The gift that keeps on giving
Bookworm on Mar 21 2006 at 8:06 pm | Filed under: Military
Doug Powers notes that comedian Richard Belzer came out and said what most Leftists imply and few admit: that they think the men and women serving in our American military are subnormal in intelligence and understanding. Certainly, that’s what I hear in my community, an accusation I’m always quick to refute. Of course, I’ve never refuted it as well as Powers, who has this heartfelt tribute to our military:
For a moment, let’s consider the people Belzer insults. Americans like these have helped put an end to slavery, oppression, genocide and all manner of craziness put forth by every spiral-eyed deranged dictator and tin-pot wanker on the planet.
The military can be sent to fight in some of the biggest dung-heap, dirt-bucket and generally scummy areas on the face of the earth — places that make a septic tank look like the Presidential Suite at the Bellagio. They perform tasks — from the incredibly dangerous to the intolerably mundane — without complaint or plea for recognition.
The military is often called upon to take on unhinged nut cases — the aberrant likes of whom may make you long for the stability of Courtney Love. They volunteer to dive head first into a big bowl of “Crackpot Bouillabaisse” against knee-jerk fascists, totalitarian fist wavers, and mad men engaged in a fierce game of “Virgin-Quest.”
All this is offset by the lousy pay.
What must make a soldier’s job even more difficult is that, on top of all this, they hear entertainers who make a fortune on fiction telling them they have no idea what they’re talking about because they didn’t learn about their own missions in the biased mainstream press.
It’s so true. So much of what our military uncomplainingly does is miserable scutwork. It’s not glamorous. It’s not Tom Cruise dashing about on screen in gleaming hand to hand combat with some politically correct bad guy. It’s slogging through horrible conditions in nasty places. And our troops do it for us because they believe it’s the right thing to do. Or maybe some of the troops do it because they made the logical decision that their civilian life was a dead end one. That’s not a stupid decision; that’s a smart decision, even if one factors in the risks inherent in military service. (And, as Little Green Footballs points out, those risks, while real, are not as dreadful as the Left would have us believe.)
Talking to Technorati: Military, Troops
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It’s not Tom Cruise dashing about on screen in gleaming hand to hand combat with some politically correct bad guy.
The hand to hand combat Hollywood has is a joke to people who do real hand to hand martial arts; so called hard martial arts
Hand to hand combat isn’t quite as spectacular and glorious as Tom Cruise and the Bourne Identity portrays it as.
For one thing, hand to hand combat requires intelligence. Both high iq problem solving abilities as well as education through orthodox learning of the specific school of MA. This is combined with the wisdom to know when to use it and how much of it to use.
Like war, it is neither a brutal contest of pure strength nor is it hours of 50 men vs our hero either.
The benefits of being in the military is that you learn a set of values and personal discipline, that you might otherwise not learn in civilian life. You get self-confidence, because the military will ask you to do things that you yourself might doubt yourself capable of. It also has very good career ramifications, because small business employers love to hire ex-infantry and ex-Marine guys because they know that those guys will get the job done, no complaints and no whinny little noises that a Hollywood Actor would emit.
Not only that, but there’s all kinds of military discounts. And there are a lot of towns in the South that respect the military and will treat you with recognition. You can’t buy recognition. Or maybe if you had as much money as Paris Hilton, you might think you can buy recognition and respect.
I tend to think that Hollywood dislikes anyone getting respect because they earned it. For Hollywood and other spectators, respect is to be bought, not earned. The idea that the respect of your fellow citizens has to be earned, requires the principle that you are equal to your fellow citizens. I just don’t tend to think Hollywood and the Left thinks that everyone is equal in terms of enlightenment.
Another aspect to it is that Hollywood simply does not understand how to use force. So it’s like the superstitious witch doctor with his 500 leeches, making fun of modern medicine because we believe that evil demon germs live on our hands and that we must wash them.
I try to understand it from Hollywood’s perspective. I mean, if I thought that force was just a bunch of numbskulls battling it out like on Indiana Jones or something, then it would make sense for me to think that military people are dumb. Cause, well, why do they need to be smart, they’re just cannon fodder for a war. There’s no need to use your brain or creativity in war, you just have to have the biggest gun. We have to use truth, and “speak” it to the military power of the oppressors, because otherwise the freedom fighters can never win. All a soldier has to do is to push a button and a 1,000 women in a village dies, that requires no intelligence or wisdom to do.
I can’t help Hollywood, assuming they’re even worth helping, with learning about war, force, and armies. Ignorance is curable. Stupidity is not.
Bookworm, a comment made earlier elsewhere:
It was the everyday little guy (when I lived in Kentucky), going to the same job day after day, who actually mattered. Black or white (or Asian, Latin), America was his home. He’s the real reason for this country. His family, his life, his thinking.
No Left Elitist knows him (or her)–this stick-in-the-mud fellow who shores up our everyday existence. Elites have more important concerns such as money and self glorification.
You will find this same little fellow (or his wife or girlfriend) holding your community together. By action, by example, by caring. Iraq is therefore the scariest event the left/liberals/Democrats have ever seen. That little guy or girl is suddenly in power, making all the points! (He may the young ‘little’ guy too–yet a student, single, and still putting his life together.)
The Left’s ‘nobody’ is the real one putting his butt on the line, while
Elites spin up arguments. He’s the one who see the lies the LEFT have made about Iraq (and much else). He’s the one saying no to terrorism.
You do remember ol Russ Feingold? He ran-off-at-the-mouth about this little guy. Claimed the South (or ‘average America’) was too stupid, or on welfare, to want to do anything but enlist and die for his country. ‘Those poor grunts in Iraq are too dumb to know better..’ was his line.
