Quick! Give the man a war medal

It wouldn’t surprise me if any day now George W. Bush appeared in public with a chest full of medals awarded by presidential proclamation. He seems so distraught over the real medals that his war-honored opponent has won that he’s got to have some for himself. What’s a war president without medals?

It doesn’t take a Freudian psychologist to diagnose the pathology. The first sign of Bush’s desire to be a war hero, without actually fighting in a war, was when he swaggered about on the deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit, appearing about as uncomfortable as old Michael Dukakis wearing a tank helmet that seemed to reduce his head to the size of a plum.

It was some time later that Bush declared himself a war president and taunted the armed dissidents in conquered, I mean liberated, Iraq to, more or less, come and get us, which is what they’ve been doing. Undaunted, he’s still shaking his fist and glowering squinty-eyed into the cameras, like John Wayne in a fighting-Marine movie, and promising America that he will not be cowed by all the threats and the killings.

While I realize it probably doesn’t take a lot of courage for a guy living in a fortified mansion and being driven in a fortified car surrounded by fortified body guards to talk that way, there’s still got to be some kind of medal he can award himself for speaking up, no matter how inappropriate his words may be.

He may soon appear before the cameras so medal-heavy he’ll resemble Nikita Khrushchev with all those hero-of-the-revolution decorations he used to wear every May Day as the Soviet Army paraded by.

Bush, after all, is commander in chief of our armed forces, and as CINCUSA, he can award himself any danged medal he pleases.

One doesn’t have to think about it much to realize that the president is suffering from medal envy. The most recent effort on his behalf is a 60-second ad disparaging the combat record of Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, who won the Bronze Star and Purple Heart as a Swift boat commander during the war in Vietnam. Bush’s backers are spending $500,000 to say he didn’t.

That even rankles a lot of Republicans, including Arizona’s Sen. John McCain, a POW during the war, who called the ad “dishonest and dishonorable.” Bush, of course, blinked and said, in the tone of Little Bo Peep caught butchering a lamb, that he didn’t know anything about the ad. He didn’t say he didn’t like it and he didn’t say he deplored the kinds of politics that lead to such trash, he just shrugged and blinked.

Other than appearing in public wearing a chest full of medals, the only other thing Bush can do to prove he’s not a girlie man, to use a Schwarzeneggerian term, is to pop up in a firefight in Iraq, a cigar in his teeth and an M-16 in his hands, blasting away at anyone in sight while whistling “Hail to the Chief.”

Well, maybe there is a better way. Instead of Kerry’s running on his record and Bush’s trying to compensate for his own blurry military term as a citizen soldier, how about not talking about war and uniforms and combat heroism at all and just discussing how we’re going to evolve beyond that and work toward a peaceful world?

I realize that in the context of politics, war is a lot more exciting than peace. War roars. Peace whispers. There’s not a lot of high-pitched drama in tranquillity or many opportunities to risk one’s life in a firefight, unless you’re a cop. But we’re talking world peace here, where swords are beaten into plowshares and Doctors Without Borders are allowed to help cure the planet’s suffering without fear of being killed themselves. Let these be among the goals of politicians seeking high office, not new weapons or new excuses to wage war but a cure for AIDS, better food sources to alleviate hunger and new opportunities for children to grow and to dream.

Then a guy like Kerry wouldn’t have to salute and report for duty to be a civilian leader, and a guy like Bush could stop strutting around like a cocky little Napoleon pretending that guns of horror are swords of righteousness.

But, again, there’s no drama in peace, no heart-pounding confrontations, no reason for the clear, cool pain of taps played over the body bags of the young, no marching music, no drums, no tears, no resonating cannon fire. Until peace becomes popular, we’ll just go on fighting wars, I guess, and creating medals for the guys who were never there, and mocking those who were.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at [email protected].