We were at Clipper Magazine Stadium for the Atlantic League All-Star game last month, and the pre-game festivities seemed to drag on just short of forever.

The home-run derby was fine but in the humidity the little boy wasn’t buying it; then came droning introductions of this dignitary or that. Fine in the context of hey, this is the Atlantic League’s/Clipper Magazine Stadium’s big moment, but in terms of the people there to see a ballgame… just get on with it, willya?

But the game would certainly not begin without the national anthem. And as part of that ceremony on this particular night were quite a crowd of military personnel; appropriate for a baseball game, for a country still mired in its war. But it was the tone of the ceremony which made me wary; we were to applaud these troops, these heroes, these people fighting for our freedom. The announcer was insistent, to the extent that I thought we might be catching a snippet of Sean Hannity’s program. The cheering throughout the stadium was raucous. But as I looked around our general vicinity, most people seemed to be dutifully clapping, and not much more.

It bothered me for a bit afterward. It’s one thing, I think, to acknowledge the sacrifice that so many in the armed serviced have made, to thank them for that sacrifice. But a sort of knee-jerk jingoist, put-your-hands-together-for-the-people-who-are-fighting-them-there-so-we-don’t-have-to-fight-them-here type of thing - which is what this was - sort of crosses the line between sporting event and political event.

Maybe that’s to be expected in a conservative community like this one, I don’t know. We were not merely honoring the troops - we were venerating them.

And it reminded me of something I’d read by Andrew Bacevich in the Atlantic earlier this year (which Ross Douthat touches on today, which is what made me think of it), “Warrior Politics,” in which Bacevich - a professor of international relations at Boston University and West Point grad who served in the Army during Vietnam and whose son was killed fighting in Iraq earlier this year - notes the degree to which our servicemen and women are themselves engaging in more politicking now than has traditionally been the case in recent years (this NYT op-ed piece by seven soldiers who fought in Iraq and see it as a rather doomed enterprise maybe being a case in point). But more than that, the public responds to their politicking in a particularly deferential manner - maybe due to our guilty consciences:

Military service, once viewed (at least nominally) as a civic obligation, has become a matter of choice. As a result, the burden of “defending our freedom” no longer falls evenly across society. Those choosing to serve do not represent a cross section of America, and most are presumably well aware of that fact.

To assuage uneasy consciences, the many who do not serve proclaim their high regard for the few who do. This has vaulted America’s fighting men and women to the top of the nation’s moral hierarchy. The character and charisma long ago associated with the pioneer or the small farmer—or carried in the 1960s by Dr. King and the civil-rights movement—has now come to rest upon the soldier.

And he concludes that…

On matters of policy, those who wear the uniform ought to get a vote, but it’s the same one that every other citizen gets—the one exercised on Election Day. To give them more is to sow confusion about the soldier’s proper role, which centers on service and must preclude partisanship. Legitimating soldiers’ lobbies is likely to warp national-security policy and crack open the door to praetorianism.

But I don’t necessarily see this as a matter of the soldiers themselves wanting more than that solitary vote - though some may indeed want that. Rather, this is a matter of us, and by “us” I mean primarily the conservatives who argue, as Pericles has on this board, that servicemen and women should indeed have more of a say in matters and policies of war. As the NYT op-ed indicates, that doesn’t necessarily mean soldiers invested with “extra” authority would exercise it in the manner conservatives think they would or want them to.

But in any event, this veneration is a dangerous trend; as Bacevich notes, “a democracy intent on maintaining a great and powerful military establishment confronts acute challenges.” There’s a difference, in other words, between supporting the troops and cracking open that door to praetorianism, which the right seems determined to do. I think I saw through that crack at the stadium that night. And it was something to worry about.