Yep, he said that (last year or two). Apologized, of course. But Russ thinks he can be PResident, some feel. So his Freudian slip represents Elite power broker thinking.
Will the little guy ‘know his place’ when he returns? (trash heap was the resting place of many Vietnam era vets.) IF the Iraq era veterans (thousands and more) ever take up CIVIC action against the Left, there will be hell certainly to pay. These ‘little people’ aren’t going to have Feingold tell them terrorism doesn’t exist. They know. Or let the Elites–Left or otherwise–run the country for whom the veterans fought.
I’ve commented before: It is our country! The Left really has no rights in the matter.
Hurrah!
Maybe this is what he was referring to?
GI Schmo: How low can Army recruiters go?
Faced with repeated failures to meet its recruitment targets, the Army has had to lower its standards dramatically. First it relaxed restrictions against high-school drop-outs. Then it started letting in more applicants who score in the lowest third on the armed forces aptitude test—a group, known as Category IV recruits, who have been kept to exceedingly small numbers, as a matter of firm policy, for the past 20 years. . . .
The bad news is twofold. First, the number of Category IV recruits is starting to skyrocket. Second, a new study compellingly demonstrates that, in all realms of military activity, intelligence does matter. Smarter soldiers and units perform their tasks better; dumber ones do theirs worse.
Until just last year, the Army had no trouble attracting recruits and therefore no need to dip into the dregs. As late as 2004, fully 92 percent of new Army recruits had graduated high school and just 0.6 percent scored Category IV on the military aptitude test.. . . In response to the tightening trends, on Sept. 20, 2005, the Defense Department released DoD Instruction 1145.01. . . in October, the Army had such a hard time filling its slots that the floodgates had to be opened; 12 percent of that month’s active-duty recruits were Category IV. November was another disastrous month; Army officials won’t even say how many Cat IV applicants they took in, except to acknowledge that the percentage was in “double digits.”
http://www.slate.com/id/2133908/nav/tap1/
Both Richard Belzer and Little Green Football’s commentary skirt ’round the core issue in the “Bush Is Stupid” meme (and what lies at the heart of contempt for soldiers): what we here at Castle D’Raftervoi call “The Mister Haney Factor.” I.e., at the throbbing heart of the Red State/Blue State divide is the inability of either side to see the difference between “canny” and “urbane.”
Make no mistake: Bush IS stupid. He doesn’t know jack about French Symbolist poets, thinks Duchamp’s “Nude Descending A Staircase” is modernist claptrap, and doesn’t own a copy of Patti Smith’s “Horses.” Id est, he’s a rural moron who speaks with an accent and doesn’t know squat about my important cultural icons!
But back to “Green Acres” and the Haney Factor Oliver Wendell Douglas was everything the citizens of Hooterville were not: a sophisticated Northeastern urbanite. Yet, week after week, he had the pants cheated off of him by rural bumpkin Mister Haney. Haney, who wouldn’t know Verlaine from Mallarmé, was something the urbane Mister Douglas was NOT: he was CANNY. He constantly ran a mental cost/benefit analysis on every human interaction and made sure he was on the winning side, raking in the hay. So he always “out smarted” Mister Douglas - but no one in the vast TeeVee Wasteland audience thought he WAS smarter than Mister Douglas.
The urban audience never sees that rural America has it’s own kind of smarts. Weighed down by the intellectual burden of post-Modernism, your typical city-dwelling mook is unable to understand anyone who would want to become a cop or a soldier. Heck, a guy could get killed at that job!
Of course, ask John Belushi or Lenny Bruce or Chris Farley how risky it is being a comedian…
But I digress. Smart guys like Belzer are contemptuous of “flyover” country. Why would you live there, when you can live in New York, or Los Angeles? My best friend moved to Davenport, North Dakota, to be with his smack-addict lesbian girlfriend. He hated it…”Jeez, Dave, these are the ****s who voted for George Bush!” Yeah, well, they’re also not stupid enough to quit their job and move 1500 miles away from home to be with a lesbian heroin addict. Belzer, though, would understand my best friend (who was a professor at a Bay Area university)…but he would NOT understand the citizens of Davenport.
Me? I was raised to be Mister Douglas. I plan to die as Mister Haney.
I’m glad to see the Army recruiting more people. It gives all Americans the opportunity to serve. Not just the high IQ percentile. Virtues of character, never were related to IQ. Otherwise, the Marines at Tarawa would have failed contemptuously.
The military has its own internal standards of heirarchy. While it is true the Army is suffering from post-modern stupidities like softer Boot Camp, the NCOs and COs in the field will get those recruits straightened out.
One of the things people might not understand about the rich, is the really obnoxious things that go on there. It’s like a bunch of old women, always verbally sparring and “cutting” up the opposition with gossip, and other dirty tricks.
Bush’s family lives in a really small house. It’s got like 1 ground floor, and maybe, MAYBE, a basement. No second story.
Their family believes that the “young sprout” needs to get the hell out of the house and make it on his own. This applied to Bush, Jeb, and all his sisters and brothers and nieces and whatever.
Look at it from a rich WASP old/new money perspective. What kind of a HICK is the Bush family, if they believe that work is good? To rich people, working is not good at making money. Servants and peasants do work, not the elite socialites.
The rich might scorn and feel contempt for the poor. But oh man oh man, that is nothing compared to the contempt and the hate they feel for one of their “own” which voluntarily sinks to the level of the masses. Rich folks that went bankrupt, are almost as equally held in contempt, because at least they didn’t have a choice in the matter to be poor, but the Bushies!!! The Bushies CHOSE to live a poor, workmanlike, life, and that is unforgivable by the rich.
This makes President Bush more likable by America, it does not make him more likable by George Soros and his fake liberal friends.
are you sure about that?
what can i say