Kesher Talk

Lefty military cliche Dept. Jeanne d'Arc walks the nitty-gritty global political beat that no one else on the blogosphere covers with her combination of elegant prose and obscure URLs, but too many of her posts tend to be content-free, like this one, where she tries to leverage the death of political cartoonist Bill Mauldin into a pro-draft argument.

Let me see if I can follow the reasoning here:

Mauldin's characters were scruffy, salt-of-the-earth reluctant soldiers because they were draftees, implying that professional soldiers are - what? Snobbish intellectual fashionistas?

Donald Rumsfeld disparages the value of draftees, so he is on the side of the fashionistas of the remodeled US Army which is the most racially integrated organization in the US, which produced a Secretary of State who grew up poor and black in the Bronx, where people of color can rise higher faster than in any corporation. But this is bad, because . . . Donald Rumsfeld thinks it's good! The only other reason given is the totally unsupported idea that draftees talk back to the Man (and why this is a Good Thing isn't specified), but volunteers kiss ass.

I have to admit it's a novel departure from the usual complaint that a volunteer army takes advantage of poor, scruffy, minority kids who risk their lives for a steady wage and an education, who don't dare rebel because they are so desparate. In Jeanne's world, that volunteer army is full of shiny well-tailored corporate clones who don't rebel because they must have sold their souls to volunteer in the first place. It seems to me that a military of highly-educated highly-trained technical experts is by definition a military where soldiers talk back, or they would not be able to do their jobs.

posted by Judith @ 2/20/2003 06:05:25 PM