I don’t think there are any of us here who think a functioning civil society is not a worthy goal. Nor do any of us suppose a functioning civil society doesn’t cost money. So all any of us would really disagree about is who should pay for it, and how much.
The large (or largish) western nations that display the most obviously functional civil societies all collect in tax, all in, a percentage of GDP right around 40 percent (and sometimes a few points higher).
The U.S., all in (federal, state & local) collects about 27 percent.
It’s true that we fund a significant chunk of our health care outside the tax system. But it is also true that a huge chunk of the private money we spend on health care is sucked up by profit (and for-profit admin). If we extended Medicare to all citizens, and funded every dollar of the cost with an additional dollar of tax, I don’t know how much that increase our taxes as a percentage of GDP, but I’m pretty sure it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 percent.
Of course we also spend vast amounts of money on our military: a level of spending close to which none of those other nations comes near.
Civil societies foster social cohesion with collective institutions that provide for the common good: roads, public transport, schools, fire and police protection, prisons, regulators to prevent illegal market manipulation and pollution, R&D into energy to replace fossil fuels, parks, etc. And of course the military.
Leaving out how we ought to provide our citizens with health insurance- which is a large and important argument- the political conversation in this country isn’t, despite all the endless rhetoric that assume exactly the case, between free-market capitalists on the one hand and socialist five-year-planners on the other. It isn’t really even about whether or not we should be using taxes to foster social cohesion with collective institutions that provide for the common good.
It’s only really about which institutions we should spend our tax money on in order to foster social cohesion.
Those of us on the so-called liberal left think the best way to spend the money is on things like roads, schools, public transport, fire and police protection, regulation, R& D, parks. Mostly soft domestic, gentle stuff like that. Maybe because we are, at heart, rather soft and gentle people.
Maybe.
Whereas those on the so-called conservative right prefer toll roads, private schools, no regulation, generally as little evidence of government funded civil society as possible, EXCEPT…
The military. Which is a HUGE provider of education, of R&D, of housing, of health care, of upward mobility, and of collective purpose and pride and personal and emotion identification with, and pride in, national purpose and identity.
Viewed as a collective economy, as a community, as a source of collective action and collective culture, the U.S. military is as socialist an institution as exists on this planet.
Of course what the military isn’t, quite patently isn’t, is democratic. Which leads me to the conclusion that the only reason the right doesn’t mind the idea of pouring money into the collective society of the military, in all its socialist aspects. Because the quid pro quo that we get for spending all those trillions on all those soldiers and sailors and pilots, and all their families and support staff and the whole industrial complex that provides for them is… obedience.
Yeah, I know, we get to sleep safe in our beds as well. Which brings us to the next point:
It’s kinda hard to justify such a humongous military without a humongous enemy, or at least without whipping up a humongous amount of fear that a humongous enemy just might be out there. Somewhere.
And fear on its own sometimes isn’t even enough. Sometimes you just got to pull those triggers. Which not only means we then can justify buying a whole lot more gear, but also always has the added advantage of guaranteeing a whole pack of enemies we often never had in the first place.
The right don’t feel comfortable with a welfare society, because they don’t see the payoff. You spend all that money building roads and schools and shit, and paying teachers and firemen and regulators out the whazoo, and what do you get in return? People who fucking think for themselves! And vote quite enough of the time for fucking Democrats!
But if you spend the money instead on a warfare society (which of course includes huge amounts of what in any other context would be stone welfare), when you say jump they fucking jump.
That’s the kind of ‘civil’ society the right can buy into. And the only kind. The trouble is, of course, that it isn’t civil at all.
Gunny,
I think your thesis is that we’re drifting into a progressively more militaristic society — or maybe just a stratified society in general and a militaristic one in particular — and that some of us are way too comfortable with that. I agree with that as a generality but the details are tricky. You make a great many points and I’d like to quibble with three of them.
First, I’d say that relatively very few people have any idea how much tax everyone pays. They know (somewhat) what they pay, and conclude that others pay far less. (E.g., an eight percent sales tax means a tax of maybe six or seven percent on a great many people’s income, but it disappears into the rounding for a few; in between are the so-called middle classes who “spend”, in the most trivial sense, maybe half what they get.) And so on, and on. My point isn’t to dissect it. My point is that nobody at all, least of all the rich, thinks the tax system is fair to him, and almost invariably for the same reason: everybody else is getting a free ride.
Second, I’d quibble with the idea that we acquire enemies to have somebody to shoot. I’d say that we acquire the capacity to shoot people when we feel ourselves surrounded by enemies. And that some of us feel this way a whole lot more than others.
