful mistake, there were still many during the 2004 campaign who tried to make a case that Kerry’s brave and vocal (he testified against the war to Congress) opposition to that war immediately following his honorable discharge from service made him unpatriotic compared to that great patriot George W. Bush.

You would think we would learn! But, no, since Vietnam, the general idea is unchanged, although the slogan is new; now, the pro-Iraq-war folks have a new bumper sticker, saying “Support the Troops,” implying that any effort to oppose the war, to bring the troops home from the sorry, unnecessary mess that George W. Bush has placed them in, is disloyal, and somehow harms our brave fighting men and women in Iraq. It’s such nonsense that it would be ludicrous if it were not such a popular and destructive idea!

We have an expression in the US: “preaching to the converted.” The general idea behind this expression is that it is a waste of time to argue an idea to people who already wholeheartedly embrace that idea. I must say that I realize that in this article I know I am guilty largely of preaching to the converted. It is clear from almost all of the comments to the interview and to many other articles that readers of The Pakistani Spectator are already well convinced that sincere criticism is an act of patriotism. Instead, my main objective is to give you your own “McDonald’s moment”! No country is perfect. However brave and admirable your soldiers are, no military leadership is perfect. Honest, sincere criticism, and honest debate of criticism, even sincere criticism that turns out to be wrong, far from being unpatriotic, is the only way forward, the only way to make even a great country, or even a great army, better. Such essential and valuable criticism is frequently unpopular, sometimes downright dangerous to the critic, and so the critic is almost surely motivated by the purest, most courageous, selfless patriotism. The alternative, suppression of criticism, leads to pure rot, as mistakes and corruption flourish, shielded from the light of day! It doesn’t take a patriot to be a “yes man”! Almost all of you already know this, and you already find the idea that criticism should be suppressed in principle, to be dangerously misguided. What you may not realize, and what I wish to share, is that when you consider the relatively rare, misguided Pakistanis who argue against criticism in principle, you could turn any corner, on a visit to the US, and have your own “McDonald’s moment:” “Ah, I know that clown!”

Since writing the above post, I noticed that there is now a second comment to the same interview by the same individual confusing criticism for lack of patriotism. In this second comment,this individual seems also rather unclear on the meaning of “free” in “free media” (No, it does not mean, “You are free to say anything you want just as long as you agree with us.”! I commend TPS, by the way, for leaving these comments in, in spite of how much they obviously differ from the TPS point of view - this is upholding the *true* meaning of “Free Press”!) I am sorry to say that here, also, in a lack of clarity of the meaning of “Free” in “Free Press,” the commenter has all too many brothers and sisters in spirit within the Bush Neocon camp.

Last 5 posts by Dan Tow

• The Right to Remain Silent - June 18th, 2008
• Living with Free Speech - June 6th, 2008
• Free Speech on The Pakistani Spectator - May 1st, 2008
• Limits of Free Speech - April 30th, 2008
• A Recipe for Civil War - March 11th, 2008