Tim Walz is a True American Hero

Time to Celebrate All Those Who Make Real Sacrifices for America

What is a hero?

We need to be especially careful these days regarding the terms that we use. Because we live in an era of hyperbole, disinformation, and ignorance. We have entered an era of semantic relativism. Everyone can have their own definition of what a particular word or phrase means. It’s like the other prevailing idiocy, the idea that we each have our own truth.

Bullshit. There is one truth. Either you understand that or you don’t. But you don’t get to pick the one you like. Just as you don’t get to choose your own facts, you don’t get to choose your own definitions for the expressions you utter or write. You may think it is perfectly ok for you to mean “blue” when you say or write “brown” but no one is going to understand you.

(Bill Clinton used to speak to his team of the importance of the “meta-message.” His point was that the real meaning of any speech or statement was not the words you uttered but how they were heard by each individual listener. In other words, communications is a collaboration between the source of the words and the recipients of the words and meanings differ from listener to listener as a result because each word has a different context or resonance for each of them. Which is to say the challenge for the communicator is expressing ideas in a way that most in an audience will actually know the intended meaning. That requires clarity, precision, discipline, knowledge and art.)

The problems run deeper than simple misunderstanding, however. We devalue ideas with real meaning by attaching them to the trivial, ephemeral or worse. Case in point: the word “iconic” which has been so overused as to lose any value as a description. Google “iconic Nicholas Cage characters” if you want to see what I mean. You may like Nicholas Cage as an actor. You may think he has done a good job in some roles. (“Moonstruck” comes to mind, of course.) But there is nothing “iconic” about Nicholas Cage. He’s a mid-tier actor who has had a mid-tier career…making, for the most part, pretty darned mid-tier movies.

But I digress. In addition to confusing listeners words can be misused for more nefarious reasons. People can seek to mislead. They can seek to claim terms as their own and thereby define or win public debates or approval in so doing. For many years the Republican Party tried to do this by seizing and claiming ownership of the term “family values.” They waged a campaign over many years to seek to claim this term as their own and to define it as they saw fit.

Their goal was to elevate their ideas in ways that made them more palatable to the public at large, to win adherents, to sound virtuous. Albeit “family values” for them always meant something else altogether (stripping away reproductive rights from women is a good example…it is hardly “family values” to let a woman bleed to death in the parking lot of a hospital because she was denied treatment she needed…so you see, a carefully misapplied label can do a great deal of damage. Another example is to suggest “family values” specifically refers to certain kinds of families and not others and in so doing denying the right to love or live with or raise a family with the person one loves for millions of Americans.)

One area where there has been a war over words, appropriately enough, has had to do with military service. In the wake of mistreatment of American soldiers returning from Vietnam, we overcompensated by referring to those who chose to serve in our military in ways that made it almost impossible to ever criticize them or second guess their judgement. They were the greatest and most heroic and most noble among us. Wearing the uniform made people above reproach…good people and bad people alike.

That is not to say that the sacrifice of those in the military was not great or worthy of our praise. Of course it was and is. It does not mean that real life heroes weren’t deserving of celebration. They were and are. But even many of the career military officers I have known—and I have known and admired many—wince at the theology that makes all things armed forces related subjects that mere civilians have no place commenting upon…or that the sacrifices of those who do not serve in defense of the country are some how less than those who do.

I was thinking of this while following the ridiculous effort by MAGA world to some how minimize the sacrifice of Tim Walz, a man with a distinguished military career. They sought to apply terms like “stolen valor”—now as loaded as any in our society—and apply it to distortions of facts about Walz. Amazingly, a party led by a draft dodger who called those who died in the line of duty “suckers and losers” was trying to find a way to take down a notch a man who devoted nearly a quarter century to the service of his country. It was a nauseating spectacle. Walz’s service record is exceptional and worthy of praise. No fair-minded person can doubt that. But the political game was all about seeking to do what the GOP used to do for years, seeking to reassert its “ownership” of patriotism and all things national security related and to use that as a cudgel against Walz.