Well, John and my dad were Star Warriors, worked in Ballistic Missile Defense, most of their careers. My dad came to think it a fraud and hated war work anyway ever since Vietnam, but what they say about it being hard to get out of military work into something else is true, or my dad found it true. So you can feel morally superior to them. Also to me, who consciously went to work for corporate law firms that represented corporations against the people they'd victimized, and I did it for money. Unlike most people who go career in the service, I had a choice. So you can feel morally superior to me to. But you've been a PR flack for the same interests, right?
As for your ravings about career service people being essentially Mafia button men, that's the kind of lunatic gibberish that feeds talk about leftists spitting on the troops when they return. You have no appreciation whatsoever of the social forces that drive people into the service, that puts nice eighteen year old kids in situations where they have almost no choice but to become murderers, and puts working class people who hoped for a better life for themselves and didn't have the alternatives I did or, I expect you did, in charge of those kids."Brutish, not too bright people possessing little initiative." That's your picture of the working class. And you are socialist why?
What you say is worse than idiotic. It's politically totally counterproductive. Its only function is to express, in a demented way, your loathing for the empire, without any real analysis or attempt to grasp the issues correctly, and its effect is a politically disaster. You incorrectly personalize political issues. You alienate the very constituency you purport to hope to organize. When I hear talk like yours I appreciate Marx's rejection of moralization in political and economic discourse.
--- Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >From: andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
> >
> >The people are this list are flipping out. ...
> >Carl has announced that military officers are all
> moronic
> >psychopaths.
> >
> >What exactly is going on? Is it something in the
> >water?
>
> Hmm, judging from your hallucinatory post, it would
> appear that you yourself
> would benefit from switching to bottled H2O.
>
> >Just FYI, Carl, I know lots of officers, having
> grown
> >up in the DC area. Most of them are just
> bureaucrats;
> >99.99% of them are more mentally stable than you,
> in
> >fact, boringly so, decent guys and gals not
> >remarkably good or bad, and you could have
> predicted
> >that career officers would be like that. In my
> >experience most people who end up career military
> are
> >working class people for whom it's a steady job
> with
> >opportunities for advancement, same as cops.
>
> Ah yes, the banality of evil revisited. The problem
> with your Norman
> Rockwell-ish depiction of the military is that these
> winsome "guys and gals"
> you describe may well be humble bureaucrats, but the
> organization they serve
> isn't HEW -- it's Murder Inc.
>
> In essence, the military as a debased form of
> socialism. As a career it's
> an attractive option for brutish, not-too-bright
> people possessing little
> initiative. For a certain type of individual it
> offers a great life. You
> get job security, free healthcare and a good
> pension, and you get to screw
> around all day playing with expensive toys like
> tanks and jet fighters,
> while on ceremonial occasions you can strut about in
> preposterous
> gold-braid-bedecked outfits, impressive to children
> of all ages. I will not
> deny, however, that Iraq has taken much of the fun
> out of life for these
> goons in uniform. Most US warmaking in recent
> decades has involved
> atomizing foreigners from a safe distance using
> high-tech weaponry.
> Unfortunately our courageous warriors now find
> themselves in the awkward
> position of dealing with an enemy actually able to
> fight back using IEDs,
> etc.
>
> >FWIW my dad's best friend -- my dad was a nice
> Jewish
> >guy, staunch New Deal Democrat, WWII vet but never
> saw
> >combat, gentle as the day is long -- was/is (my
> dad's
> >no longer with us but John still is) a Navy SEAL,
> >right wing Christian fundamentalist, a super macho
> >commando who was actually doing missions as
> recently
> >as the first Gulf War; he's way too old now --
> Also,
> >like my dad, a Ph.D in Operations Research from a
> >prestigious university, paid for by the Navy, and
> way
> >smarter than you or me. And John is an absolutely
> >wonderful human being. I am sure he has done things
> >that don't bear thinking about.
>
> John sounds like an awesome guy indeed: a
> professional killer with a
> doctorate.
>
> Carl
>
>
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