Iraq defines our generation?

So, there has been a fascinating series of articles on Tom Rick's FP blog about the relative merits of the service academies versus other commissioning sources. The brouhaha all started with an op-ed he wrote for the WaPo about closing the academies: they were too cost-inefficient, they produced officers with liabilities not seen in other commissioning sources like excessive drinking, social awkwardness, and pronouced cycnicism of the Army, and their education is given by faculty and instructors who lacked the credentialing found in any other similar four-year institution. There have been some awesome debates on all points, ranging from the relative merits of having a company commander who served in Iraq relating his experiences to the literature of the known world yet who lacks a graduate degree to points arguing that the USMA (US Military Academy, West Point) produces an immersion environment incomparable at any other institution. I have my own thoughts on these that I hope to weigh in on at some point, but one particular thought keeps leaping out at me that I felt I could comment on without more extensive reflection.

Notably, it has been frequently mentioned through the posts, comments, and posted emails that Iraq defines our generation. One comment gave the example of GEN Petraus speaking at Harvard the day before he testified to Congress, and the auditorium overflowing because "Students are genuinely interested in the military here, perhaps because it's beginning to define an entire generation." I make no claims to a broader understanding of my generations zietgiest than my own experiences, but I still cannot fathom how this comment makes sense. I don't understand how people who do not live, work, or know hardly anyone from the region can claim that this issue "defines a generation".

I felt this same way at CU, every time yet another faux protest would start or the quad would get covered with little flags. Now, to be sure, there were more than a few students at CU who were Arab, or had traveled extensively through the Middle East, who had somehow internalized this dilemma from the far side of the world. Maybe they were drawn in simply because of who they were, their heritage left them no choice. Maybe they were drawn in because they felt the pull, and so they traveled and worked and educated themselves. But I felt such people were in a definite minority, among the general population, among their classmates, and among their activist peers. Too much of how Iraq "defined our generation" ended up looking like cheap rebellion and generalized anger at the powers-that-be.

Broader still, such activists were, and are, among the minority of the American population. Activists at CU were those loud angry people who kept stepping in people's way as they tried to get to class. Now I have my own issues with the blase disinterest of my classmates, but my point is that regardless of the issue, most students didn't care about Iraq, or Afghanistan, or people dying really anywhere. They wanted their job, and their car, and their party on Saturday to go well. Iraq may have happened concurrently with all that, and people might have been talking really loudly at the same time, but that hardly "defines" a generation.

So, I just end up really confused when I hear talk about how Iraq is the quintessential issue for my generation. Most people I know don't follow it, don't care about what happens, and probably couldn't find Iraq on a map. Those that do know, that do follow current events, have more often than not chosen other courses for their lives. Those who chose foreign policy will no doubt have to deal with Iraq in some professional and intercultural capacity, but doing international development in Africa is not exactly in the same arena, or working as a FSO in Europe approving visas. Maybe I have a profound misunderstanding of what that statement meant. (I more or less have the same idea this is how things went during Vietnam, but then there was at least a draft, far more people knew people serving, there were more uniforms in Vietnam, and it got caught up in the public discourse over nuclear weapons, so that's a lot more understandable. I still think it's mostly counter-culture for the sake of sticking it to the pigs, but I can understand that a bit more.)

Please, someone give me some perspective on how Iraq defines our generation, 'cause to me right now it mostly just sounds like some angsty 20-something-year-olds found a newspaper, got riled up, and then did nothing substantive to enhance, solve, or otherwise impact what was going on while their peers didn't even bother finding the paper.

Inhale, hold, exhale

So, I've smoked my first (and second, and third) cigarette. I've toyed with the idea for quite some time now, and finally got hammered enough to stop arguing inside my head. And in all honesty, eh. Not really sure where the histrionics come from, on either side of it.

I didn't throw up, or cough any more uncontrollably than my allergies to North Carolina already make me cough. I got some kind buzz off it, but since I was already pretty thrashed, that could also be ascribed to the double shot of tequila I had taken right before I tried the cigarette.

But what did stick out, and what had made me think of taking it up in the first place, was the social aspects of it. Originally my plan had been to just have one cigarette, to try it. But then we're out at the bar, and my friend, the one who had offered me my first cigarette, asks to bum a cig from this group of girls sitting at the table. Asking for the cig was our way in, and got us talking to them, so when she offered some to the rest of us, it was an easy decision to use that as an excuse to talk to her.

