Now stop complaining that I was ignoring your answer. I wasn't ignoring your answer. I'm just trying to find a good, trustworthy, really mega-spicy newspaper account of the whole Jerri Ryan divorce mess.
And my Borg Implant is still mega-distracting and disorienting me. (But it works!)
Also distracting and disorienting me is Scooter Libby's Free Pass, and this ghastly Washington Post History of Torture in the Bush/Cheney White House. I got an e-mail about "unspeakable monsters ..." from another Old Dude, an old drafted Vietnam-era Army vet like me.
And this exchange slid into the Great Scary Monster Of American Politics: The Draft!!!
Okay, I'm just gonna say it: I hate the Iraq War, I hated Desert Storm, I hated the Vietnam War, I hated the Army.
But I love the Draft.
Year after year, as the Draft gets farther and farther from our American experience, I love the Draft that caught my poor sorry luckless ass more and more. I want it back. I think we need it back.
===========
Yo L** --
Oh, you must know where Smith College is. I live four blocks west of it (and two blocks from cows, and my backyard neighbor is a single mother bear with three cubs) -- Northampton, Massachusetts. Newspaper job I took over the phone brought me up here. The job sucked and I promptly bailed, but I loved Northampton and just tossed out the anchor. It's the great indulgence of my life: Living somewhere just 'cause I want to live there.
The Great and Wonderful Gifts of the Draft are too emotionally overwhelming a topic to wake up to, but what the hell, there's coffee, I can get through this.
I just don't know where to start ranting about the draft. I'm even embarrassed to find myself motivated to advocate for it out loud. In this political environment, in the middle of this ghastly war, from far right to far left, from neocon psycho warhawk to PBS-watching antiwar freakazoid, it's The Draft That Dare Not Speak Its Name. In popular, widely acknowledged virtues, it's right up there with standing on a streetcorner advocating loudly for NAMBLA.
For the umpteen presidential candidates, bringing back the draft is The Mother Of All Third Rails, guaranteed instant electrocution. I don't even think Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich are making a peep about it. Is Lyndon Larouche still alive? That's the kind of presidential hopeful you'd expect to call for bringing back the draft. My wish to see a prompt instatement of a no-loopholes universal military conscription (for all genders, if anybody's asking my preference) sticks my pushpin real close to Jonestown's and Waco's.
This is where National Forgetfulness really hurts. Our great myth of total victory in World War Two still mists our eyes and chokes our throats, Hollywood still grinds out reliable box office retro clunkers about Our Finest Moment of sacrifice, bravery and American patriotism.
But these days the screenwriter has to surgically remove a naughty little secret about the soldiers, sailors and marines who Won The War: They were drafted.
And that was okay with them, that was okay with their Mom and Dad and their girlfriends, that was okay with the neighbors who were the Draft Board, that was okay with our national leaders, that was okay with our West Point generals and Annapolis admirals who had to whip these reluctant civilians into the instrument that, eventually (in less time than Iraq's dragged on), defeated Imperial Japan's kamikaze samurai and the supermen of the Third Reich.
In the patois of my teenage nephew: Not too shabby. Our most desperate military crisis of the century, and the draft made it work. We just can't mention it in the new WWII summer blockbuster starring Leonardo diCaprio.
(While we're in this neighborhood -- uhhh, what happened to the Victory Bond and War Bond drives? Why aren't ordinary Americans given the chance to reach into their wallets and buy support for our wars anymore? What do you think the monthly tallies would be for the War On Terror Bond Drive? What superstars would perform at the big rally?)
I gaze into my crystal, and somehow I don't quite see our All-Volunteer Army accepting the unconditional surrender and sincere apologies from al-Qaida and the Taliban. Compared to the bunch that won The Big Two, this is a very inferior military instrument. The barracks these days are peopled with the scrapings from the Bottom of the Barrel, with the desperate rejects of the civilian economy, the collapsed public schools, and the criminal-justice system.
When you and I were luckless enough to get nabbed, you could scare up a barracks conversation about Faulkner or biochemistry, there were guys from top colleges, and even the odd Thatcher Baxter III from Prep School. (My mail clerk always enjoyed handing me my "Saturday Review," he had sniffed inside it and was convinced I was a Martian.)
If the sergeant screamed "I need a volunteer who knows spherical trigonometry!" or "I need a volunteer who speaks French!" -- one or two guys in the platoon would sheepishly raise their hands.
Now we got the All-GED Army, and the recruiters helped half of them cheat to get their GED.
You painted a very comical picture of a nice Jewish college boy in a barracks and shower room and latrine filled with ghetto blacks, barrio Hispanics, Southern and Minnesota farm boys, reservation Navajos. A wild Woody Allen farce that screams: What's Wrong With This Picture?
But the real question was: What Was Right About This Picture?
A shared national experience, shared risk across all demographic boundaries.
And now we've lost it, we've declared it unecessary, even for an authentic national defense crisis.
Our new War Machine guarantees that Americans will never meet each other, never know each others' experiences, never have the dimmest understandings of each other. From here on, the sons of the Elite who declare the war will never take that shit with the guys who risk and get maimed in the wars. We have institutionalized playing life-and-death poker with Other Peoples' chips.