Third, I don’t think most people have anything resembling an accurate perception of how (or why, for that matter) government (at all levels) spends its money. This is true of roads, schools and sewers, but nowhere is it truer than in what you (and I) call the “socialistic” half of the economy. One way to know that somebody is talking through his hat is to hear him say that this part of economy can be fixed if we eliminate “waste and fraud.” Of course waste and fraud are everywhere, but we’ll never see them in perspective when half the country believes we spend five percent of federal revenues on foreign aid and one percent on NPR — while the other half mostly believes that “the military industrial complex” is just a bunch of cackling old plutocrats scheming away in luxury.
Nat.
On the run here, and almost no time for this right now, but I tend to suspect that may be true initially in many cases, but at some point the enemy/military buildup dynamic takes on a life of its own where one begets the other.
In other words they cease to become separate events but rather distinct features of a single event.
And bluthner wrote the piece, not I, though I would not be at all unhappy to have done so.
Gunny, Bluth-
Sorry for the miss-attribution. I plead coffee depravation.
I’ll agree that fully evolved agressive paranoid xenophobia is a phenomenon unto itself, but I ain’t letting go of the notion that the paranoid part is a priori to the rest and has to persist to the end if the whole, barely spoken national consensus is to be maintained.
I generally don’t like to comment on things military, as I was never in the service having pulled a high lottery number. However, I think most of us who post on G’s blog are of an age where we likely had fathers who served in WW2 and know the respect they were accorded their entire lives. We also probably remember the lack of respect or even contempt that many Viet Nam vets met with, so I think that most Americans today think it a good thing that the young people presently in the military are generally respected for their service. Among many conservatives you find both strong sentiment that they both want the baddest ass military in the world plus would be perfectly happy to see Europe and other regions take on more responsibility for their own defense and that we bring personnel back. Do R’s like to invade more than D’s? Is there strong evidence that any president, when given an opportunity to play with ordnance that goes bang, won’t do so? Even Clinton’s Bosnian campaign was pretty intensive if overshadowed by scandals with interns.
On taxes, yes, people like police, fire, libraries, schools, roads, water, sewer, and a few other services. What is at issue, is do you get satisfactory value for those tax dollars and is your jurisdiction competitive with other jurisdictions in offering value for the money. Some states seem to get by with relatively low tax burdens and some have much higher ones. Ah you say, the ones with low burdens are lousy places to live. Well, does California’s 9.3% income tax rate kicking in at $47K and its sales tax rate of 7.25% mean it is twice as civil as Colorado with it’s state income tax rate of 4.63% and sales tax rate of 2.9% (note the state sales tax rates exclude local sales taxes)?
Many states and municipalities are struggling under the burden of their pension crises, with every more of their general fund monies going toward supporting those obligations. It clearly can make a community uncompetitive for taxpayers, who may well say that I can pay a lot of tax and get reduced services in this jurisdiction but the government employees retire comfortably, or I can go over there where the less tax money goes to to government employes and more to services. Or perhaps a simple calculation is that I don’t need everything this jurisdiction does as what that other offers is just fine and cheaper.
Take a look at Wisconsin where many polls suggest that Gov Walker will survive his recall. It is quite easy to suggest that those trying to recall Walker are fighting to preserve a well benefited government workforce – in other words, the government workers took the taxes and kept a disproportionate share of them for themselves.
Governments compete for taxpayers, just as businesses must compete for customers. It just takes governments longer to decline when they become non competitive.
That would be me
Having grown up as the child of an active duty Army officer, I can tell you that those whose jobs are in the military are no better or worse, no more nor no less deserving than anyone else who makes a particular job/career choice based on many factors, including long-term benefits. Why is it acceptable for federal tax dollars to go toward the cushy pensions of retired military officers, along with the life-long free health care, when they are eligible for retirement at much younger ages than any average state worker and quite often have full second careers, but it’s just terrible that someone who’s taught school (a very stressful job and in my opinion far more beneficial to society than is a soldier) for 40-some years retires with a comfortable pension?
Do not teachers and other state and local level workers “serve” their community just as much as military personnel “serve” their country? Many people think nothing of heaping disrespect on the former, while aggrandizing the latter. It’s skewed priorities.
Being pedantic but isn’t that an oxymoron Bluthner?
I agree that we all want to live in a civilized society and that taxes are needed to fund government in order to preserve security and liberty, engage in expensive shared endeavors and provide for the vulnerable and needy.
I guess the difference is that conservatives believe the individual, family and civil society, as commonly understood, are better at covering everything else and that a bigger government tends to crowd these beneficial things out to everyones long term detriment. It’s a balance.
