Prius Dementat

Briefly noted during a foray into the drive-time news - the now-inevitable GOP Dauphin Mitt Romney saying

"For every single mom who feels heartbroken when she has to explain to her kids that she needs to take a second job ... for grandparents who can't afford the gas to visit their grandchildren ... for the mom and dad who never thought they'd be on food stamps ... for the small business owner desperately cutting back just to keep the doors open one more month — to all of the thousands of good and decent Americans I've met who want nothing more than a better chance, a fighting chance, to all of you, I have a simple message: Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight."

and bitterly observed, to the solitude of the dashboard radio;

"And in that "better America" the policies you support - every act of your Party to date - every small-town, back-bench, mean-minded, spiteful Teabagger swill you've ingested and now claim you'll swill out to the nation if elected - will ensure that her second job will pay less for longer hours, that their gas will be exhausted more quickly and profit it's producers more richly, that those food stamps will be harder to come by and more desperately needed, that the small business will be more likely to be battered and beaten, sold, gutted, and re-sold by your crony-capitalist friends' megacorporation, and that all those good and decent Americans will be further crammed down, shat upon, disenfranchised, wage-slaved to the wealthy and connected who are your primary supporters and beneficiaries"

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, how huge a lie does this man, and this Party, have to tell before the American public screams "Hold! Enough!"?

And I'm afraid that we all know the answer, my friends.

There IS no lie huge enough, for the vast Gadarene herd that still gobbles up this swill.

We cannot continue in this fashion without destruction. We Are SO Fucked.

Or, as one might say in Latin, were one philosophically so inclined;

Ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam

This is what I was talking about...

...here.

The image below is from the March 19 Reader's Express, a Washington Post publication aimed at transit riders (h/t to Greenwald for the image):Can you imagine the insane furor - at least and especially from the Right - if Saudis or Iraqis were quoted as saying "Well, bin Laden was just stressed from too much Koran study..." or "Well, in wartime, you have to excuse his captors cutting Dan Pearl's head off..."

I'm sure that this SSG probably was stressed, and probably did go violently nuts because of some fucked up thing.

And, again, in the Great Geopolitical Game we're supposed to be playing in the Paimirs, that means two things; jack and shit.

If counterinsurgency/rebellion suppression depends on the "strategic corporal", it depends even more on the quick, public trial and death of the strategic staff sergeant - even if it's the wrong staff sergeant.

Because if you're really serious about "winning", the important thing is that the village remains quiet.

We still don't seem to fucking understand that. And that is unimportant for 98% of the United States, which has no fucking skin in this Great Game and never did.

But for me, it is important, because it means that more of my Army brothers will die, or return home without arms, or legs, or functioning brains.

And that is a keening and a grief to me, regardless of what most of my country seems to think.

Assuming it even fucking does.

To the Mountains of Madness

The Germans used to tell a story about the occupation of Alsace, back in the late Eighteen-hundreds.Now the local Alsatians, part-German though they were, liked having a bunch of foreign soldiers living on top of them about as much as you'd think. And the soldiers probably didn't like it any better, being young, bored, and far from home amid a population that didn't much care for them.

And, unfortunately, some of them might not have behaved as they would have back in those homes. So come the day an Alsatian father, bolder or perhaps just more reckless than the rest, drags his shrinking daughter into the German commandant's office to rage about the goddamn soldier who had raped his sweet, demure, virginal little girl.Now I'll bet that Hauptmann probably looked at the bedraggled little Franconian farm wench and thought "Was im ficknamen haben Wir hier jetzt..?" I'll bet he vaguely remembered her hanging around the garrison, possibly even flirting with the junge in their natty uniforms. A trooper with a steady job, even a foreigner, might not have seemed like a bad catch for an ambitious girl from a boring little scheißloch farm town.

