Monster
Active member
To preface this piece, my Letter to the Editor will be the second post. The young lady stirred up a hornets nest with this article. It was referred to me by a friend and colleague that is currently attending this school, now that he has been released from Active Duty (again) in the Middle East.
NO PITY FOR THE NEW AMERICAN HEROES
Lily Morris
senior reporter
Uncle Sam wants YOU (to volunteer for brainwashing, life under a dictatorship, and death.) Be all that you can (be ordered by your commanding officer to) be. An army of one (inane jackass.) Sugar coat it, candy coat it, wrap it in red-cellophane slogans; joining the military is for the birds.
The popular myth in our dear, sweet Republican land is that military boys (and girls—but mostly boys) are brave young men, courageously following the battle cry in the name of the land he loves. It's touching, and it's bullocks.
I'll let you in on a little secret, since MTV has apparently systematically destroyed the public's ability to read between the lines. There is no special cause. There's no divine being orchestrating the success or not of our military endeavors. There's a ****-off lot of money, and a lot of greedy, old, dry, wrinkly white men lewdly smacking their chops and wringing their hands for more. That's what they're dying for. I won't bother naming names, because the people profiting the very most from this mess are
likely hidden away, outside the limelight behind mountains of shredded documents and glorified media coverage. They're just anonymous, nasty old men in mothball smelling suits who think that God is on their side for no other reason than that they have become freakishly wealthy. God, you see, is telling them they deserve even more.
Congratulations, and welcome to the U.S. Armed Forces, sucker.
In the course of my experience (limited, but undeniably substantial) I have encountered precisely one—yes, only one—recruit who enlisted out of patriotism. The poor guy is not only naïve (the poor dear), but he is also certainly the exception. The military for most proves a viable option when weighed against another, presumably worse option. There are a myriad of (horrifyingly inadequate) reasons why these apparently oblivious boys join.
There are those who join because they don’t feel like attending (or don’t feel they can excel in) college. These geniuses are sacrificing a valuable education for four years of complete servitude that will leave them with frustratingly specific if not completely useless work experience. Others do it because they cannot find work. Often (or invariably, depending on your critical bent) the “can’t find work” excuse is a thin euphemism for “won’t get off my ass and apply myself to finding a job.”
As my grandfather would say, as soon as I find a job opening for someone to hold down a couch, I’ll let you know.
Sure, work is sometimes scarce, and that’s understandable, but this ain’t the depression, folks, and you can’t convince this cynic that you’ve been hitting the job market hard with applications and carefully polished resumes eight hours a day, five days a week, yet you are still not employed. If you have and you are still unemployed, chances are the military doesn’t want you either.
There’s the “security for my wife/children/family” line, but if your wife/children/family would rather have financial security than the comfortable assurance of your continued existence, perhaps you should be searching for other familial options rather than new career paths. There are also those who’d like to travel. I’ve noticed that Iraqi travel packages are going for cheap online if you’re the adventurous type, but a better option by far is the Peace Corp. While its effects on other countries have been inflated in print by our good old ethnocentric America, the life experience it provides for its workers is immeasurable and often profound.
Boot camp is a glorified name for a (mostly casualty-free) concentration camp set up for the purposes of brainwashing and propagandizing recruits. Forced into an isolated world of uniformity, fatigue, humiliation, and degradation, enlistees are broken down to their fundamentals in order to be more effective, more expendable pawns in the government’s bloody game of G.I. Joes.
I don’t feel sorry for a single American soldier killed in Iraq. Not your brother, your husband, your son, or anyone else. Don’t go writing me some sob story about what a fantastic person he was and how he didn’t deserve to die and how you miss him so goddamn much and his baby won’t ever know him; he was stupid. None of these men were drafted. None were taken against their will. Each and every one chose to be there willingly. As the boot camp slogan goes, they signed their lives away to “protect the constitution, not practice it.” Anyone naive enough, dumb enough, or with a following nature that blind deserves whatever comes to him.