Liberals favor a different balance – which is a valid point of view – but some of their analyses of conservatives is irrational and – well – uncivil
BTW – When are going to start building and improving our infrastructure
Why? This is something I seem to see a lot in American comments. It always suggests to me that this is a reason why the US has become so much more militaristic. After all, the military is merely an arm of the civil power. If it is not subject to public inquisition, somehow supposed to be immune from it, then it becomes, essentially, an uncontrollable power of its own.
I still muse over being told of an animated discussion in NATO among a number of officers abou the ‘rights and wrongs’ of the Iraq invasion. For all sorts of reasons, with one exception, the general feeling was that it had been a Bushy/NeoCon political ploy that did not bode well. More or less, as it would appear to many of us who were not in the military, that while military action might change a regime, it was an obvious contradiction in terms that it should be expected to impose a democratic polity on a country.
The exception was an American officer, who, to everyone else’s surprise, remained silent. I remember being told by a British officer, when asked why, he said “I can’t criticise my President, he’s my Commander-in-Chief”. I’m not entirely sure what that’s emblematic of, except it’s emblematic of something.
If my friend and his European colleagues had been sent off to make ‘bang-bang’ noises in Iraq, of course, it wouldn’t have stopped them. As my friend said, “It’s our job. Doesn’t mean we’re not supposed to think about it though.” As another friend once said, when I noticed with some amusement his hair was quite long, “When I’m on leave, my hair’s my own. When I go back, it’s only then it belongs to the army.”
I don’t like it when respect approaches idolatry. My RAF friend, like most of his colleagues, has always preferred relative anonymity. Asked in the pub what he does for a living, he’s always said what kind of thing he does, not that it’s for the military. Or — on secondment when we’re not supposed to know (and actually, I barely have an inkling myself, he’s extremely discreet) what he’s involved in — just that he’s a ‘civil servant’. As he says, “That is what I am when it comes down to it.”
Although I’m sure there are ‘gung-ho warriors’ who do want to make loud bangs, and European officers always seem to be rather envious of their US counterparts’ apparently endless unquestioned supply of toys, over the years, the one consistent thing I’ve found is that they generally view actually going to war as a failure. That they would by far prefer to prevent it; or at least minimise the effects of it.
But if you make a military too big a part of society, the civil and the military lose touch with each other, and it is terribly easy for the military to adopt aggression as its only raison d’etre.
the aggregate of non-governmental organizations and institutions that manifest interests and will of citizens; individuals and organizations in a society which are independent of the
government
What a peculiar definition, that assumes any form of government is not a part of civil society; that it cannot “manifest the interests and will of the citizens”. That may be true of a dictatorship, but it makes a nonsense of the idea of democracy.
“Of or belonging to citizens; consisting of citizens or men dwelling together in a community”; “of or pertaining to the whole body of the community of citizens; pertaining to the organisation and internal affairs of the body politic or state.” “Pertaining to the civilian as distinct from the soldier.”
[OED]
For once Squirrel I don’t disagree with you. I merely have no first hand experience of being in the military, and I had enough relatives who were in battle in WW2 that I don’t even begin to pretend to know what they went through. I think, however, that America has probably never been less militaristic than it is today in that an ever smaller portion of the population is ever in the service. They are, however, generally more respected today than they were 40 years ago.
In other words, if you are in a democracy, but believe that civil government is (or can be, or should be) somehow separate from (or, worse, antagonistic to) the civil society it is supposed to be part of, then you’re on a very slippery slope to absolutism or anarchy.
Is that part of this trend I keep ranting about, that the USA is “not a democracy, it’s a republic”? Which seems to me a total denial of its history. And history . . .
Venice was a republic for getting on for a thousand years; but it was, for nearly all of that, not a democracy.
Squirrel
It’s a matter of definition. Civil Society, as opposed to a civil or civilized society, covers all the things that people do in free association for mutual support, benefit or fulfillment – clubs, fraternal organizations, mutual aid societies, unions, charities…. – everything that isn’t part of the state, commercial markets or family.
Squirrel – in a modern democracy the state, individual, family, market and “civil society” all work together – not against each other.
Heck – I wish I hadn’t started this – I thought it was a universal definition of the term and was just pedantically tweaking Bluthner
This from The World Bank for example:
America has probably never been less militaristic than it is today in that an ever smaller portion of the population is ever in the service
Three million? That’s something like 1 in 50 of the militarily fit/eligible population (i.e. roughly between 18 and 45) including women. But since most of the military are (I presume) going to be between 18 and 30, that becomes an even higher proportion of the relevant civilian population.