Those farm boys will never again have a chance to feel the back of my head for horns. And the Jewish kid will never meet the Navajo who tells him about life on the reservation. In the Old, Gone America, those conversations lasted a lifetime, Americans knew something about The Other America. In the Old, Gone America, we called The Others our buddies, we knew them by name, we trusted them, they trusted us.
Or we hated them, but by face and by name, for authentic personal reasons.
After we got out of the Army, we trusted the way our buddies would keep voting in Idaho and Texas, we understood something more and something valuable about this American Glue.
I authentically must stop ranting about this, it just boils up so much anger. If a war's worth fighting, the Rockefeller boy who played lacrosse at Choate needs to be in the foxhole with the black dropout from Baltimore.
And if absolutely nobody from privilege and education can be coerced to go -- uhhhh ... maybe we shouldn't fight that war, maybe we should just skip that war.
Bob
PS -- Those two drafted years didn't seem to harm Elvis overmuch. And when poor Bill Clinton desperately needed a Vietnam vet on his ticket, he was damn lucky Al Gore was available. The hell with global warming. Al Gore makes me smile because he had my same silly Army job -- 71Q -- and took his poops in, and cleaned, the big latrine.
14 comments:
Draft = slavery.
Although I think you're mostly being tongue-in-cheek here ... I hope so anyway!
Yes, let's skip war, ALL war. It never does any good for anyone.
No, I am not being tongue-in-cheek here. I would vote to instate a no-loopholes universal mandatory military conscription -- for both genders, and for straight and gay -- tomorrow, in a heartbeat.
bret -- I wrote about 900 words. And you reply with a bumper sticker of 2 words and the equals sign. Truly you are of the Bumper Sticker / Sound Bite generation. You probably have a real short MTV music video attention span.
As an exercise in your Thesis, I recommend you go to every surviving relative in your family who served in the military as a draftee and inform them they were slaves, but just didn't know it 'cause they were too stupid. But you're telling them now, 'cause you're smarter and you love them.
As for "all war sucks," that is an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT QUESTION from the goodness or badness of the draft. One reason -- expressed in my original post -- that I like the draft is that it acts as a political brake on rushing into wars. When the political elite that declares and votes for wars knows its own children will never be put at risk, they're playing with Somebody Else's chips, and they're far more cavalier about screaming "This means WAR!!!"
Loopy Lieberman was never drafted, and never served in the military. So guess who's screaming loudest for a war against Iran?
Good luck with the JD degree.
Oh, my new draft -- you can just kiss that law school deferment goodbye, like Israel's draft for both sexes, no school deferments, you reach 18, you serve 2 years. THEN you get to go back to college.
The Vietnam-era law school deferment has filled the cabinets of both Clinton and Bush with patriotic law students who've never served. I guess the reason for the law school draft deferment was that becoming a lawyer was defined (curiously enough, by lawyers in Congress) as a National Defense Priority every bit as important as military service.
If the draft does come back, as I so fervently wish it would, and the law school deferment ever gets debated again, I'll have to cook up a cool bumper sticker to express my feelings about that. Until then, here's Shakespeare's bumper sticker, from Henry VI Part 2:
"The first thing we do,
let's kill all the lawyers."
No apologies that your MTV bumper sticker still sticks in my craw and grates the fuck out of me. You certainly aren't the first Youthoid to pull this crap. It really dates to Bill Clinton's weaseling out of his draft obligations, and his subsequent attempts to make his draft-dodging palatable, even high-minded-sounding, to the electorate. He had a pile of shit to pour a gallon of perfume on to make it smell sweet.
Wrapping your villification of the draft in a "I'm Against War" Halloween costume is
* disengenuous (the charitable adjective)
* a fucking lie (a more candid characterization)
You're no pacifist. You're a Clintonesque guy who doesn't want his career ambitions delayed or inconvenienced -- certainly not by anything that could actually get you shot or maimed or killed.
Being shot or maimed or killed -- that's for Other Peoples' Kids, not for a *special* person like you.
The thing everyone forgets about Little Bill Clinton's high-minded anti-war pacifism is that when he didn't show up for the draft ... one of his male neighbors was pushed forward in the draft queue, and did get drafted. There was a draft quota every month, and when Little Bill didn't show up, they grabbed the farmer's kid or the inner-city black kid to take his place.
They just never told Bill the name of that kid who served in his place, so Bill never had to know what became of him.
You don't even begin to know what authentic pacifism is. You just don't want to serve in the military because you're better than poor kids who aren't good college students.
You're Special.
And it reeks and it stinks and it sucks.
Sorry to be impatient, but..... well... I'm an impatient person. I realize this, and I try (in vain) to stifle it. Hopefully I'll have more luck next time.
No, no, I tend to view impatience as a virtue. You had every right to pout, especially since you knew the answer.