And I'll bet he sighed, thinking that he really needed this like a case of the piles; some goddamn troop that couldn't keep it in his pants until he visited Mdme. Villebois down at the town brothel, and some little local wench who was probably more pissed off about the lack of an engagement ring than the actual ravishing.

And about how impossible it would be to try and figure out which one of his guys had actually done the damn deed.I can picture him drumming his fingers on the desk in irritation before shouting for his Stabsfeldwebel.

And I'll bet the Stabs had his guesses; if he was any good he'd know who had been on the prowl for the farmgirls in town. But he had a couple of hundred men, and the nights were dark, and the lanes were shadowy, and who the hell knew, anyway?

But whatever had happened, the two soldiers knew this; there would be hell to pay if they didn't do something.

The locals were quiet because they knew that to raise their hand against the occupation was to get crushed. And because the troops were usually reasonably polite, and didn't get in people's way without reason.

But...if this got around, and suddenly the local people began to think that their women, or anyone else, might be attacked, well...the officer and the sergeant both knew how many of the locals had been armed by the French government back in the last war...and how many of them probably had a Chassepot shoved up in the eaves somewhere. And they probably grimaced uneasily, remembering the damn franc-tireurs - the "free shooters" - who had made the countryside so unpleasant for them on the way to Paris a couple of years ago.

So the Stabs paraded the garrison, and the Hauptmann addressed them quietly, and the men drew lots out of a helmet. And the unlucky winner was marched out the following morning to the wall outside, neatly shot, and buried in the churchyard that evening. Personally, the Stabs suspected that Kirchen probably hadn't done it - Kirchen was a shy kid, really, and he suspected Knabe, the dirty hound; he'd been sniffing around that girl for the past week.

And with the weary rue old soldiers feel when they think about the things they're told to do or asked to do by the feckless people they work for the first shirt probably regretted having to shoot one of his own for a damn cheap little tart who'd likely be fat and blowsy by forty, married to some local yokel with mud up his backside, who both in five years would have forgotten all about the damn business.

How a good man had been killed because of someone's damn stupidity. About the fucking waste and misery and pointlessness of it all.

And how the Stabs would shoot another man just as quickly if it happened again.

Because the important thing is that the village remained quiet.

One soldier had died as soldiers have always died; to save his friends, and to serve his country's purpose.I have no doubt that the sergeant that killed a slew of Afghans this past week was off his nut. Shell-shocked, battle-fatigued, PTSD'd...call it whatever you want. The man was on his, what, fourth? combat tour in probably six or seven years. That's a hell of a lot of time for a young man to spend doing the dirty work of imperial policing in some of the shittier parts of the world.And, honestly - I don't think that his insane slaughter says anything of any value about the "Afghanistan mission", or whatever the sweet hell the U.S. Army was doing in that town, or the province, or in A-stan, or southwest Asia, for that matter. It's just a tale told by semiautomatic fire, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. To take this tale of one man's journey into the mountains of madness is madness itself, trying to read the scribblings of a soul tormented to insanity by the peering in the abyss for too long.What tells me something very sad and sorry, though, is the general reaction I'm hearing and reading here in the U.S.

Which varies between much speculation about the very things this horror means nothing about - the Great Game that sergeant's country and mine is playing in the Afghan highlands, the "mission" he was supposed to be there for, or anything else having to do with the larger whys and wherefores that the United States has spent more than a decade farkling about doing in the hinterlands of central Asia - and personal hand-wringing about the trooper who seems to have gone bloodily nuts on the night of 11 MAR.

There are troubling, difficult problems there, there are difficult questions to ask about all of those things, but this particular incident touches on none of them.

Instead, what it drives home to me is how utterly, completely cluelessly disengaged the entire U.S. - from the public through the civilians in the federal government to the U.S. Army - is to whatever the fiddle-fuck we're doing there.Because the Hauptmann and the Stabsfeldwebel could tell everyone involved what needs to happen now.