Anyway, it’s not the numbers, entirely, it’s the prominence. But it’s not just the ‘official’ armed forces that make a society look miltarised. It’s police armed with stuff — ‘pseudo-military’ weaponry and vehicles as well — that adds to it.
I mentioned before, I think, that a friend was a military attache for a while in the US (but this was before 9/11) and said he was really surprised, and actually found it mildly unnerving, at the numbers of uniformed people he saw in Washington.
Squirrel. mind you, is in a touchy mood about this kind of thing today, what with a blasted aircraft carrier tying up in Greenwich and Chinooks all over the damn place.
Gunny
absolutely true. Because alot of people make alot of money out of war.
Squirrel – I noticed that when I visited DC on business at first but soon realized that Crystal City and the Pentagon are just a couple of stops south of the river on the metro and that they were just going to work in the government bureaucracy.
A difference I did note though was that after the 11th of September 2001 fewer seemed to be wearing smart uniforms and more were wearing fatigues.
Civil society -in the sense that is relevant to this discussion is merely what we all do together, with each other and for each other. We could all pay for it voluntarily out of our own pockets, or we could all pay our taxes and then the government can write the check; what matters is not the method of payment, but the inclusiveness. If you want to run a nation-state that has a sense of social cohesion, that is. The right seem not to want that at all, except for the military. If ALL the people of a nation feel that these are our roads, and our schools, and our trains, and our post office, and our space program, and our -whatever- then you encourage and foster a community of everyone.
Or every little group can do their own thing behind their own set of walls and leave the public spaces to the franchise pay-to-use operations or to crumble and rot. Except when it comes to our tanks and our aircraft carriers and our drones and cruise missiles, and our Seal Team Six…
Can’t for the world work out how anything I wrote suggested disrespect of men and women serving in the military in any way whatever. My point was that the ONLY kind of socially cohesive all inclusive spending the right seems comfortable with is military spending. Much of which is spent on exactly the kinds of things which, if they were not part of the military, they would cut off at the knees if they could.
In Britain even doctors are admired for their service. Or have been up to now. They do what they do because they are called to do it, not because it promises them lives of material satisfaction, because… here the life of a doctor is not particularly well paid at all. The Tories are doing their best to destroy that culture of service and to replace it with a culture of remuneration. Which is a tragedy beyond measure.
Also, we can’t measure how militaristic we are today simply by counting boots on the ground. You have to follow the money. The money is HUGE.
I know we aren’t Sweden, but if we taxed our GDP -progressively- to the tune of 40%, and then spent it mostly on non-military civil society, we would live in a very different country than we do now. Sure we couldn’t go round invading countries on the other side of the world, but then we probably wouldn’t feel the need. Because we wouldn’t need to be so fearful all the time.
But if we stopped using the military as the national church in which the nation worships, and the only church in which the entire nation can agree to worship, then…
Would we have a nation any longer? Me I’m thinking we could replace the church of the military with a much better one. But even attempting to do so would be far too frightening for far too many people who are, as Nat points out, too deeply invested in the a priori paranoia ever to emerge from it.
BTW – When are going to start building and improving our infrastructure
When the construction industry cleans itself up? (politicians included)
Which brings up a big problem – that covers both domestic government services all across the board as well as the military. In a nutshell, corruption and waste. Don’t mind paying taxes to pay the soldiers. Mind very much paying Xe. Mind very much paying contractors who charge $500 for a light bulb, operate out of a PO box and stash the dosh in the Caymans..
We get referendums every year to vote on, many are for infrastructure. Last time we voted, we had a referendum for a bond issue for road repair. As i don’t drive anymore, (and the state is notorious for bad roads), i asked a friend if she really thought that we needed the roads repaired. She said yes, they were a mess and needed repair. We both, very reluctantly, voted for the referendum. Reluctantly, because we knew that a very good chunk of that money was going to disappear into many pockets along the chain.
Tommy beat me to it bringing up the state level taxation. So 40% federal Bluth says, and my state’s taxes are higher than federal. Again, i’m happy to pay for cops and teachers and libraries and you have to have a safety net. But you get a lot of debris caught up in that net. I’m not happy paying for bloated pensions, and for a system that’s a way of life for some more than a safety net, and some not here legally. I have an added gripe because as a single person with no kids, i’m taxed at a higher rate, but should misfortune befall me, the safety net doesn’t cover me. People on welfare get covered by Medicaid, working folks that don’t make enough to pay health insurance are not covered.
I don’t like the term “welfare state”. I like our system of unemployment benefits a lot better than the UK’s, and i like that it’s kept separate from welfare. I think that everyone here legally should be covered for health care and for education. There should be a safety net for welfare, with graduated time constraints.
