> Wow, wasn't that a thoughtful blast?! Do you feel
> better now?
I take it you don't have those numbers on the percentage of unincarcerated young black men vs. the percentage of unincarcerated white men who are in the military? Because God forbid that these statistics might actually show that a highly disproportionate number of young men of color are under the carceral and/or disciplinary care of the state in some way (whether prison, parole, probation, or the military).
Doug, for someone who -- as far as I recall -- has expressed sympathy for the pomo lit-crit style and for incomprehensible theorists like Judith Butler, your line of argument here ignores the rather fundamental insight that dry "facts" are not everything and that "context matters." The Heritage Foundation creeps didn't just "run the numbers," as if the numbers tell a story on their own. They ran the numbers and published them out of context (e.g., without consideration of the phenomenon of mass incarceration of young black men in this country) because they are a racist institution with an interest in preserving white supremacy, and in buttressing the comfortable half-truths and outright lies that are the very stuff of white supremacy and capitalist hegemony in this society: the illusion of personal "choice" and the moronic platitudes of bourgeois individualism generally.
I'm also hardly impressed by this habit of yours (and of Yoshie and Carrol in a different vein, as well as many others on this list) of repeating things that we all already know as if they were a special insight of yours. So the military is a "cross-section of American society"? Well, no shit -- of COURSE it's a cross-section of US society, a class-divided, ferociously racist society that left about 1,500 of its own civilian citizens (maybe more) to drown or starve to death in a major city just a few months ago. The only way someone could be impressed by the Heritage Foundation's sophistry is if they cling to the mystification of "the military" as a monolithic institution, and if we think of "recruits" without reference to their inevitable class location within the military itself -- who gets officerships and who ends up among the grunts, for instance. You flatter yourself by thinking that by citing a few dishonest and superficial statistics from the Heritage Foundation, you're engaging in a real empirical study of the military as it is; in reality, you're using these stats to shadow-box with (always unnamed) "leftists" who believe that the US military is still like the draft-time military of the Vietnam era, or even the paper tiger Tsarist army of the First World War. Neither your position nor that of the straw men you tear apart is based on anything more than ill-informed and lazy dilettantism on this subject.
It is for this reason that I find this "discussion" so exasperating to read. It is neither intellectually edifying nor politically useful or insightful; instead, it is idle-bordering-on-masturbatory. Just what the fuck, praytell, is the point of all of this anyway? The Heritage Foundation -- and keep in mind that those evil bastards play for keeps, unlike most of us -- has the very definite goal of trying to make or at least insinuate the claim that no one ever joins the military for economic reasons ("They can just go to community college!" sez the Polish professor). What's our goal? To point out that there are plenty of proles who have stupid ideas about the world (yet another big and oh-so-surprising insight)? To argue that because much of the working class actually believes the bullshit it is fed day-in and day-out, that it therefore it is not worth critiquing real-world relations of power, because everyone is "morally responsible"?
Really, how can you expect people to wade through insufferable, moralistic horseshit like this all the time and not have the occasional blowup?
- - - - - - - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
Tell no lies, claim no easy victories