Good
Morning. First, the ad I saw was
in Newsweek, not Time, but of course could be many places.
Second,
I am not denigrating the process by which men and women are recruited or
trained in this discussion. I am
concerned with the end product use.
If we
accept that there is a new direction and application of US power and
resources, specifically in regards to a Pax Americana or new American Empire,
it seems to me that we are undergoing a shift away from idealizing the
educated to idealizing the well-trained, who it seems by current propaganda
and political appointments, must be associated with the military or its
Establishment system.
Long
ago, Americans admired the self-made man, whether humble or not. It used to be that men and women of
intelligence who wrote well were admired for their vision of what this country
should be. Now, in simple terms,
if Kaplan and others are allowed to be the only voices, have the biggest
megaphone, we will look simply to problem-solvers, "go-to guys" and players in
the system.
If
foreign policy and vision for the future can be relegated to Ten Simple Rules,
we have evolved to not just a List Society, but one where, as the author
suggested, the citizen soldier, able to train others or kill them, is the
ideal. That leads to a whole area
of discovery for the rest of us who are not citizen soldiers.
KWC
Military people are
sent to ALL colleges in the country. They practice equal
opportunity hiring and they send you to whatever school you are eligible for
or in the area of. Their education policies will send you to
Harvard if you qualify. For me it is an issue of
performance. We largely have a non-performance intellectual driven
type form of work that doesn't produce much of ultimate significance other
than keeping people at work doing things that subvert their talents and
potential. My experience of most of the private sector is that it
resembles uncomfortably the movie the Matrix in which people are asleep and
dreaming about performance and living but are surrounded by "ghosts" who seem
to indicate that there is so much more. The military has some
rather sinister purposes but it still operates on a more honest mandate than
world business.
REH
As if
to prove my point, that today's measure of success is portrayed in uniform;
while scanning the new issue of TIME magazine with dinner tonight, lo and
behold a full-page ad next to the back
cover:
Photo
of a handsome, intent mature black man in suit and tie, sitting at a CEO desk,
inset photo as if one of his shoulders was still in uniform, heavily
decorated.
SENSE
OF MISSION
Mark
"Ranger" Jones. United States
Army 1986-2003
"Security
is a critical issue these days.
Especially for high profile leaders and dignitaries. No one understands this better than
Mark Jones, founder and CEO of a security-consulting firm. Mark is a man who earned the title of
'go-to-guy' by being entrusted to jump from 13,000 feet with a former U.S.
President. A man responsible for
meeting different heads of state while serving as a Senior Aide to the
14th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Someone who started out as a cook but
quickly learned to convert one challenging task after another into
opportunity. A Master Sergeant
from the US Army Rangers who, day after day, brought honor to three simple
words: "Complete the mission."
The
qualities you acquire in the military are qualities that stay with you
forever."
TODAY'S
MILITARY
See it
for what it really is. 1.866.VIEW
NOW. www.todaysmilitary.com
Agreed,
Ray, but would we want all our political leadership to come from one Ivy
League school or just the Midwest, etc?
My
concern is the recent tendency to place military people in diplomatic posts at
NATO, in the Middle East, the Far East.
While I realize in some places a former military man will command more
respect from some cultures as opposed to an academic or just another
well-heeled party fundraiser, it is troubling to me that men in uniform are
becoming spokesmen and the face of America
overseas.
KWC
REH wrote:
Karen and Ed,
I would remind you
all that the military is the only truly equal opportunity employer in the
nation and admits all religions, cultures and only discriminates against Gays
and that is beginning to be questioned. It might be good for the
rest of society to question how children from trailer parks and Louisiana
bayous can become generals as often as Ivy League school
graduates. It may very well be that the most democratic
institution in America is the military. Like the arts, the
military is performance oriented and not build upon the European aristocratic
model. Prejudice against the military is unseemly and we
should not carry that prejudice over into creating the kind of anger carried
by the police. We pay the military poorly but train them
well and demand much from them. They, more than any other
Americans, can truly speak to the values of equality and equal
opportunity. As they say in the Army, A "F...k up
is a F....k up" no matter where you were born. And no one
wants to follow a fool simply because he was born with a silver
spoon. They may have loved Bush but Iraq will change that
quickly. The words from the hinterland is that there is a lot of
anger and hostility out there. I smell a change
coming. It seems that the Yale Drama school is the only place
producing serious work these days while the other departments are working the
legacy routine. Legacy doesn't mean anything in the theater
unless you can produce.
Ed,
when I read this piece earlier it struck me as you mention, that Kaplan was
writing about these events as if he had created them into being. He glorifies the soldier as the
epitome of the modern democratic ambassador, a highly trained, deadly working
representative of the superpower.
Hemingway had such an effect, did he
not, on a generation of men and women and
war?
Meanwhile,
more retired military fill former diplomat-only posts around the globe and
increasingly, multinational corporations with ties to the military industrial
technology complex.
Have
we undermined public education so much or lost all confidence in it that we
only trust the military to train our leaders?
KWC
The current issue of Atlantic contains
an article by Robert Kaplan entitled "Supremacy by Stealth". I've read most of
it, but it's the kind of article that I find difficult to finish. It sets out
ten rules that America, as the new Rome, should use to govern the world and
make it safe for freedom and democracy, American style.
I first encountered Mr. Kaplan a few
years ago in an article entitled "The Coming Anarchy", also in Atlantic. The
message there, seeming entirely credible at the time, was that the world was
going to hell in a handbasket. The message in the current article is anything
but credible. It's that, yes, the world could go to hell in a handbasket, but
it won't because America is there to prevent it from doing so. And it can even
be fixed up if America but follows Mr. Kaplan's ten simple
rules.
It must, for example, produce more
Joppolos, the central figure in John Hersey's second world war novel "A Bell
for Adano". Apparently, Mr. Joppolo knew exactly how to win the trust of the
townspeople he had to deal with. As Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated, it
would be nice to have people like that, but they don't come around very often.
And, by being "light and lethal", you can accomplish great things, like
helping the Bolivian government track down and kill Che Guevara in 1967.
(Sorry, Mr. Kaplan, but some of us still remember Che as the eternal
revolutionary and a force for liberating the oppressed. I for one do not see
tracking him down and killing him as a good thing. It's a bit like the Romans
bragging about tracking down and killing Christ!) Or, like the British,
and the Romans before them, by speaking Victorian and thinking pagan you can
try to persuade people of the wisdom of your ways, but, if you can't
accomplish that, you do have other means.
What Mr. Kaplan suggests is that
American forces have already followed his ten simple rules, though perhaps not
consistently enough. He says they have done a very good job at times, as when
they trained Salvadorian counterinsurgency forces, but he doesn't then mention
is that these forces became government death squads and killing machines that
brutalized the countryside and cost thousands of people there
lives.
The image that Mr. Kaplan presents in
his ten points is a clean, tidy and efficient one that, like B52 bombers,
flies high above the messy, dirty world of his earlier article. Sorry, Mr.
Kaplan, it just doesn't figure.
Ed Weick