But there is an awful lot of housecleaning that needs to be done at all levels.
I don’t buy that Americans are fundamentally and in general irrationally anxious and fearful. Just about everyone I meet is quite the opposite – even in these challenging times.
Porn,
No, nobody is reading what I wrote accurately. I’m talking about 40% of GDP.
At the moment, all in, and that means all state and local, sales, gas etc AND federal taxes, the U.S. is collecting about 27% of GDP. That is historically low. But also far below the 40% of GDP that better functioning nations (which score better on just about every index, from health to life expectancy to mental illness, to ‘happiness’ to violence to you name it… collect.
I am NOT talking about the top marginal rate. I’m talking about how much tax the nation collects in total.
I’m saying if we collected that much, and didn’t throw so much of it at the military state, and threw it at civil state instead, we’d all be a lot better off.
Expat,
If you think Americans aren’t fearful, how do you explain the whole Obama is Muslim, gays shouldn’t be allowed to say they are gay if they are in the military, or marry, and women shouldn’t be allowed to control their bodies, and drugs have to be fought against like a war even though that is clearly the most idiotic and unsuccessful and bootless war that ever was conceived in the mind of man, etc etc etc side of the American conversation?
No, nobody is reading what I wrote accurately. I’m talking about 40% of GDP.
Sorry, Bluth, it’s early here!
But my points about housecleaning still stand. When people have money to spend, funnily enough, they find ways to spend it. If people find they’re entitled to things, they’ll tend to use them whether they actually need them of not. If we want to invest in a social welfare system, then we have to restructure and streamline a lot of things first, and get rid of a lot of deadwood. Otherwise it’s just going to compound a lot of the problems that we already have.
Porn,
I don’t disagree with you at all, except to reiterate my point that we are already spending almost that amount of money on stuff that either is or ought to be collective in a saner world. I just think, like you, that we are spending it unwisely. Dangerously unwisely.
I suppose fear means different things to different people.
Things have moved on since I was in the States in ’69, but one of the things I remember was walking around Bill’s old neighbourhood in Kankakee on a lovely summer’s evening as he showed me and the kids his childhood haunts.
It was quite eerie. Lovely little parks and riverside walks and not a soul in sight.
The few people we saw – usually sitting on their porches – were horrified that we were wandering around on foot.
It had been ten years since Bill had been there, and in that time his small town had developed ‘no go’ areas.
It made quite an impression on me and I still feel absurdly pleased when I see people out and about in the summer.
Madame -
but it’s just terrible that someone who’s taught school (a very stressful job and in my opinion far more beneficial to society than is a soldier) for 40-some years retires with a comfortable pension?
That wouldn’t be a problem at all. The problem is, they retire after 28 years here, not 40. (with summers off). And the pensions aren’t just comfortable, they’re cushy. With nicely bundled Colas too. So if your salary at retirement is, say, $70,000 – given compound Colas, the pension can be quite hefty after a number of years. And you can even be a shit teacher and get that, as you have a better chance of seeing Christ than of being fired.
Pornstar:
I apologise if I sound priggish, but I think Bill and I must be peculiar, because even when I had a successful business and then some years later when we released capital from our home, I still worked on the criteria of do I really need it, or is it just a passing whim.
These days there are various benefits provided by the State, which we are technically entitled to, but for the same reasons we choose not to use or take them.
I keep mentioning the comparison of talking the talk vs walking the walk. Amy is noting that she pays attention to how they walk the walk. I do too, with the added flip that different jurisdictions walk the walk differently and they are all in competition with each other. In a nutshell Bluthner, you think that there are individuals (shall we call them bureaucrats) who are personally wiser than the average bear and who really should have more direct say in how society is run and how its resources are spent, and that on average individuals should have less. Phrased like that you can see why it’s not an easy sell. Going back to my earlier point, is California twice as civil as Colorado because our income taxes and state sales taxes are double theirs?
One point on government contracting. It is a nightmare of rules and accounting procedures. That contractor who charges the Feds $499 for a hammer probably has an extremely complex accounting system that can show precisely how it allocates costs and overhead to that hammer, and then adds the negotiated profit. Your local hardware store that charges $19.95 probably just buys it for $12 and marks up enough to achieve a 40% gross profit. That’s not an acceptable methodology to the Feds. Admittedly, by buying the more expensive hammer it does nudge government’s spending of GDP upwards.
Squirrel, of course DC was full of soldiers when you went there. They always bring them out when the squirrel population gets out of control.