Because if whatever the fiddle-fuck we're doing there means anything that soldier - regardless of how tortured his mind is, regardless of the demands of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, regardless of his rights, or the opinions of the gormless American public - needs to have a quick drumhead court-martial there at his post, be given a kind word and a good meal, and then taken out to the wall outside the FOB and shot.Because the important thing is that the village remained quiet.We just don't seem to get it.

Imperial occupations are damn deadly difficult things. They don't have a fucking thing to do with Goodness, or Rightness, or Freedom, or whatever bullshit pablum gets fed to the ignorant masses. They're about figuring out how to keep the locals quiet and as happy as possible.

Anything that makes that happen is what needs to happen.

And if you can't live with that - you need to get the fuck out of the business of imperial wars.Because we seem to have chosen to treat this like we'd treat a domestic murder rampage. Which makes perfect sense - because it was a murder rampage - except that in the context in which it happened is utterly mad. Other good men will die because of it.

Because people here and our media keep repeating that this man's madness says nothing about the tens of thousands of other GIs in the country that, while perfectly true, is perfectly meaninglessly mad.

Because while talking about combat stress, and giving this trooper his Article 31 rights, and a fair court-martial, and a long sentence in a military prison makes perfect sense to the world of the United States and the people comfortably here, or in their offices in Kabul, or in the quiet briefing rooms alongside the Potomac, in terms of what it will mean in the mountains of Afghanistan... ...is a perfect wilderness of madness.

Forever Fools

My pals jim and Lisa over at Ranger Against War have a nice vituperative little post up discussing the bizarre success of Newt Gingrich (or, as Charlie Pierce likes to tag him: "N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer of Civilization's Rules and Leader (Perhaps) of the Civilizing Forces") in portraying his 1%-wealthy-Beltway-insider, perpetual-staff-banging-serial-adulterer self as a good ol' Christian Boy to the good people of the great State of Florida.

My friends speculate that:

"...(t)hese are not fit people and would in fact do well to walk, but have bought into a society which has effectively rendered them hostage to Big Pharma and Big Agra. They feel impotent -- often are -- and out of frustration will vote on seeming kinship alone, so disenfranchised are they from the system. Maybe someone who looks like he has to take the same statin drugs or eats the same fast food will feel their pain."

It's a great post, and well worth the reading.

But, in the tradition of how many words is the worth of a single picture, all I can say is:Do we really need to know more about the U.S., circa 2012, than that people are willing to both purchase, and, worse, leave the house, in something like that?

For this, men and women gave their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to wrest independence from Great Britain? For this, whole families suffered in the coal mines, men died builing the intercontinental railroads, sacrificed and bled to win the terrible World Wars?

For this?

WASF

Update 1/31 PM: Speaking of Chas, here he is in brilliant form, discussing Santorum, the - excuse the expression - hindmost ass in the GOP Florida donkeyshow:

"He had the right to expect better than to be reduced to being the undercard in the low-class donkeyshow into which the "fight" between Romney and Gingrich has devolved. Two colossal fakes, one with more money, gulling the rubes by pretending in many cases to be what Rick Santorum has been his entire career, for good and ill. Meanwhile, Santorum is the purest product out there of what the conservative movement transformed the Republican party to produce. It may, in fact, be true that Rick Santorum is too much of a modern Republican for the modern Republican party to nominate. He may be the mirror into which his party is afraid to gaze."

Hard not to wince in recognition.

Yep. We truly are well on the road to being irrecoverably fucked; having a third of the electorate harking after clowns, fools, charlatans, and grifters is the broad, smooth road to Hell and there is no disguising that.

With Their Shields or On Them

I'm sitting in front of the computer whilst the kiddos indulge in some truly reprehensible Saturday morning TV - a ritual as old as MY childhood, at least - and came across this Krugman column that ends with a comment that I thought went right to the heart of the discussions we had around here about what I considered the unfortunate narrowing of the social arc of military service in the U.S. circa 2011:

"If people can’t comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost."