There’s no pride in blind faith. No glory. And with the same inclinations G.I. Joe has--to do whatever his commanding officer tells him to do-- comes the potential next cult member, or the next terrorist’s recruit. Pretending that someone who chose knowingly to take on to the death a cause that no one cared if they believed in is any kind of victim is hogwash, and it cheapens the deaths of the hostage draftees who unwillingly went to fight the Vietnam war.
In all this disgusting glorification of machismo, drunkenness, violence, and sameness, I can’t help but be stricken by the pathetic lack of confidence that must surround those that sign up. Besides an utter lack of ambition, a belief that you are incapable of living your own life effectively, besides a sense of inferiority, why would anyone in their right mind chose to discard the next four years of their life (minimum!) to live under a dictatorship-style hierarchy? Why else would anyone subject themselves to possible death, imprisonment by a foreign government, lack of free will, and an environment so controlled it regulates hair length, clothing, sexuality, and living quarters?
Infidelity is as common as jaywalking among the ranks. Men separated from their wives by thousands of miles delight in the women of the places they visit. Their wives, bored at home and likely fully aware of their husbands’ philandering take up with his friends. Rape frequently goes unpunished, homosexuality is a crime, the pay for lower ranking men with families is so low that many, if not most, are on government food stamps in addition to their pay, and the laws are so restrictive that oral sex can result in discharge or jail time. This is rarely brought to trial, but anyone who angers a superior is subject to court martial or dishonorable discharge for the most unlikely of crimes.
As though there was not enough to keep one from donating their lives to the not-exactly-charitable cause of the United Corporations of America, there is a deeper sacrifice of self that accompanies military service. When you are trained to kill a man, when it is drilled into your head that you may have to slaughter a child without blinking, when you are encased in a world of potential violence and threat, it messes you up. Maybe you’ll never kill a soul. Maybe you’ll never so much as swat a fly, but you’ve lost your inhibition to do it. It’s no longer a question of ethics, but a question of circumstance; the theory of it has been dealt with, only the practice needs implemented.
Spokane Falls CC "The Communicator" Opinion Section 25 Feb 05
NO PITY FOR THE NEW AMERICAN HEROES
Lily Morris
senior reporter
Uncle Sam wants YOU (to volunteer for brainwashing, life under a dictatorship, and death.) Be all that you can (be ordered by your commanding officer to) be. An army of one (inane jackass.) Sugar coat it, candy coat it, wrap it in red-cellophane slogans; joining the military is for the birds.
The popular myth in our dear, sweet Republican land is that military boys (and girls—but mostly boys) are brave young men, courageously following the battle cry in the name of the land he loves. It's touching, and it's bullocks.
I'll let you in on a little secret, since MTV has apparently systematically destroyed the public's ability to read between the lines. There is no special cause. There's no divine being orchestrating the success or not of our military endeavors. There's a ****-off lot of money, and a lot of greedy, old, dry, wrinkly white men lewdly smacking their chops and wringing their hands for more. That's what they're dying for. I won't bother naming names, because the people profiting the very most from this mess are
likely hidden away, outside the limelight behind mountains of shredded documents and glorified media coverage. They're just anonymous, nasty old men in mothball smelling suits who think that God is on their side for no other reason than that they have become freakishly wealthy. God, you see, is telling them they deserve even more.
Congratulations, and welcome to the U.S. Armed Forces, sucker.
In the course of my experience (limited, but undeniably substantial) I have encountered precisely one—yes, only one—recruit who enlisted out of patriotism. The poor guy is not only naïve (the poor dear), but he is also certainly the exception. The military for most proves a viable option when weighed against another, presumably worse option. There are a myriad of (horrifyingly inadequate) reasons why these apparently oblivious boys join.
There are those who join because they don’t feel like attending (or don’t feel they can excel in) college. These geniuses are sacrificing a valuable education for four years of complete servitude that will leave them with frustratingly specific if not completely useless work experience. Others do it because they cannot find work. Often (or invariably, depending on your critical bent) the “can’t find work” excuse is a thin euphemism for “won’t get off my ass and apply myself to finding a job.”