Di -
You’re not priggish at all. That’s the way it ought to be. We work with a girl whose job closed at the same time mine did. I was unemployed for 5+ months and lived off of savings and my own business. I could have collected, but the amount i would have been entitled to was pretty small to be worth the hassle it would have entailed. You have to be looking for work to collect here, and i wasn’t really interested in looking for another job at that point, and didn’t want to lie and say i was. I probably would have been entitled to food stamps, about the only benefit available to single people. Again, not worth the hassle, i’d rather be off the gov’t radar.
This other girl lives with her mom (and pays some rent), gets weekly money from another guy, and works with us now. She woks 5 nights, and it’s not a shitload of money, but it’s more than we all make, and more than enough to live on comfortably in her situation. Eats at least 2, sometimes 3 meals at work 5 days a week. Still takes the state for all the food stamps she can get. When there are people hurting badly in the state and stamps are being cut. Spends her own money on crack.
But when i said that people will take what they were entitled too, i didn’t just mean individuals. I meant government agencies as well. A big reason that some of the states are in such deep shit with pensions that they are now is that the govts went apeshit with the money that was floating around in the go-go 80′s, and cut sweetheart deals that were unsustainable in the long term. But the money was there at the time, so what the hey.
Tommy,
I suppose I should find it surprising and bizarre that you could read anything I wrote and then come up with that nonsense. But I’m not surprised. Because I don’t think you really read what I wrote. You think you did, but then you filled it in with some preconception of me, of people with whom you disagree… something.
I am complaining about bureaucrats who are ALREADY spending our money the wrong way!
What you seem to want is what the Chinese now have. They collect about 18 percent of GDP, have absolutely no safety net whatever, every man for himself and devil take the hindmost. But even they know they are lost if they don’t spend huge amounts on collective culture. They go for the military option as well (though in their case it’s boots on the ground much more than hardware) and what we would see as militaristic repression. Is that what you would prefer?
I can’t work out when this b-quote thing works and when it doesn’t sometime. Obviously above only the first para should be in quotations….
Bluth,
Then you’ve been away too long. “Support The Troops!” became a fully internalized, thought-preventing tautology the day after it first appeared on bumper stickers in the mid-60′s. Whoever doesn’t want his neighbor’s kid sent off to die in a rice paddy for a cause no one can articulate does not support the troops. QED. It’s only grown stronger since then. You have criticized our propensity for military solutions to domestic anxieties. This is at least second degree troop disrespect.
Amen, but there’s a hell of a lot more to it than the money. Flyovers before every football game. Cheerleaders in camouflage. The San Diego Padres taking the field in their camouflage uniforms (because watching the Dominican and Japanese ballplayers with the American flags on their sleeves somehow doesn’t bring the thrill it used to, you know?) God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch because who can remember singing the Star Spangled Banner that late in the game?
Now when the camera pans the soldiers on leave sitting together in the stands, the announcers no longer welcome such and such infantry brigade and hope they have a good time. Hard to imagine that announcers used to be so disrespectful! Now they command us to contemplate the assembled “heroes.” Yes, troops are passé at the ballgame: now they are “the heroes,” a deeply respectful usage that only incidentally obliterates the entire concept of heroism, makes it utterly impossible even to talk about. There is only the heroic uniform and those of us who gaze on it in mute awe, or don’t, and thereby disrespect the kids getting blown apart in our name (even as I will be reminded quite soon that I disrespect them by typing this).
Where I work we now wear red shirts on Fridays, because to do otherwise is to not support the troops (this is not the ballpark, it’s largely staffed by ex-military who haven’t promoted themselves to heroes yet). But why, I asked, red shirts? Big Dave, the guy promoting the idea, didn’t know, but what he did know is that it is now disrespectful to not wear a red shirt on Friday. (I looked it up: it started in Canada, where red is like red, white and blue all in one.) Big Dave is a friend of mine, a thoughtful, hardworking guy who, after twenty years in the navy, really does worry about kids getting blown up and thinks about them when he gets dressed on Friday mornings. He worries even more that the country takes them for granted, as it largely does. What utterly eludes him is the easy out he’s handed to the rest of us: me, not doing my part? Shit, look at my red shirt, see how I’m one with the heroes… What more could I, as a citizen and a Patriot, possibly do for them?
This is militarization, and it’s militarization all the more for coming on at such a slow pace, for being so unspeakably easy to adapt to, no reflection required, ever, any step of the way.
If we have decent roads you can drive wherever you like. If we have decent schools your kids can learn whatever best suits them to learn, if we have good enough health insurance/care for all citizens then you are free to take whatever job you want to take and not risk being caught in the cold if catastrophe visits, how on earth is it a reduction of freedom to use government to do the things that governments have been proven to better than the private sector, and to create a sense of common purpose and community, without which nations dissolve, in the process?
