Cindy Sheehan, and the flatness of discourse

By "flat" I mean that all traumatic historic and contemporary events are flattened down almost to the level of triviality and equality, so that they seem to match each other in magnitude. I also mean "flat" in the sense that all discourse is similarly trivialized so that it will fit through the flatness of a screen, whether that be the screen of a television or the screen through which people participate on the web.

Cindy Sheehan, through her insipid, mindless, repetitive and just plain lazy use of the term "trail of tears" has provided an example of exactly this phenomenon.

The "Trail of Tears" was a forced relocation of Cherokee Indians that resulted in the deaths of at least four thousand of them.

Cindy Sheehan experienced the death of her son through an act of war.

These things are not the same. They should not be equated. These are two events distantly separated in time and magnitude, one the death of an individual, the other an act of genocide against a people.

We live in times when people should at least be trying to use precise language, both to describe what is happening in the world around them and what it is they want to accomplish. Sheehan's rhetoric fails on all counts, but I think we're hearing this for a reason:  it takes real effort to come up with words to describe the consequences of this government's policies, and co-opting pre-existing language is both cheap and easy and fits the model of what people have grown to expect. That everything, no matter how inflammatory the rhetoric, is equally trivial or equally horrific, and that a few dramatic words stolen from someone else, or another people, are appropriate to take if they inflate your own sense of purpose, mission and importance. We've arrived at the point where people seeking attention of the media reflexively co-opt such terms without even beginning to understand what it is that they're doing, which in the end trivializes history down to exploitable sound bytes, metaphors and terms and removes past events from any historical context.

But I suppose this is exactly what I should expect. It's become nearly impossible to base an American anti-war movement on the premise that this war is immoral or unethical (take your pick) and that this war puts this nation in the position of doing things to people in other countries that it shouldn't be doing. Instead, we have the skeleton of a feeble anti-war movement based on one thing: the death of a soldier, and a mother's grief. It's all about us, and in the case of Sheehan, all about me. Her loss will forever be bigger than everything else. In the grand scheme of things, her loss is just what happens in war. Meanwhile, it would be nice if someone articulated one good convincing reason, other than our own pain (including the loss of children), why American soldiers shouldn't be in Iraq.

Which, I suppose, is ultimately why she can't understand how offensive and disingenuous it is for her to be taking "trail of tears" for her own purposes, even repeating herself in her so-called apologies when it's been pointed out to her that her use of those words to describe herself is just plain wrong. This is just the form that American discourse is going to take, until and unless people learn - hopefully not the hard way - that not all traumatic contemporary or historical events are the same, or are co-optable for one's cause.