> perhaps you have aversion to phrase 'poverty draft', however,
> military's own demographic data indicates that about half of
> recruits are from 'lower middle class' (now there's a precise
> concept) to 'poor' households, rural poverty is a factor given
> that almost 50% of recruits are from poor rural areas, all of
> top 20 counties for recruiting have lower than national median
> incomes, 12 have higher poverty rates, 16 are 'non-
> metropolitan' (another great neo-social science term)...
Precisely: the facts that (1) the military recruits plenty of people who are not the poorest of the poor and that (2) something like a "poverty draft" still exists are not mutually exclusive. By way of illustration, I can think of plenty of examples from my own (rural) high school, class of 1997. There were a lot of people who went into the military; I couldn't even do a count. Of these, I can think of at least two right off the top of my head who went into the Army for purely economic reasons, with no special ideological commitment to it that I ever saw. There were plenty of others who joined for a whole lot of other reasons, and wanting to get the hell out of a podunk place was no doubt near the top of the list. It was among the ones who were attracted to the Marines that the appeal of professionalism and excellence were most clear.
But all of this is dreadfully empirical, I suppose, and alien to the purposes of this particular "discussion" -- namely, self-satisfied moralizing; agonizing over moral "responsibility" and parcelling out blame for the existential angst of our militaristic present moment ("Is it the commanders and politicians or the grunts who are responsible for my dark night of the soul? Lo, it is all of us! ALL OF US, I tell you!"); pretending that there is such a thing as clear-cut "choice" in a capitalist society; and masturbatory back-and-forths generally, in which no one is listening to anyone else. The primary mode of argument is Doug's hacking-apart of a straw-man argument that resembles the position of no one on this list -- and indeed, no one on earth apart from his imagination -- to wit:
> RIght. THe American working class is never gung-ho patriotic,
> and never identifies with the empire.
That, plus a lot of Sean Hannity-style rants from Wojtek about how everyone is trying to claim victim status. It's all SO edifying, let me tell you.
- - - - - - - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
Tell no lies, claim no easy victories