Fucking John Mayer!

So I’m sitting here, flipping through channels on this Saturday night, just managing to come out of the funk that’s kept me in bed for the past three days, and I stumble upon his latest Austin City Limits performance, which is mostly just stuff from his latest album Continuum. Now, I love John Mayer but this probably wasn’t be best night to get me all introspective and shit. I probably should have picked out a big-budget movie from the box of cloned DVDs that I haven’t watched yet and seen some shit blown up. But as soon as I hit on him singing “Belief”, I knew that I had to write a blog post. For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking that I should write something for my blogs but I couldn’t really come up with anything ‘appropriate’ to write. I’m sure regular readers of my blog are wondering what I might write that I would consider inappropriate, but it isn’t really about me. A great deal of it is about other people, people that I don’t want to hurt or endanger by writing my truths and my feelings.

But listening to him sing “Belief” brought up something that I probably should write about, something that I might be in a unique position to write about, though I don’t claim that my position is right or wrong-it’s simply mine.

While I’ve always had a passing interest in politics and a passing idea of what was going on in this country and a slight idea about things in the rest of the world, I started paying more attention to the bigger picture (i.e. things other than just those issues that directly effected me and mine) after 9/11, though mostly because of Sir’s interest in those things. It brought me another thing with which I could discuss with Sir in a semi-intellectual manner. Fortunately, this interest in politics didn’t go away when Sir and I broke up. Actually, it allowed me to more freely express and pursue my political ideas, which were and are much more liberal than Sir’s are.

But it is in this context that I assessed and constantly reassessed my beliefs and feelings about the current Iraq War. But no matter how much information I have read, I always feel like I’m coming up short. I feel like I still don’t have enough information to make an informed decision. In my mind, I would think that any leader and/or politician without an agenda might feel the same, though they do probably have some information not available to the general public. From the beginning, I really didn’t know if I felt the United States (and our Coalition of the Willing) should start a war in Iraq. And as we have not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and fighting continues in Iraq, which gets closer and closer to civil war, it becomes harder and harder to support this particular war. And, while it has never been one of my favorite songs on the Continuum album, I think that “Belief” does bring out that sort of ambivalence about the war, about anything that is supported by ‘belief’ because everyone believes in something and no one is just going to change their mind because someone else yells louder. In the song, belief is not necessarily good or bad: “Belief is a beautiful armor/ But makes for the heaviest sword.”
But what really gets to me, especially now, comes at the end of the song. “We're never gonna win the world/ We're never gonna stop the war/ We're never gonna beat this/ If belief is what we're fighting for//What puts a hundred thousand children in the sand?/ Belief can/ Belief can/ What puts the folded flag inside his mother's hand?/ Belief can/ Belief can.” On the one hand, I recognize that ‘the war’, especially what radio commentator Michael Savage would call the War on Islamofascism, or hell, any fight that is based on beliefs, will never truly be won. But I also don’t think that our politicians keep us involved in two wars overseas that aren’t going very well because they believe it is the right thing to do or because they believe that they are making the world a better place. Personally I believe that the only things they consider are their political futures, their bank accounts and the bank accounts of their friends.

And, despite feeling this for quite awhile, despite knowing that this war was/is killing children, not only Iraqi and Afgani children in the war zones, but also our children, the 18 year old boy- and girl-soldiers that we are sending to do our dirty work, despite knowing that pretty much everyday at least one U.S. mother loses a child to this war, I never really cared. I have to admit that I was just as ambivalent to it as everyone else. The first song on and the first single from Mayer’s Continuum is “Waiting for the World to Change”. In it, he discusses how people of his generation are viewed as uninvolved but he tries to give reasons for this, saying that people of his generation, and I think people of my generation as well, feel disempowered. Even my mom identifies with the lines “And when you trust your television/ What you get is what you got/ Cause when they own the information, oh/ They can bend it all they want.”

So, why do I care now? Why do I feel like I should write about my ambivalence now? Because now I’m a soldier’s wife. I’m the wife of a soldier who is leaving for Iraq in less than a month. That child buried in the sand would be my husband, who’s never really grown up, who has a foot-locker full of Star Wars figures. That folded flag would be in my hands. The night I met him, he told me that he would be shipping out in January, so I knew from the start of our relationship. But it wasn’t until a few nights after we were married that I ever knew how he felt about the war he was going to fight or the man who was ordering him to fight it. As a pinko, liberal, queer, feminist, etc, etc, I never got into a discussion with this man who I was having amazing sex with about his political beliefs, mostly because I was afraid of finding out that he was a hardcore neoconservative. And I didn’t want him to think that I didn’t support him or what he was going to do, because I do support him. I have a great deal of respect for him, for any and all men and women who choose to fight for our country, especially because I know it is something that I could not do, for many reasons. Imagine my surprise when my new husband revealed that he did not believe in this war and that he doesn’t like his Commander-in-Chief, but that he asked for this deployment because his military brothers and sisters were out there fighting and he should be as well. And, for as hard as it is sometimes, I will do everything and anything in my power to support him as he is fighting.

But that doesn’t mean that I think we should just continue to fight, ad infinitum, in Iraq, especially as it seems that nothing is getting better, but I don’t have any answers. Should we “cut-and-run”? Should we put even more of our soldiers there to stabilize the region? I don’t have these answers. I’m just the wife of a soldier who is proud of how well-trained he is but would be much happier if he never had to use that training.

[Oh, and why I titled this “Fucking John Mayer” is because I started this right after he sang one of those songs that I can never hear without crying- “Stop This Train”. I have a previous post with this song in it, but no matter what I’m going through, it speaks to something in my life at that point. I could never sing this song in concert. Hell, he didn’t seem like he could make it through the song without a few tears. I suppose for me, I have a great deal of reasons why I would like to “stop this train” and keep things like they are. And so I started crying. Then, he followed it up with the other song on Continuum which makes me cry a good deal of the time, “Gravity”. So, fucking John Mayer: making me cry! Oh, but I love him so!]