Memorial Day
Today, we think about the dead. We think about the almost dead. The nearly dead. The pseudo dead. We think about the dead past, the dead present, and the dead to come. The newly deads...which was actually the title of a really bad horror movie I sad once.
We think about the poor, brave kids...one of the few really representative bodies in America, I suspect...the grunts, the jarheads, the airmen, the seamen. Poor kids, black, white, brown...male and female...and (hallelujah?)..gay and straight. These poor kids making a real contract with America...one bottoms feeders like Newt Gingrich, masturbating over the History channel and bloviating about whatever nugget of pseudo-patriotic horseshit happens to plop from his horse's rectum brain to his horse's ass tongue, would never understand...a contract with America...I trade you my heart and my body for a chance to be somebody.
Afghanistan is now the country's longest war. I didn't fight. I stayed here and got fat. I let the poor kids do the dirty work, like we all did. 9 years of mangled bodies and mangled hearts and mangled minds. I hope we at least hold up our end of the bargain. Maybe they will become somebody...and take this country over from the pusillanimous privileged fucks who sent them off to die in the first place. One can dream, anyway.
posted by Joe @ 10:59 AM
11 Comments:
If you can put aside the class resentment for just a sec (impressive though it may be) I think you'll recall that the decision to invade Afghanistan was about as uncontroversial as it gets in Washington. The resolution passed the house 420-1 and the Senate passed it unanimously. I think an honest debate can be had as to why the US still has troops there. Are we required ethically to "fix" any failed state we have military activity in? Maybe not, but the motives for being there are certainly not driven by a shadowy plot to extract profits for a cabal of multinational corporations with Bush family connections. I do think it's weird that you're so outraged over disadvantaged rural white kids being put in harms way but don't seem to mind if a bunch of woman and children are victimized by the Taliban.
Actually I can't put aside the class resentment, as that was the whole point of the post. Our elected officials have little personal experience with war and little chance of bearing the cost of it in their own families. Which sucks. I sure as shit will not put that aside.
So are you advocating manditory public service or that the 12.1% of the population that are veterans control the military or both?
Your class resentment doesn't appear to be well supported by the data.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2006/10/Who-Are-the-Recruits-The-Demographic-Characteristics-of-US-Military-Enlistment-2003-2005
"Like their peers in 1999 and 2003, recruits in 2004 and 2005 came primarily from middle-class areas. Poor areas are proportionally underrepresented in the wartime years (2003-2005).
[...]
...the mean income for 2004 recruits was $43,122 (in 1999 dollars). For 2005 recruits, it was $43,238 (in 1999 dollars). These are increases over the mean incomes for the 1999 cohort ($41,141) and 2003 cohort ($42,822). The national median published in Census 2000 was $41,994. This indicates that, on average, the 2004 and 2005 recruit populations come from even wealthier areas than their peers who enlisted in 1999 and 2003.
When comparing these wartime recruits (2003- 2005) to the resident population ages 18-24 (as recorded in Census 2000), areas with median household income levels between $35,000 and $79,999 were overrepresented, along with income categories between $85,000 and $94,999. (See Chart 2.)"
Why don't you compare them to the average U.S. senator?
"The Department of Defense (DOD) does not track family income data for recruits, and there are no individual income data for enlistees. Military service is the first full-time job for most of them. We approximate each recruit's household income by using the median household income of his or her hometown ZIP code."
Iron clad methodology here, by the way. This assumes that recruits are a random sample from the underlying population...which of course begs the question.
I didn't say the study completely completely undermined your class resentment it just makes your supposition that the infantry is filled with poor rural kids just looking to get ahead in the world anyway they can less workable as a possible Springsteen song. Enlistees come from all over the country except for the very poorest regions. If anything the only overrepresented group are rural, middle-class, white males.
Again I ask, what would make you happy? Mandatory public service to finally get those very rich and very poor outliers to start bleeding red white and blue like the rest of us?
Well, maybe that, but also not having a system where those rich outliers are the only ones who are actually making policy.
The difference between poor and middle class is much smaller than the difference between middle class and the American plutocracy.
I'd be interested as to what criteria one has to satisfy to be part of the plutocracy. Does a McMansion and a BMW qualify or does one need a yacht, a tophat and a monicle?
Also smart people tend to achieve higher levels of education and higher education leads to higher incomes.
Don't we not want smart people making policy?
If you can't tell the difference between middle class and rich, I'm afraid we will have to part ways on this particular issue.
Smart and educated are not equivalent. Rich and educated are not equivalent. Smart and rich are definitely not equivalent. And even if it were, if you hadn't noticed, we tend to believe that representativeness is valuable for its own sake.
By the way, I think I've had enough of arguing with anonymous ideologues. From now on, this blog is gonna be comment free. It's better for my blood pressure. Thanks for playing! Adios.
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