The Krugman essay is in reference to the apparent difference between "conservatives" - who seem willing to shove any sort of public-figure misbehavior down the memory hole so long as the offending politician continues to vote for their regressive policies - and liberals, who immediately defenestrate their own "leaders" if the personal lives of those leaders vary from the public positions.But in the course of his post Krugman brings up someone I had forgotten; Ed Luttwak, who wrote back in 1995 that any hope the U.S. (and other Western societies) had of returning to a widespread national service was doomed by the replacement-level birth rates of their peoples. Luttwak's "post-heroic" societies had developed such an attachment to their children "...(b)ecause most couples have only one or two children, the loss of any in warfare becomes intolerable, and conscription becomes unthinkable..."(and)"...child-centered Americans (and Europeans and Japanese) will be forced to rely in the future on allies, mercenaries, and maybe robots to fight on their behalf."So; here I am, looking at my own precious offspring (one inert on the couch, the other somewhere in the back of the house - I can hear her chatting to herself there, anyway...) and wondering - would I give them up if my country demanded it not for existential defense, but for some abtruse foreign policy objective? Would I be "convincible" that burying my son or daughter for some transient geopolitical advantage in part of my country's imperial corona was worth the end of my own personal immortality?And I honestly don't know the answer.

But it certainly raises some difficult questions for me.

Buzz cuts, longhairs, and the bouffant puff

The last post got me thinking; why should I, or any sane citizen of a democracy, want to use the full majesty of the law to force his or her fellow citizens into the armed service of our nation?

I mean, isn't the whole point of a republican form of government - and isn't the definitive point of the United States form of democracy - that the individual citizen should have the broadest individual liberty consistent with the function and survival of the community and/or the nation?

And what is a military draft, if not the very lowest form of coercion? You and I in the form of our government are saying "You, other citizen, will place yourself under the military authorities of the nation (and in so doing be subject to a military law vastly more dictatorial, abrupt, and draconian than any possible under the civilian federal Constitution or any state legal system) and continue as such, hazard to injury or death, until such time as we may choose to release you" and if that other refuses we permit ourselves the authority to seize him/her by force and inflict punishment on him or her.

A draft is perhaps the antithesis of patriotism. It forces a citizen who may have vitally sound reasons for refusing to join a fighting service to do so, and in so doing forces others, who might have joined on their own terms, to join will-they-nil-they on the terms our government sets for them.

And commentor Ael pointed out on the comments or the previous thread: traditionally a draft has been used to build up a large standing Army, perhaps among the most reviled of the aspects of British rule rejected by the Founders and Framers. It was for this reason more than any other that drafting citizens was generally rejected during our wars prior to 1917. Only in the Civil War did the federal government finally accede to a draft and then only after all other methods of enlistment were tried and failed.So not just the intent of the nation's creators, not just the legal and philosophical arguments against it, but the weight of U.S. history weighs against the idea of a draft.

Why recommend it?

To explain myself, I need to...well, explain myself.

I'm a pretty white-bred sort of guy. Father a corporate type, mother a classic Fifties stay-at-home housewife. Raised in nice little suburbs, went to nice little suburban public schools with nice little suburban kids. Went to a nice-little-suburban-sort-of-college - actually a very small, very spendy, very private Eastern liberal-arts school known as a "safety school" for the Ivies with lots of people who were and are my intellectual and social superiors.

And then I enlisted in the Army.

I had a nice couple of hitches of nice little semi-peacetime active service and then got out and spent another nice little decade-and-a-half or so in the Reserve Component back when the RC really WAS a "reserve component".Here's the thing.

I've noticed that at my college reunions I'm one of a tiny handful of graduates with service time. When I go to professional meetings, or spend time with others in my social peer group; middle- to upper-middle-class white guys with college degrees - I'm often the ONLY one who spent any time as an enlisted soldier or a noncommissioned officer.