For me, the appeal of smoking has never been it looks cool, or all the cool people do it. It's been first my incessant need to do something with my hands and/or my mouth, which is why all my pens get chewed on, I always have gum on me somewhere, and I do stupid pen tricks. I'm not looking for something to calm me, but rather just something to do with myself. The other appeal, and the one brought out here, has always been it's use as social lubricant. I first really noticed this in China, where absolutely everyone smokes. There, not smoking is regarded strangely. There are certainly more than a few people who don't smoke, but the social norm is to light up after dinner, or while waiting at a bus stop, or when hanging out with friends. A lot of people I tried to explain the American logics about health ended up looking at me strangely, either because they felt I was trying to be their parent, or because those narratives were simply foreign to their norms about smoking. The stigma attached to smoking is very very American, at least in my experience.

Since returning from China, I've more than once come across references to the simple utility of always having smokes. Just as accepting chai with tribal leaders is now the accepted Army way, so too can the ground be broken by just offering smokes around the table, or to translators or interlocuters. I remember reading a semi-fictional story about a Mossad agent. During his training phase, one of his trainers told him he absolutely needed to take up smoking, and to always carry smokes and a lighter on him. Whenever he needed to meet someone, all he had to do was ask them for a light. It didn't even matter if they had one; it broke the ice and put that person in play. But in case they did, you had to know how to smoke and how to handle yourself with a cigarette. The flipside of this was hearing about how different nationalities smoked; apparently Americans had a distinctive way of lighting, holding, and smoking cigarettes.

Anyways, as for the immediate health risks, the activities I'm already doing are doing some pretty sexy damages to my body. I'll be very curious how well my knees work 25 years from now. And jumping out of planes always carries certain risks. As for the cardio impacts, some of our fastest runners here smoke packs a day, anecdotes to be sure, but my point being that we have so much of a short-term focus, the godawful smell is the biggest discouragement right now, and like so many other vices, that's an acquired taste. So whether or not there will be a fourth or fifth to follow remains to be seen. But I've jacked my life up in so many other ways, this would hardly be exceptional at this point.

Let cooler heads prevail

Once again, I'm surfing the news at ridiculously late hours of the night (and who says I have no life?). Perchance, I came across this blog post from the USNews website, calling for, of all things, calmed tempers. He isn't making any terribly controversial claims, nor finding much fault in the principles that lead to the Teabagging parties or Governor Perry trying to restart the Civil War. Instead, he is making the simple human appeal that hystrionics might be cathartic, that they might be soothing, and they might feel like a chance to air serious greivances, yet there are those out there, with the capability to enact tragedy who are inspiried, encouraged, and sustained by such hyper-passionate rhetoric.

For the first time in a while, I read the post and I could see the author behind it. I saw a real human being, maybe with a drink in his hand, sitting in a dimmed study late at night, gently thumbing a piece of rubble. Sitting there and thinking, wandering back to a blackened, charred street in Oklamhoma City, and seeing in his mind's eye the daycare across the street. Thinking about the all-too-human tragedies produced by people with too little common sense to seperate the rhetorical flourishes from legitimate calls to action, and sufficiently empowered to realize that divide.

Then again, maybe that scene exists only in my mind's eye, who knows. Anyways, to hear a call for soothed tempers, to hear reminders of those who cannot seperate the symbolic from the real, to hear someone make an appeal to our better natures helps to reaffirm my faith that there are still reasonable people out there in politics, at least for the rest of the day.

Irritating News Articles

An age old technique for someone inbetween decent blog posts is to simply surf the web until something either irks you or makes you cheer, both behaviors best done in public fora (forums?). So when I came across the breaking commentariat of Obama's torture memos, it doesn't take long for articles to cross my radar. One, in particular, for no other reason than it's sloppy reasoning and rhetorical emptiness. On face value, the claim that torture demands rigorous inquiry is more than fair. Both policy makers and interrogators themselves need to know if what they're doing is producing actionable intelligence or just inflicting inhumane pain on someone. Thus far, one's opinions on the issue seems to come straight down party lines, which doesn't dilute the truth value of the respective claims, but it does make it a little hard for wise or just policy making when the advocacy is so tainted.