Red shirts?
Yeah, I’ve sort of not been around for a lot of that stuff, which, having not creeped up on me, creeps me out instead.
My high school has found me through the internet and at least half of every issue of their newspaper is about alumni in the military. Which to me is astonishing. Okay some of the boys I went to school with enlisted, but some went to work for Sizzling Steak, too, and no one thought to remark on the difference. Of course we weren’t fighting any wars (anymore, just…) then, but we weren’t invading countries that we had no business invading either.
I guess we can at least be grateful that they aren’t black shirts. Yet….
Bluth,
My, my, your tautology deficiency is really showing itself today. I know you don’t live here anymore but you could try to keep up just a little, you know.
What is the opposite of freedom? Tyranny, of course.
What do tyrants do? They govern. Therefore an increase in government is an increase in tyranny, and, conversely, a decrease in government is an increase in freedom.
How do we measure the relative balance between freedom and tyranny? By the number of (non-military) government employees, of course. This is why eliminating the EPA (or the Dept of Energy or whatever) is, self-evidently, an increase in freedom. It’s also why those who advocate for the government to pay for, say, scientific research nobody else is ever going to fund are aspiring tyrants. What could possibly be more logical?
You are, of course, entitled to your views. But not your own logic. I’m quite sure I will not be the last to remind you of this today.
Ah yes, the T word. I can’t really call myself a civil libertarian i guess. Because i got in a protracted argument with a British guy on CiF awhile ago, apparently that’s what i was submitting to and supporting when i said that i really didn’t have a problem with being required to show ID to board the Amtrak or a plane.
I don’t think you expressed any disrespect for the people in the military. I just made an observation that they are granted more respect today than they were after Viet Nam, by liberals as well as conservative, and I think that is probably a good thing. I imagine you may agree with me there. I would be happy to see the military reduced in scope; particularly I’d like to see the Europeans take on more responsibility for their own defense, but I also want ours to remain at the forefront of the world.
Interestingly, of trips I’ve made to other states in recent years, Utah impresses me with its cleanliness, good roads, good schools, and generally civil atmosphere. Though I’ve a friend who lived in Ogden for a few years who says that yes it’s peaceful, but it’s an uneasy peacefulness. I won’t argue; I don’t want to become Mormon and my impression is that it wouldn’t be really comfortable place to live if you are not Mormon, plus I like trees too much. I do have a nephew, an avid skier, attending the Univ of Utah who enjoys it, and the university’s reputation is excellent. Utah State Univ is sometimes noted as being one of the best values in education in the US. The place seems to work pretty well, though I’m not arguing it’s a utopia (rock climbers may disagree).
But Bluthner, it sounds as though you are trying to describe some sort of utopia with wise but firm leaders and their subordinates calling most of the shots. That’s comes with territory if government controls 40% of GDG. Yet you acknowledge much of the money actually collected is wasted. I’d suggest that that waste is notorious in those states largely controlled by the Democrats. I think (a conservative view) that the only thing that will inhibit government from simply wasting money on the bureaucrats own perks and pet (often foolish) projects is competition from other locales that can pull the tax base away from them. It is a painful process when a government is forced to reduce size and prioritize. Here in California we are watching government at the local level being cut by a third to a half. It is a messy process. Who knows how it will turn out in the end, but I”m betting it will be for the better.
You’re not alone. Bill was in the USAF and is as patriotic as you can get, but it makes him very uncomfortable. I usually remind him he’s been away a long time, and nothing stays the same, which is when he shakes his head and changes the subject…
GD P
Ah… I’m beginning to glimpse the error of my ways: so if a buncha low-life Washington leeches fail to address the disastrous state of health insurance in the U.S., and I (along with my employer) end up having to insure the uninsured in such a stupid and inefficient way that it ends up costing us both five or six times as much as it would if the leeches would only do the job we all elected them to do….
I end up with more freedom!
Freedom to drive a nine ton tank because any vehicle less substantial would crack it’s axle on the compact-eating potholes.
Freedom to drive 170 miles out of my way because the bridge is out.
Freedom to homeschool my kids because if I send them to the state school they are going to have their brains sucked out of their skulls and bibles shoved inside to fill up the stick void.
Freedom to build tall walls with shards of glass and razor wire up top around my ‘community’ and to hire guys with guns (and bibles inside their heads where their brains should be) to shoot anyone who tries to come in who doesn’t look like ‘us’.
Freedom to pump any shit I like into the river, spew whatever I like into the air, and strip mine any resource at all I like.
Freedom to bet your money, all of it, on any stupid horse running in any crooked race, ’cause I get to keep the winnings but you’ll pay up when I lose.