There's usually a smattering of commissioned types - though my college alums tend to have the "courtesy commissions" of JAG and medical corps officers. But I'm often the only one in a group of 200 or so with any first-hand experience as a private soldier, a dogface G.I.Think about how odd that is.

Look back, for instance, at the so-called Greatest Generation. My father - who was and is as solidly upper-middle-class as a brushcut American could and can be - was an officer-cadet, a V-7 pilot trainee in 1945. But he was called up as a draftee in 1944. His uncle died as a draftee battalion runner in the Argonne the generation earlier, and his brother was a draftee sailor in WW2 before going career as a pilot (they like to fly, my family; dunno why it passed me by. The only use I had for the contraptions was as a taxi I jumped out of when I got to where I was going...)

This sort of stuff makes me thing that the Americans of the Forties and to some extent the Fifties had less elitist notions than we have today. The idea of young men of "good families" going into the fighting services was accepted as part of being an American. Everything I've seen, everything my parents' generation says, makes me think that the idea of a well-bred young man serving as a private soldier or a foremast sailor was considered perfectly acceptable after WW2 made it acceptable.

Take, just as an example, the servicemen in William Wyler's 1946 movie "The Best Years Of Our Lives". It's a movie, yes, but it wasn't wartime propaganda or a feel-good morale-boosting fairytale; it was intended as serious postwar drama and therefore had to be recognizably realistic enough for Forties audiences, familiar to sickness with war and soldiers and soldiering, to accept with no more than moderate suspension of disbelief.

The story revolves around three men; an Army Air Corps pilot, an Army sergeant, and an enlisted sailor.The commissioned pilot was a soda jerk before the war. Okay, we're on familiar "Officer and a Gentleman" ground here. But here's where it gets interesting; the sergeant - an E-7 platoon sergeant - was a minor executive, a loan officer in the local bank.

Can you imagine that today? A banker going to war as an enlisted troop? My friend Lisa has mentioned someone she's met who was doing Wall Street-type financial work and got called up with his Guard unit. And certainly there are still a handful of unusual "social" Guard outfits like the "First City Troop" of the Pennsylvania ARNG.

But in general the guys I served with were, and the studies I've read suggest that most U.S. soldiers still are, from small towns or the rougher parts of cities. A lot of them are from the South and interior West, with a fair number from the big cities of the West. Midwest, and Northeast. Most of them are from middle- and lower-middle-class families. Even the officers are not from the sort of place I went to college - though Franklin & Marshall had a sizeable V-12 training program in the Forties it has no ROTC today - but from ag schools, Southern and Western state colleges, and places like Brigham Young University.No bankers. None of the kids I went to college with. No congressmen's kids, or senators' daughters. No doctor's sons, no lawyer's. None.

So when I think of the benefits of a draftee versus a self-selecting Army I think of the benefit more to the country than to the Army, or to the people drafted. Of having bankers serving with soda-jerks, urban tough kids with suburban mall rats, of spreading the franchise, as it were, to a wider spectrum of Americans than we take in today.Anything that forces young people into a uniformed service, or to fight, is an evil thing. But we do "evil" things all the time to keep our republic working. We force people to serve on juries. We force them to pay taxes, to submit to regulations that deny them things they want or need to do. We don't force them to vote and as a result find ourselves at the mercy of the small percentage - almost always less the half, often WAY less than half - that do vote. And now we no longer require people to serve regardless of their social class.

Which has led to the better outcome?

I honestly am not sure I'm right about this.

But when I look around me at all the other well-bred, well-fed, well-paid, white men who, like me, have to be considered the "well-born and able" who have a hell of a lot to do with running my country and don't see anyone else with a Good Conduct ribbon on their lapel...

I wonder. I really do.

Without the buzz cuts

Generally speaking I try to avoid the sorts of situations I lump under the general heading of "Support Our Troops".