As my grandfather would say, as soon as I find a job opening for someone to hold down a couch, I’ll let you know.
Sure, work is sometimes scarce, and that’s understandable, but this ain’t the depression, folks, and you can’t convince this cynic that you’ve been hitting the job market hard with applications and carefully polished resumes eight hours a day, five days a week, yet you are still not employed. If you have and you are still unemployed, chances are the military doesn’t want you either.
There’s the “security for my wife/children/family” line, but if your wife/children/family would rather have financial security than the comfortable assurance of your continued existence, perhaps you should be searching for other familial options rather than new career paths. There are also those who’d like to travel. I’ve noticed that Iraqi travel packages are going for cheap online if you’re the adventurous type, but a better option by far is the Peace Corp. While its effects on other countries have been inflated in print by our good old ethnocentric America, the life experience it provides for its workers is immeasurable and often profound.
Boot camp is a glorified name for a (mostly casualty-free) concentration camp set up for the purposes of brainwashing and propagandizing recruits. Forced into an isolated world of uniformity, fatigue, humiliation, and degradation, enlistees are broken down to their fundamentals in order to be more effective, more expendable pawns in the government’s bloody game of G.I. Joes.
I don’t feel sorry for a single American soldier killed in Iraq. Not your brother, your husband, your son, or anyone else. Don’t go writing me some sob story about what a fantastic person he was and how he didn’t deserve to die and how you miss him so goddamn much and his baby won’t ever know him; he was stupid. None of these men were drafted. None were taken against their will. Each and every one chose to be there willingly. As the boot camp slogan goes, they signed their lives away to “protect the constitution, not practice it.” Anyone naive enough, dumb enough, or with a following nature that blind deserves whatever comes to him.
There’s no pride in blind faith. No glory. And with the same inclinations G.I. Joe has--to do whatever his commanding officer tells him to do-- comes the potential next cult member, or the next terrorist’s recruit. Pretending that someone who chose knowingly to take on to the death a cause that no one cared if they believed in is any kind of victim is hogwash, and it cheapens the deaths of the hostage draftees who unwillingly went to fight the Vietnam war.
In all this disgusting glorification of machismo, drunkenness, violence, and sameness, I can’t help but be stricken by the pathetic lack of confidence that must surround those that sign up. Besides an utter lack of ambition, a belief that you are incapable of living your own life effectively, besides a sense of inferiority, why would anyone in their right mind chose to discard the next four years of their life (minimum!) to live under a dictatorship-style hierarchy? Why else would anyone subject themselves to possible death, imprisonment by a foreign government, lack of free will, and an environment so controlled it regulates hair length, clothing, sexuality, and living quarters?
Infidelity is as common as jaywalking among the ranks. Men separated from their wives by thousands of miles delight in the women of the places they visit. Their wives, bored at home and likely fully aware of their husbands’ philandering take up with his friends. Rape frequently goes unpunished, homosexuality is a crime, the pay for lower ranking men with families is so low that many, if not most, are on government food stamps in addition to their pay, and the laws are so restrictive that oral sex can result in discharge or jail time. This is rarely brought to trial, but anyone who angers a superior is subject to court martial or dishonorable discharge for the most unlikely of crimes.
As though there was not enough to keep one from donating their lives to the not-exactly-charitable cause of the United Corporations of America, there is a deeper sacrifice of self that accompanies military service. When you are trained to kill a man, when it is drilled into your head that you may have to slaughter a child without blinking, when you are encased in a world of potential violence and threat, it messes you up. Maybe you’ll never kill a soul. Maybe you’ll never so much as swat a fly, but you’ve lost your inhibition to do it. It’s no longer a question of ethics, but a question of circumstance; the theory of it has been dealt with, only the practice needs implemented.
Spokane Falls CC "The Communicator" Opinion Section 25 Feb 05
than I can probably find out. The Opinion section of this week's is still all about the article above. I did view the article before sending my reply or posting it here. So far as I can tell, it's not TO liberal.