Freedom to strap a six gun on my hip before I head down to the school to pick up my little ones, and a AK47 on my back before I head down to the mall to stroll around and eat ice cream.
Freedom to bleed myself and everyone around me white just so we can all pretend we aren’t insuring the health care of those shiffless & uppity folks!
And so, so, soooooo many more!
OH SAY CAN YOU SEE ALL MY NEW FREEDOMS! I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT!
No, Tommy, it’s no Utopia. It’s Germany, and France, and Scandinavia, and Britain, and Canada, and any other high-functioning nations in the west. All of which have their problems, sure, but they are still trying -or Britain was before Thatcher- to hold on to a sense of community that was not military based.
No one seems to have taken on Tommy’s question yet -
Going back to my earlier point, is California twice as civil as Colorado because our income taxes and state sales taxes are double theirs?
Bluthner. I don’t know where you live, but I think you forget that some of us actually live in high tax states largely under the sway of liberal politics. How they are model for anyone is lost on me, though perhaps Canada and Scandinavia have a better class of liberal. Mostly what I see is a Democratic war on the working class couched in terms about what a wonderful society they would create as they drive industry from the state. As I keep saying, watch the walk rather than listen to the talk.
I don’t even observe all that much glorification of the military, just a greater willingness to pay people some respect for their service that probably started with the first Gulf War after a long period of indifference or even disdain. I was in Susanville, CA last year, a ranching town about an hour north of Reno on the lee side of the Sierras. Each streetlight pole had a banner on it naming some local kid and the branch of the service they were in. I’ve never seen that before, though it is probably not unique. Is that indicative of a militarized society or simply a nice gesture by a largely conservative community? If the latter, it might even be an example of a local community using their funds to support their values.
So now if the private market is always and everywhere more efficient, or otherwise desirable, than the public sector, and if we want the best for our armed forces personnel, how come the GOP and conservatives generally are not in a full court press to privatize the VA?
It seems we honor our veterans with a government-run health care delivery system for life, even if their service was just a few years, and I really think any politician who campaigned to privatize that whole edifice would go down in flames immediately. But to be consistent with their ideology that markets are more “efficient” they should be campaigning vigorously to dismantle the VA and turn it over to the private market.
So if we’re not fetishizing our military, how come they get the HC delivery system that they do, even after a single enlistment? If their “service” not elevated to a special significance, how are we to explain this?
An argument can be made for the idea that military enlistment indicates a willingness to die for one’s country, that’s true, and that does make it special. However the same argument can be made, rationally, for cops and firefighters and, without too much of a stretch at all, coal miners and loggers and a whole lot of others.
The idea that the US does not raise military service to disproportionally exalted heights is preposterous. Of course we do.
I would agree that it is ridiculous that someone might serve 20 years in the military and then be eligible for a lifetime pension and medical benefits by the time they are 40. I know people who’ve “retired” from the service at 38. I’d suggest that if they have earned such a pension, start paying it when they are 65. I would make an exception for anyone wounded; they should obviously get as good a care as they can get. I think I said above that I would be happy to see this military spending pared back. I particularly noted that it could be scaled back if the Europeans took on more of their own defense, but the benefit side of it is also completely fair to examine. So, I’ll go on record as saying that military compensation should be looked at as a total package, which includes housing and benefits, not just the relatively low pay – that they should at least make a contribution towards their benefits, and that military pensions not kick in until retirement age, except in the case of disability. If you want to tweak that with some others suggestions I”m all ears. Solving the problems of the world is what we do here, eh?
G, most people I know don’t even know anyone in the service. Living in a small town you might know a few local kids who enlisted.
I know a couple of instances where young men joined the Marines for officer training which would get them through university and give them decent medical cover and a comfortable pension when they retire in their early forties.
You can’t blame them for taking advantage of what’s on offer, but it worried me that actually being a marine with all the attendant responsibilities and risks was an after thought.
That has certainly been my experience since coming to America Gunny – and more so since 9/11. However I sometimes wonder how sincere it is – especially amongst those who haven’t served in the military or who don’t have family in the military.
…just red Natasha’s “red shirt Friday” piece up the thread which reinforces my suspicion about the sincerity of support for military personnel.
Well. Maybe i won’t be voting for Barry after all.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/05/gary-johnson-2012-libertarian-nomination_n_1485044.html
Nope. Never been to raise radical squirrel awareness. That was my RAF friend.
Re Tommydog saying he lives in California, under the sway of liberal politics: it must be hard to see looking out only one eye. He’s delilberately not talking about Proposition 13, and the Republicans in the legislature, and (of course) Orange County.