open_sketchbook

You and Jerry seem to have very different politics. Does that ever become an issue in terms of deciding what jokes to do? Like, does he ever try to pull you back from certain topics or something?

(PS: Going to my second PAX East this year! Thanks so much for all the fun times!)

There was a strong individualistic political undercurrent to the counter-culture, anti-war movement of the 1960s. To the anti-war movement, draft dodging or desertion was the morally correct thing to do, and choosing to follow orders was tact approval of those orders. That's what slogans like "What if they had a war, and nobody came?" and "Girls say yes to boys who say no." were about.

Considering they were the generation immediately after WW2, having grown up hearing their dads talk about the stuff they saw people who were "just following orders" do, they may have been on to something. The "Support our Troops, even if you don't support the war" rhetoric devised after Vietnam basically rearranges things to present soldiers and the military machine as victims instead of instigators and hands off culpability entirely to politicians, who are already seen as morally bankrupt.

The bipartisan view of soldiers as selfless public servants in a thankless job is actually very new; historically, soldiers of standing peacetime armies were seen by much of the progressive/pacifistic/isolationistic political wings as parasitical pawns of the colonial-industrial complex, as warmongers, as a moral blight on the nation, and so forth. The First World War's senseless, large-scale violence against fairly helpless soldiers saw a softening of that view, while the Second World War re-contextualized soldiers into a crusading force for peace and freedom that was widely accepted in America. Korea and eventually Vietnam basically broke the United States of that illusion, and there was something of a cultural scramble for alternate viewpoints.

While treating troops and veterans poorly is obviously not the answer, the opposite approach of limiting acceptable protestation to war along non-disruptive, abstract action and rhetoric obviously doesn't do jack fuckin' anything neither.