Supporting the troops? What is that?! I don’t SUPPORT OUR TROOPS! What a laugh! As the slogan goes: better to support the troops by bringing the troops home! I don’t support what the troops are doing. I don’t support that they’ve been put in harm’s way. I don’t support that they are putting thousands of others in harm’s way.
They are firing on children, firing on women, firing on civilians, using napalm, cluster bombs and depleted uranium projectiles. They’re making snap judgments that are often fatal for innocent civilians, journalists and even their own comrades.
I heard the other day a TV anchor asking if we are being too concerned about civilian casualties at the expense of our soldiers’ safety? I’m sorry but is the life of an American soldier more valuable than that of an Iraqi? I think it’s the opposite unfortunately. The Iraqi is an innocent bystander to this affair, whereas the soldier has been hired to do a dangerous job. Inherently dangerous.
Xiu Xiu’s “Support Our Troops, Oh! (Black Angels, Oh!)” (Salon exclusive free download) is, to me, the most potent and intense of all the protest songs I found, so I’m particularly thrilled that the band gave Salon permission to post it.
While most protest songs, however angry and intense, are content to tell people things they’ve already thought and heard and believe in, this one aims to shock, to force you to rethink.
The lyrics, in their entirety:
“Did you know you were going to shoot off the top of a four-year-old girl’s head, And look across her car-seat down into her skull, And see into her throat, And did you know that her dad would say to you ‘Please, sir, can I take her body home?’
“Oh wait, you totally did know that that would happen, Cuz you’re a jock who was too stupid and too greedy and too unmotivated to do anything else but still be the biggest, and still do what other people tell you to do. You did it to still be a winner.
“You shot your grenade launcher into people’s windows and into the doors of people’s houses, but you wanted to shoot it into someone, just to watch them blow up.”