But as I said ... I've been looking around for both a perfectly factual AND a reallllllllllly smarmy spicy Tale of the whole mess. So your Pizza Account has been credited, now just a little patience while I cook up a real rip-snorting tale.
hello
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a bientot
shalom
marcel
I'm actually all for compulsory national service for all. 2 years between high school and college sounds just about right. There should be few exceptions, everyone serves. There should be, in addition to military service, a national corps of young men and women who serve in inner cities, in soup kitchens, in homeless shelters, in all those places that simply need hands. Some could serve domestically, some overseas. Some could serve in what used to be call WPA projects. Where you end up (meaning, which branch of compulsory service) should be a matter of the luck of the draw. Only those who are truly physically or mentally incapable of serving are exempt, though in some cases, there could be something some of those people could do. (I have diabetes, I could not serve in combat, but I certainly could serve in some position at home...) No school exemptions. Perhaps hardship (only wage-earner at home) but even then, some could serve part-time. If there's a war on, most would be assigned to military service, though some could be assigned to domestic National Guard service and some to Regular branch service. Aptitude tests after induction would be necessary. As would a whole new infrastructure of forts and bases and training camps.
Yes, compulsory national service for all. Maybe even three years. No exemptions. No kidding. Stiff penalties including jail time and a dishonorable record for those who fail to fulfill their national obligation.
Agree with all. But in trying to assemble a new, equitable draft, I think the *real* trick is picking the wars.
In World War Two, everybody *wanted* to serve in uniform and be a part of the national experience. Nobody wanted to be left behind.
By Vietnam, nobody wanted to be drafted, and finally the unpopularity of the war made the politicians get rid of the draft.
But the problem wasn't the draft. The problem was the really crappy, disastrous, pre-doomed war.
Maybe one of these days the shit will really hit the fan and we'll be plunged into a war that most or nearly all Americans agree has to be fought and won. Like World War Two.
Then the draft won't cause campus riots. People will grudgingly accept that it's a price they're willing to pay for the benefits of citizenship, and they'll pack a bag and get on the bus.
May I add my 2 cents here ? Historically it was not necessary for the USA to enter WW2 (or any other war since then). Most of the wars where Americans fought were started by...guess who. This has to be considered if you want to reinstitute the draft.
We outside the USA would have a bit more smypathy for you ("Poor buggers, now it is even mandatory to have to go to war !")
As you know I live in CH and here Military Service is mandatory from the age of 19 (18 weeks basic training), then you have to serve 3 weeks every year untill you are being discharged. if you refuse to do military service you must do Civlil Service in a hospital or some other institution. if you refuse to do both you have to PAY. And when I say PAY I really mean PAY. Dunno how much I payed the Swiss Govmt just for saying NO but when I saw the Swiss Army cleanig up the mess we had after the floodings last year that this is not a bad investment
Most other countries in Europe have similar systems, maybe it would do you Americans good to think about it.
Havent i read somewhere that Dubyah was very close to reintroducing the Draft sometime last year ? Probably Not Your Kind Of Draft anyway
(BTW I like Draft. Vleeptron Old Draft, Carlsberg, Heineken aned Calanda Draft. Best idea of a Draft I know)
There are many countries with conscription. Perhaps you would be happier in one of them. We don't use slaves in a free society.
Yo, lawyer wannabe ...
Can you cite any US state or federal law or decisions which concluded that US military conscription was a form of slavery?
Can you cite any US state or federal law which, while the draft was in force, immunized a citizen from the draft by ruling that the draft was a prohibited form of slavery?
Or are you just making all this crap up as you go along because you want some high-minded-sounding excuse for your yuppie bumper sticker?
Shock me. Cite a real law or court decision.
Near the end of the Vietnam War, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law declaring that no citizen of Massachusetts could be compelled to be conscripted in any war not declared by the federal Congress. (Vietnam was never declared by Congress.) But to the best of my knowledge, no citizen of Massachusetts ever tried to use the state law as a legal immunity from a draft notice. It was just Massachusetts' noisy political protest, and never had any force in law.
I dub your "Draft = Slavery" bumper brain The Yuppie Elite Caucasian Privilege Career Inconvenience Protection Act of 2007. When you get it passed, it will make statutory the Vietnam-era draft-dodging of the law students who went on to become the Clinton and Bush cabinet.
As long as you're in law school, ask a professor how this "Draft = Slavery" crap works out in federal law. Doesn't that mean that "Selective Service System = Slavery"? Did you register to be a slave on your 28th birthday? If you didn't, and the FBI arrests you, won't "Draft = Slavery" be a valid and effective legal defense?
Jesus -- I don't mind unethical lawyers, but you are going to be the DUMBEST fucking lawyer I've ever run across. You don't know anything about law and you don't know anything about history.
btw, did you contact your older relatives who were drafted and served in World War II and tell them they were slaves? How's that working out? Are your uncles grateful for pointing out their slavery to them?
I like the United States. Why do you think I agreed to be drafted 36 years ago? I didn't like it. But I wanted to stay here -- draft and all.
whoops typo:
Did you register to be a slave on your *** 18th *** birthday?
When you get to federal court or try to ram your Yuppie Career Protection Act through Congress, it's going to have to trump the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, PROVIDE FOR THE COMMON DEFENSE, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Good luck!
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