#I don't talk about Klinger much and it's because almost everything I have to say involves race issues

[majorbaby]

The thing about Potter is that while he may hate the war, he still loves the army and believes it’s an upstanding institution. He doesn’t grapple with that nearly as much as Margaret does. Plus I have way less sympathy for some high-ranking white dude than I do for Margaret, who is shown being fucked over all the time by the army because she’s a woman and furthermore by the end she decides it isn’t for her. Like I think we’re meant to understand that she’s ultimately unhappy and dissatisfied with her career in the army, and she doubts her life choices.  One of the casualties of Potter’s regular-army-shtick is Klinger, who has to learn this ‘maybe the army isn’t so bad after all’ lesson repeatedly as a trade-off for the development of his and Potter’s relationship. Hawkeye gets the same lesson a few times and it’s just as grating then, but he also has way more screen-time with which to re-assert his morals to us.I don’t doubt that Hawkeye maintains his low opinion of the army for the rest of his life. But we’re meant to understand that Klinger undergoes this arc that sees him as being obsessed with getting out of the army to being kind of okay with it, and even having respect for it, because he knew a colonel once who was a pretty nice guy. Potter being a good dude means that he’s a good dude, not that the army facilitates the production of good dudes, and I didn’t like whenever the show leaned into the latter rather than the former.  And it really gets to me that they had Klinger, the one brown guy on the show (you’re gonna hear me that a lot around here) convey this messaging. I think it’s pretty annoying that Potter’s armyisms are dismissed by the gang as being the old-timey quirks of a grumpy, but charming, old man, or are otherwise framed as being on the moral high-ground opposite HawkBeej who simply don’t understand how terribly hard it is to be a high-ranking army official. Like compare that to Hawkeye and Trapper telling Henry to fuck off whenever he tried that shit lol. That’s not a slight to BJ and Hawkeye’s dynamic, it’s a slight to the overall tone of the show as it progressed.

Lastly, I’m not saying that Potter isn’t allowed to miss his family or his wife, but I don’t think his army doctor career is comparable to BJ’s being plucked fresh out of medical school. I bring up BJ in particular because he and Potter seem to bond over the army wife thing, but Potter choosing to split his life between the army and his family isn’t the same as BJ being forced to leave his wife and child.