The sinister politics of pouring beers for dead troops
The sinister politics of pouring beers for dead troops
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Editor’s note: Apropos of Donald Trump’s grim use of American soldiers’ gravesites as props for a campaign ad late last month, and this excellent column by Jonathan M. Katz of The Racket about the right-wing politicization of the US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in which those soldiers were killed, I’m reprinting a popular Fingers column that originally ran around three years ago (September 13th, 2021) about a peculiar bartending practice that went viral in the immediate aftermath of the withdrawal. The piece below has been lightly edited. Thanks again for your patience as I wrap up this side project.—Dave.
In August 2021, restaurants, breweries, and bars around the country began putting out 13 full pints of beer to honor 13 American soldiers who were killed in a bombing in Kabul as the U.S. war machine withdrew from Afghanistan. One bar owner told USA Today that:
[T]he community reaction has been overwhelming; customers have seen the 13 beers and asked where and how they can help other military families. Some have offered donations, while others have thanked and hugged local veterans.
"These families, the sacrifices and those soldiers who died deserve to be seen. So in our small way, we put our 13 beers to honor them, which isn't half of what they deserve. But it's something," Russell said.
It is something, that’s for sure. But what, exactly? There’s a longstanding tradition of U.S. veterans ordering beers and shots for fallen and POW/MIA comrades they’ve lost. That’s a deeply personal and intimate act, whereas this practice seems to have sprung up in response to a specific, highly politicized attack on U.S. troops to whom the participating businesses have more indirect connections.
It also seems precision-engineered to harvest attention social media, unlike, say, organizing to oust the politicians who would gladly march us into another intractable conflict for the sake of flowing untold billions to the defense contractors that they plan on “consulting” for as soon as they leave office.
Maybe these businesses are doing that, in which case, great! But it still wouldn’t answer why this is “a thing” now. The U.S. military was in Afghanistan for 20 years, and while 13 American soldiers dead is indeed a tragedy, it pales in scope to the 2,500 U.S. troops who have died in Afghanistan since 2001. (Not to mention the 66,000 Afghan troops and 50,000 Afghan civilians killed in the conflict; no beers for them, I guess.) Have bars been doing this for the entire duration of the war, and I just missed it?
A couple Friends of Fingers sent me this story (thanks Pete J. and Justin G.), and I was flummoxed, so I put that question out on Twitter. From what I can tell, none of my followers have seen this either. A lot of people chimed in about individual vets buying drinks for fallen friends, or restaurants setting a missing man table. But again, those seem like distinct rituals from this one, in which for-profit businesses use perishable liquid in highly choreographed responses to a discrete news story. So, assuming this is new: why, and why now?
Sure, there’s a Democrat in the White House these days. But partisan politics alone don’t explain this. The GOP flogged the 2012 Benghazi attack into a bumbling, interminable congressional investigation, an entire feature film starring John Krasinski, and one of the first mainstream political memes. I don’t remember conservative bar owners wasting beer to own the libs on Facebook back then, or following other fatal attacks on Americans in the back half of last decade once the platform had red-pilled a critical mass of users beyond recovery.
Unfortunately, USAToday never got around to asking those business owners about this discrepancy. Neither did the Today Show or Fox News or any of the other mainstream outlets that ran with this as a feel-good story. But
, writer of the newsletter (and an occasional Fingers collaborator) offered me a plausible answer on Twitter: “I don't know about the empty table with full glasses specifically, but it's part of the broader ritual of honoring the dead by pretending their deaths were wholly apolitical.”Ah yes: doing politics by refusing to Do Politics. Atherton linked me to a piece he published in late August (just before the pint thing hit headlines) that details the popular feint of “limiting coverage of the dead to the impressions shared by public mourners [and] flattening expressions of grief into a reaffirmation that questioning the war means dishonoring the dead.” That certainly tracks here, and reminds me of something Luke O’Neil over at Welcome To Hell World wrote awhile back:
I was trying to figure out why the patriotic people in America love dead troops so much but don’t seem to care about the living ones… I guess it’s a lot like how they love the unborn. A dead troop and an unborn baby aren’t actual people you have to take care of anymore or yet they’re just an idea you can do whatever you want with and what the fuck are they going to say about it anyway their bones aren’t even moving.
O’Neil was writing about a memorial involving flags, but beer is actually an ideal beverage for this washing down the bloody consequences of American politicians’ devotion to waging war. It’s an approachable, available commodity that also doubles as a symbol of friendship and community and common ground, which is why centrist types like to wring their hands that Democrats and Republicans can’t simply set asides their differences and have a beer with each other as Americans.1 (Ironically, some of the only common ground both parties can still find these days is spending trillions on unnecessary wars.) It’s relatively cheap, so bars have no problem spending some of it for this observance. Best of all, most American drinkers like beer, and don’t want to think about it as politics, which they hate.
Considering all that, setting out pints for dead troops reads like a somber (albeit vaguely commercial) sacrifice at an altar. Like I said, it’s a nice enough idea… except in this allegory, the altar is built to an American experience where it’s normal, even expected, to have dead troops to honor with Facebook beer homages. To accept this schtick as dogma (as we already have with so many other performative liturgies of Troop Respecting™) and spread it like the gospel on social media is to embrace the political orthodoxy that keeps getting American soldiers killed in the first place. Look, maybe all these bar and restaurant owners began putting pints out for dead soldiers in good faith. But divested of broader historical context and pumped out across Americans’ newsfeeds, it looks a lot more like bad religion.
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