Ever since my country decided that the drawbacks of having a substantial portion of its citizenry with skin in the armed-foreign-policy game exceeded the value of cheap military manpower I've watched the average U.S. citizen become about as familiar with the realities of soldiers and soldiering as a milk cow with the details of the deliberations of the Council of Trent.

But in what I have always considered a perfect slice of savage irony as those people have become less and less cognisant of what their now-professional troops are doing in their name they have developed an absurdly exaggerated veneration and adulation of those troops. And I recently ran across one of these on my "Facebook" page which pitchforked me into the question of what my country has become since it no longer requires random lots of its young people to serve in its military.

Here's a perfect example, something titled the "anxiety of a military mom" written by someone who presents herself as a military wife (I'm not saying she isn't - just that I have no way of knowing one way or the other).Her money graf sums up her attitude towards her husband's service in Afghanistan in particular and soldiers and soldiering in general;

"I for one cannot think of a better ambassador for the United States than my husband...I love knowing he’s the face of my nation on the other side of the planet. He has honor. He has valor. He’s brave. He’s an officer and a gentleman. He’s always in a freakishly good mood. Having him in Afghanistan is my small way of saying, See, world? Not all Americans are over-medicated, McDonalds-eating channel surfers with entitlement issues! We still make a few like we used to! So to this mom..."(the article is in reference to another woman who is frantic that her son wishes to join as a Marine officer) "...I say, be proud. Be ecstatic. Be blown away by your son’s determination and character. The fact is, we need more men and women like that. A lot more. A nation full. But without the buzz cuts."

I have a hard time with all the illusions summed up here, but perhaps the most perplexing to me is the notion that this woman has about how the majority of the nation feels about her husband and his comrades.

"There is a lingering perception in our society..."

she writes,

"...that the military is for those who seek a way out of a dead end life, that the only people crazy enough to enlist are those who have nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, and want to beat their chest in the process. That combined with the very real threat of death is why so many parents cringe at the idea of a child enlisting. They seek a “better life” for their sons and daughters."

Lingering perception of... In the "thank you for your service " America of 2011? Has this gal been out in public lately..?

What I would tend to agree with is that for anyone who has economic alternatives (which is to say anyone making more than $50,000 or so a year) the notion of giving a child to an expeditionary army fighting neo-colonial wars in the global hustings - which is the reality of military service circa 2011 - is not an appetizing one. The downsides of woundings, death, psychological damage and emotional distress far outweigh any possible return, given that the visible lack of an Afghan Taliban Navy or Air Force make the ridiculous canard that the enemy we're fighting in central Asia is a genuine threat to the nation.

So for a rational parent, diverting a child from a life of semi-permanent low-grade expeditionary warfare for fairly murky geopolitical objectives isn't a bug, it's a feature.Troops are dying in central Asia, true (though not many and not often) but what they are dying for is as far removed from "their country" as a Frenchman killed at Salamanca was dying for the principles of the Revolution of 1789. National interest? Geopolitical advantage? Perhaps, sure; the same reason that professional soldiers fight and die and have fought and died since Rome. But getting blown away chasing muj outside Kandahar is a very different proposition than getting shot down storming the beaches of Normandy or defending the barricades on Long Island or the ramparts of Fort McHenry. And the choice for a parent, or a spouse - to give a loved one for geopolitical advantage - is to me a hell of a lot more fraught than if the choice was one of death in defense of their home and family.

And the troops themselves understand this. They also understand that the bulk of the American public - like the poor woman quoted above - do NOT understand; "A vast majority..."(of the U.S. public) "...expressed pride in the troops and three-quarters say they thanked someone in the military. But a 45 percent plurality say neither of the post-9/11 wars has been worth the cost and only a quarter say they are following news of the wars closely. Half of the public said the wars have made little difference in their lives."

I understand that neither the military nor the U.S. government wishes to return to a draftee military. I understand the military difficulties with that concept. But when I look around me and see the vast disconnection between the public and the military forces...when I watch the public make foolish and uninformed choices based on fantasy and propaganda rather than painfully-won experience...I really wonder if we're sacrificing the public good for military expedience. I wonder if we're placing the wants of the military service over the needs of an involved and informed public.

