CSotD: Again and again and again
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Andy Marlette (Creators) offers a challenge that, IMHO, proves something though perhaps not what he intended.
I’d be willing to bet that, indeed, most Americans couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map, which you could take as an indication of how little attention we paid to that war. I’d take it further and suggest that it’s a good reason to bring back the draft, because, if our own kids were apt to be snatched up and sent off to war, we might care a little more.
And, when I say that, I mean both young men and young women, with no deferments for the sons and daughters of the middleclass and the influential.
I’d also point out something I noted during Vietnam, which was that people would have paid more attention if we’d had rationing and scrap metal drives and so forth like we did during WWII.
And I’d stand by the idea that there’s something deeply immoral about waging risk-free, painless wars.
But there’s also this:
Maybe most Americans couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map, but I’d also be willing to bet they couldn’t find Utah on a map, either.
Jay Leno used to send camera crews into the street to find foolish people so he could make fun of them on national television, but my guess — having done my share of man-on-the-street interviews — is that, if he showed his raw footage, you’d find that a lot of people answered his questions with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Still, the world is indeed full of fools.
The question is whether you design a government to assist them or one that will exploit them, which brings us to this
Juxtaposition of the Day
There was a phrase going around during Vietnam, “War is good business: Invest your son,” which was nothing new, or, at least, no newer than World War I, which was notable for the breakthrough realization that there were no class distinctions in trench warfare.
Danziger has standing to talk about the sponsors of warfare, because he served in Vietnam and has even written a book about it.
But, again, it’s nothing new.
Siegfried Sassoon wrote passionately about the rear echelon officers who sent young men off to die, and not from a theoretical point of view: His own exploits at the front had earned him the nickname “Mad Jack” from his comrades, captured in the excellent wartime autobiography of his friend Robert Graves, “Good-Bye To All That.”
Telnaes also points out the disconnect, quoting William Sherman’s advice to a group of graduating officers that they not romanticize war.
He was right, but they romanticize it anyway.
Reason and experience are no match for what people want to believe, and we’re currently seeing people gasp not at the horrors of the war in Afghanistan but at the fact that they’re happening where we can see them.
The word “obscene” comes from “off-scene,” because violence, in Greek tragedy, did not happen in front of the audience.
But war genuinely is hell, and, if you want to explore the fact from a woman’s point of view, read Vera Brittain’s “Testament of Youth,” a memoir of the horrendous cost of WWI to a young military nurse who lost nearly everyone she loved.
And who came home to write her own poems about it.
World War I was a century ago, but we did it again a generation later, and once more we left the participants to create art — “The Best Years of Our Lives” and “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” — that we would applaud and bestow Oscars upon and then ignore.
If we were going to learn, if we wanted to learn, we’d have long since learned.
Ann Landers famously said that nobody can take advantage of you without your consent, and, however Sassoon or Brittain or Danziger or Telnaes feel about the powerful, wealthy interests that exploit people, the fact remains that the exploiters are in no danger of running out of people who willingly, eagerly consent to being exploited.
Kevin Necessary (AMS) points out the folly of those who take mistaken pride in believing that they are smarter than everyone else, and he works in a nice connection between metaphorical and agricultural sheep.
The numbers of people requiring medical treatment for having ingested livestock de-wormers seems a bit squishy, but it is happening and, if it isn’t entirely typical of our gullible fellow citizens, it is at least an example of why exploiting their trust is irresponsible and dangerous.
It fails to “promote the general welfare,” which was supposed to be one of our founding goals.
Mind you, the term “welfare” has acquired its own negative connotation, to the point where it’s hard to know if Gary Varvel (Creators) is purposely exploiting people’s ignorance or genuinely doesn’t understand unemployment and the current labor market.
But making people feel smarter and better and more honest and industrious than their neighbors has always been how you build tribal loyalties, and Afghanistan is hardly the only tribal culture in the world.
Reagan’s mythic Welfare Queen has morphed here into the young person who should be out there flipping burgers for nine bucks an hour but, instead, is luxuriating on unemployment, with his silly little beard and his video games.
It doesn’t take much research to realize that you have to have lost a job in order to collect unemployment, and that we have always had a constantly renewing supply of young people just reaching their first-job age.
Any shortage of minimum wage workers has virtually nothing to do with those supplementary benefits.
It doesn’t take much more research to learn that workforce issues in states that have cut off federal supplementary benefits are actually worse than in states which have maintained them.
Or that the program ends in two weeks anyway.
However, it’s not about what is.
It’s about what people want to believe, and about people who want them to believe it.
And, as Kal Kallaugher (Counterpoint) puts it, the fingers of blame hardly begin to tell the story, or stop it from happening again and again and again.
An old story without an ending.
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