Remember Derne

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Derne

I also agree that there is some historical resonance to the ‘big army leads to chronic conflict’ point. you can’t just leave the damn thing sitting on the shelf for pete’s sake! gotsta use some of them munitions so as you can buy more and keep your brother rolling in whores. I do, however, wonder if the PRC’s ‘Red Army’ is not an exception to this rule….Short of it’s sensational deployment in Tiananmen, I don’t recall seeing a Chinese bullet fly in my lifetime.

Finally, I guess what I was really getting at was this….Yes, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other examples have been examples of misusing the tool. I still, however, have a hard time imagining that the tool itself inherently can’t or won’t eventually serve the purpose for which, as you point out, it was originally built — to preserve our very lives.

Maybe my years as a child romantacizing the machines of WWII in particular have penetrated deeper than I know….

But then again, maybe not. For I can in clear conscience and with enthusiasm echo your call to arms:

HERESY NOW!!!

I think it’s unhealthy to heap unquestioning praise on soldiers. When it comes to human beings, the role of tool doesn’t absolve one of responsibility. Just because a man signs up with the best of intentions doesn’t mean he’s any less of an active participant in imperialism and unprovoked aggression than the warmongering politician. In some ways he’s even more responsible: the soldier drives the tank, pulls the trigger, presses the button. And should the considerable risk they take in our name silence criticism? I didn’t ask anyone to go to Iraq or Afghanistan. I don’t see their work as a service to me or the country. It’s mischief.

Yes, soldiers don’t start wars, but they are inarguably enablers. No soldiers, no wars. I can’t think of a society with a huge military that’s never constantly been at conflict. By joining the army, you add fuel to the war machine. I wonder about the distance we put between soldiers and the decision-makers. Soldiers might feel ambivalent about war, but without it they’d be looking for work in a hurry.

Our need to honor soldiers no doubt goes reaches back to humanity’s earliest days. When resources were so limited that outsiders would kill to get what you had, warriors were as essential as food and shelter. Without them, there’d be none of the other. Later, as I wrote in the post, soldiers became the embodiment of the perfect citizen. Is it healthy to carry these notions into a new millennium, a time when now more than ever we need critical thinking, skepticism, and reason? An age when sentimentality, jingoism, and aggression are more dangerous than ever? We need fewer martyrs and more heretics.

I’ll end with a confession. Imagining soldiers on parade, a word forms in my mind: “resentment.” I resent the respect they get. Much of that resentment goes back to what I’ve said above and in my original post. But it’s also that I’m a middle-aged man and I’ve never ever taken the risks seized by a soldier. Consequently, I’ve never reaped the rewards and recognition.

You can’t help but respect a solider: he’s fit, disciplined, and accomplished. He’s a part of a long tradition. On top of that, he’s got a gun.

The praying before dinner was hardly offensive – if a bunch of Christians believe in Mencken’s ideas but don’t subscribe entirely to his views on religion, I hardly see how it’s disrespecting or disgracing Mencken. I think in any pro-Mencken organization, you’re going to have a variety of opinions on his hyper-individualized points of view. You’re basically playing tit for tat, saying that “it only focused on some of Mencken’s values but not others” and then “I would run it this way” essentially encouraging people to do the same thing. Less pesky principles, more Nietzschean nihilism! Unfortunately, this is a principle in and of itself. If everyone decided to autonomously pray, it probably would have looked the same as it did with whoever it was leading the prayer, so I don’t see much validity in blaming a club for catering to majority opinion. No one in the Darwinian Societies is complaining that scientists have long since rejected Darwin’s idea of Pangenesis.

Also, I’m not sure I would paint the whole institution as racially dogmatic and simplistic just because of a few various folks trying to promote their own agendas passing out flyers. That’s like me saying, “These people were a bunch of orthodox Menckenites!” because your book sold well there. The most I saw pertaining to race in the whole presentation was a brief (albeit admittedly superfluous) rundown of mean race IQs in one of the presentations, and a discussion on how more systematically lenient loans to underachieving minorities make little sense when these minorities are more likely to default on said loans in the first place.

That said, I do admire your dedication to the Mencken, and it seems inevitable that eventually someone would go to an event called The Mencken Club Conference expecting actual discussion of the dude, so I’m not sure where the lack of anticipation on their part comes from. And I also am critical of “paleo-conservatives” (who invented that word anyhow? Wikipedia?) who cater to a somewhat racially nationalistic sensibility but refuse to give credit to black leaders who promote basically the same agenda, so I see where you’re coming from there.