And mind you, I'm not saying that the public needs to have a wider experience with war. I'm saying it needs to get to know what happens in armies.

Because without that we have become a nation in awe of our own military. Poll after poll reaffirms that the U.S. armed services are the best respected institution in the nation - ahead of the Presidency, ahead of the Congress, ahead of agencies great and small. Not having any real experience or understanding we loves us some GIs and tend to credit them with intelligence, diligence, and moral standing above any of the civilian institutions in our country.

Which, as any GI could tell you, is nonsense.

Soldiers are generally fitter than most people, somewhat better organized, and with a less-complicated world to understand. But no private who has spent hours standing around some worthless patch of dirt doing fuck-all only to be told that the original point of the clusterfuck was mistaken will continue in the mistaken belief that soldiers know better than civilians what should be done and how to do it. No one better than an enlisted troop - especially a draftee troop, who has no vested interest in making the Army look good - knows the meaning of the terms "SNAFU", "SUSFU", and "TARFU". No one can spend more than a couple of days in the service without experiencing some appalling clusterfuck and then hearing it described in the post paper as a brilliant success.The draftees of the French Army in Napoleon's day had a saying: "Pour se trouver comme un Bulletin"...meaning that there was fibbing and untruth and then there was the Big Lie as expressed in the official Army Bulletins. When you lied "like a Bulletin" you were really bringing the bullshit.

A democracy needs a middle course; neither adulation nor contempt for its military forces. Right now we're all in on the former. That's not sensible and it's not healthy; it encourages a militaristic way of thinking, and, if pursued to its logical endpoint, will eventually encourage both people and soldiers to contemplate praetorian treason.

And behind the larger, public, difficulties are the small individual tragedies typified by the sort of person who will read the "military mom's" account and really believe that patriotism, love, and hope will overcome the brutal effect of sending young men to fight in foreign rebellions and civil wars.Thirty years ago she would probably have seen three generations of young men go off to fight in straighter wars in simpler times and return different men with wounds both external and internal that would often twist them for the remainder of their lives.

Today she writes only what she knows. And while I understand it is her truth, as a soldier I also understand that behind that truth lies another, sterner, iron-shod truth, the truth of the heart of war. And that for many another woman - and perhaps even the writer herself, as the effects of her husband's deployments work their way inward over the years - the collision between her truth and the Truth of War is likely to become fragments that will tear into their lives like mortar shrapnel.

I wish that my country could gain the wisdom to understand this without having to bind itself into forced soldiering, the stupefyingly blunt instrument of a military draft. But it does not appear to and does not seem to wish to.

I do not love the idea of a draft, of forcing citizens to serve the state. I do not wish to give my son or daughter to one. But I do not love what I see as the lack of a draft having done to my nation, and my people. I do not like what I see of my nation when a woman whose husband is overseas enforcing the national will on an unwilling foreign land can say that her nation should be proud and ecstatic to be a nation full of soldiers.A democracy should go to war sternly, reluctantly. It should be proud and ecstatic to see its sons and daughters inventors, steelwrights, poets, and athletes. It should see its soldiers as it does its weaponry; necessary instruments of policy, good for destruction that is valuable only in that it preserves or returns the peace needed for those peaceful professions to thrive.

It should glory in its power for creation and should give its young people over to soldiering with reluctance and regret, with the stern resolve not to "support the troops" but to return them to the benefits of peace as quickly as it can.

And if a draft is needed for us to find that resolve within ourselves then by all means let us return there, and soon.

I Blame Al Gore

This occurred to me whilst arguing about - of all things - post office and library closings over at MilPub.

And that is; does the Internet actually make you LESS informed? Has the Internet helped make Americans dumber?

