The Tragedy of the American Military, James Fallows, The Atlantic, January/February 2015
This has become the way we assume the American military will be discussed by politicians and in the press: Overblown, limitless praise, absent the caveats or public skepticism we would apply to other American institutions, especially ones that run on taxpayer money. A somber moment to reflect on sacrifice. Then everyone except the few people in uniform getting on with their workaday concerns.
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This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not. When Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way. On the eve of the D-Day invasion, he warned his troops, “Your task will not be an easy one,” because “your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened.” As president, Eisenhower’s most famous statement about the military was his warning in his farewell address of what could happen if its political influence grew unchecked.
At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.
Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.
The Surprising Thing People Who Resist Authority Have in Common, Krystnell Storr, Science.Mic, January 14, 2015
Consider this a lesson in disobedience.
In 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments looking at people’s willingness to obey authority, even when doing so meant harming another human being. A new analysis of the controversial experiment suggests that the difference between blind obedience and disobedience may be less a question of morality and more a question of skill set — that is, how many tactics a person can try to assert him or herself in the face of authority.
10 Most Harmful Novels For Budding Writers, Crawford Kilian, The Tyee, via AlterNet, February 3, 2015
Any young person who wants to be a novelist should of course be a reader as well. But some novels can be more hazard than inspiration. They are often well-written, but their effects have generally been disastrous: they inspired younger writers to imitate them, they created awful new genres that debased readers’ tastes, or they promoted literary or social values that we could very much do without.
Here are ten 20th-century novels that have done more harm than good to apprentice writers. My list is both entirely subjective (I am a scarred victim of several of them) and in no particular order.
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The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
Mark Twain made the American vernacular a literary language; Salinger tried to do the same for the American adolescent whine. We who read Catcher as teenagers in the 1950s and ’60s at once considered ourselves free to babble on paper just the way we did over coffee and cigarettes. It was certainly easier than learning how to write a straightforward sentence expressing something more than teen angst.
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Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
Well, we know all British writers hated the boys’ schools their parents consigned them to. Nasty schoolboys are still a dismal metaphor for civilization, even if it’s clangingly obvious to an audience genuinely scared of nuclear war. Stick to your pretensions, Willy.