So, my problem with this particular article isn't it's particular claims, or it's constructions. I agree Obama seems more inclined to pardon Nixon than put the country through a special prosecution, and I agree the above study ought to be done. But the article itself could easily be a case study in Argumentative Logic 101 for circular reasoning, implied conclusions or hidden claims. He isn't arguing that we need to be making wiser policy, and that to do so we need to know if torture works or not. He stipulates that torture doesn't work, so what we need is a study that says torture doesn't work so that Mitt Romney won't resurrect the practice. It's because of articles like this that make it so hard for reasonable public discourse to exist. It perpetuates the echo chamber.

Even when reasonable people agree with things like "Congress should appoint someone to discover if all those renditions and secret prisons produced anything useful and if those methods produced the advertised result", they're forced into the position of defending the broader claim that they're really out witch hunting for Republican blood. It changes the issue from an issue of public relevance into yet another issue of partisan hackery.

The irony of the Democratic majorities and Presidency is both their admirable willingness to buck a party line, and their hair-tearing inability to coalesece around the important issues of the day (for more explanation). The Republicans, for all their faults, are willing to embrace a party orthodoxy, create and reify the narrative to generate and sustain public support, and refuse to hew far from the bone (whether all that qualifies as responsible statesmanship, or representation is a whole 'nother issue). But Democrats are endearingly idiosyncratic. Which leaves them prone to getting hung up on issues of personal principle at the expense of public policy, and sufficiently divided that all the Republicans have to do to act like an opposition party is just sit back and snipe. The Republicans are in the midst of an existential crisis, yet the Democrats are so busy running around in circles the GOP isn't really in any hurry to create a counter-narrative.

So what that leaves us with is the progressive commitariat. They raise issues of policy, of justice, of fairness, of all the loud idiosyncracies that make policy makers so frustrating. But they do so from such hackneyed positions of partisanship their concerns can be written off as just that. The article isn't about the issue of torture, it's about the Democratic issue of getting back at Republicans. And when the article gets written with such obvious argumentative fallacies, it's counterproductive because it circumscribes the available rhetorical space, and associates further comments on the issue as more Democratic witch hunts.

On Swearing or Why Ethos Matters

Soldiers swear. Stunning, I know, but we do. Also, there's gambling going on, if you want to be shocked about that too. But apparently, some look upon swearing as "a bad thing" so we, especially we in wannabe Special Forces, try to moderate our speech in more cultured company, read: everyone else. So while we might prefer to pepper our speech with the appropriate inappropriatities, we don't really care or notice if someone doesn't swear.

But what does flag on our radar is when someone, in this case a sports psychologist by training briefing us on "mental performance of elite athletes", starts throwing around words like "heck" or "freaking". Those are words pretty much restricted to (a) children trying out their provocative little sea legs for the first time and (b) old church ladies. And now, apparently, (c) guy who wants to act like he relates to his audience, but can't quite bring himself to do it properly. He may actually be someone who uses "darn" is his everyday conversation, or he might be restraining himself for religious reasons. He might have any host of legitimate reasons for using those words as he does. But to us, it ended up sounding like he was a poseur.

So as his brief continues, he starts talking about various phases of our training as examples of the hardships we'll go through, as examples for applying what he's talking about. His models seemed coherent and useful, insofar as I know anything about sports psychology or psych theories for elite performers (read: nothing). He seemed to be making attempts to relate to his audience, to incorporate examples from our training into his presentation, all perfectly acceptable rhetorical strategies. But as the presentation progressed, it became more obvious that he didn't actually know much at all about our training or mission. He threw around acronyms and their extensions in a haphazard fashion characteristic of someone who doesn't speak in those terms all that often, i.e. someone unfamiliar with the Army, and someone specifically unfamiliar with what we did.

This doesn’t disqualify his statements or the utility of their application. But we couldn't take him seriously. He talked himself out of his own presentation. The metamessage undermined his text, and because of that, we couldn't grant him leniency for a civilian contractor who couldn't really be expected to understand in detail what we do. But if you're doing to step up, swinging lingo that's clearly foreign and acting like you're part of a club without paying the membership dues, don't be surprised if people stop paying attention.