There seems to be a swathe of opinion out there that says yes. One of the commentors over at the 'Pub seems to think that closing libraries is an inevitable side-effect of electronic commerce and knowledge. My snide observation is that it does indeed seem to be an artifact of the "dumbing" of the U.S. public.

I got to wondering; I've been involved in learning and teaching (in some aspect) nearly all my adult life. What have I observed that might help in figuring out whether all this Internet-shaming is factual or not. And I came to several conclusions, some germane, some less so.

Among the less germane but IMO affecting the argument is the effect of the electronic media in general.

As little as three or four generations ago you had to have some intellectual heft to get your ideas in front of the public.

Not that you had to be intelligent, or clever, or even particularly sane. All sorts of fucking idiots got published - Ayn Rand, forchrissakes! - and still do. But the ordinary garden-variety gomer had a hard time getting his or her empty head in front of others' to spout off moronic opinions. The media just wasn't there.

But with the proliferation of electronic outlets anyone; Glenn Beck, Osama bin Laden, me, can get all up in your grille with our whackadoodle ideas. The cumulative effect is to raise the apparent Whacko Factor.

Remember that intelligence, like pretty much all other human traits, is distributed on a bell curve. So by definition half of all humans are below the intellectual mean. And nearly all of them either have blogs or seem to work at Fox News. But, again, the increase in outlets for this tomfoolery provided by the electronical internet, 24-hour-cable-news, bizarre cable channels...it's impressive, and not really in a good way.

So I think that part of this "issue" is an artifact of the fact that there are just more ways for fucking idiots to be heard, not that Americans are necessarily more fucking idiotic.

But...

I do think that in at least one aspect the Internet does contribute to debasing what intellectual content our public debate contains.

It allows you (me, anyone, everyone) to gain an nearly instant but extraordinarily shallow and facile learning about damn near anything. And I've noticed that my students - the electronic generation - are particularly bad about this.

Part of me wonders if this has to do with growing up with visual entertainment as a constant sort of intellectual elevator music in their lives. Movies and television don't encourage reflection. It requires a great deal of effort to stop a video because you want to ponder a certain point, issue, or question. From childhood we vidiots learn to suspend our disbelief to make video "work". We know that that actor isn't Paul Revere...but we go along with the gag to make the story work.

I wonder how far a stretch it is from there to hearing Rick Perry say "Fifty percent of Americans pay no taxes at all" and going along with THAT gag..?

But whatever the reason, I've noticed that an overwhelming majority of my high school and community college students over the past decade are bad; really, genuinely, extraordinarily bad at researching information.

If it isn't on Google or Wikipedia, they can't find it.

And I wonder; maybe this has to do with ONLY having used Google or Wikipedia...

As antediluvian as they are today, when I and those of my generation had to look something up all we had were dead-tree media (and microfilm...)

So we had to learn to use card catelogs. Dictionaries. Encyclopedias. Being a geologist I also had to learn to use the Science Citation Index, and the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, to research topics discussed in journals in my field.

All this paper-shuffling tended to make me, and my contemporaries, slower but fairly thorough (some, obviously, more than others...). And I often find that even when researching on-line I tend to do what I used to do; using one article to chase down several others from the citations, checking multiple sources to see if they confirm or contradict each other. And when I don't - for example, when I accepted a single source for the so-called "Irene Incident" in the Philippines in 1898 - I find that I make the same mistakes my students made; accepting unsubstantiated claims as facts, including interpretation in with data, and passing along outright falsehoods.

So.

Has the Internet made Americans dumber?

I doubt it. For one thing, we were never all THAT smart to begin with. We, the People, have throughout our history tended to be credulous, emotional, badly-informed, and prey to all sorts of ridiculous nonsense.

What I think the Internet DOES do, though, is let us believe that we're smarter than we really are. It lends us a superficial knowledge that allows us to make all sorts of boneheaded choices thinking we know all the answers.

When we haven't even the slightest idea what the right questions should be.