Page 75 - The Irony Board
P. 75
Into the World
About face
Before good Christian
Soldiers go abroad,
They first must check their
Cheeks in with their god.
Like the preceding and following pieces, this poem was written
during the war against Indochina. The heritage of meekness is not
much in evidence among the American followers of the Sermon on
the Mount; in fact, divine sanction, in terms of national destiny, is
often invoked to justify military adventurism. This contradiction,
Gluckman concluded, can be resolved unhypocritically by leaving
one’s pacifism in theomanual safekeeping while on active duty; then
mayhem may be committed with a clear conscience. “Cheeks” is
also a slang term for buttocks, a part of the anatomy the prudent do
not expose; thus, in the vernacular, these soldiers don’t have to
cover their asses (find moral justification for killing) because they
haven’t any (religiously abjure responsibility).
So the warriors don’t turn the other cheek: they turn both of
them—in. “About face,” then, works variously. The poem is literally
about face (location of the cheeks) and figuratively about face (the
loss of it: absurdly, by giving up the cheeks; idiomatically, by
betraying values higher than political expedience). The marching
order, “about face,” means a 180-degree turn; this both describes
the advance in the wrong direction our military makes in getting
involved with foreign civil wars and revolutions, and commands to
that army to stop and come back. The irony is echoed in the words
of the battle hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
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