quality education

Undergrad on a cellphone, Kerckhoff coffeehouse, UCLA:

"Is Obama more like Clinton, or is Obama more like Reagan -- what do you think?"

(Pause)

"The problem is we have to stay within the theory, sort of."

too silent

Dude, somebody say something.

adding

Having just posted a two-parter on how much I enjoyed being in a town with a significant military presence, the "of course" addition has to be that I think our use of our military is politically and often morally insane, and that military personnel -- including me, pretty recently -- serve an empire that needs to learn a hard lesson regarding restraint and the rights of other people to live their lives without our violent interference. If you'd like to believe that it's contradictory or hypocritical or otherwise ridiculous to personally enjoy the company of people in the military while thinking they engage in behavior with which I sharply disagree, you're probably right to think I'm taking contradictory positions, and so be it. But there are also a good number of people in the military who are having this discussion about empire in some form or another, and who joined the military with the honorable intention of genuinely defending their country and their community. I'd like to bring them home, keep them home, and buy them a beer or ten.

I understand there are people who don't agree, but my personal experience is that the military is full of smart and morally sophisticated people, along with some people who are neither.

ADDED LATER:

For example....

sorry 'bout that

My bad, dude. We cool now?

balance (part two)

So now I live in West Hollywood, in a neighborhood I generally like. However. We celebrate our diversity -- omfg, do we celebrate our diversity -- and there's real diversity to celebrate. But it's not entirely a, um, diverse diversity. The city government's strategic plan pledges to "VALUE AND ENCOURAGE OUR BROAD DIVERSITY OF CULTURES" in an environment that "nurtures the variety of ethnicity, age and sexual orientation that uniquely defines the West Hollywood community." Maybe you can find some things missing from that list.

In practice, I sometimes think that West Hollywood's celebrated cultural diversity means that you get to sit and drink your coffee next to, on one side, a skinny hipster boy in an ironic t-shirt and whatever passes for the current version of an ironic trucker cap -- and, to your other side, a skinny hipster boy in an ironic t-shirt and whatever passes for the current version of an ironic trucker cap. But hold on, because one of the skinny hipster boys will be gay, and one will be straight, and they might even be of different ethnicities. And one will work in the television business, see, but one will work in movies.

So here we have 1.) Columbus, Georgia, where it feels like every two-legged organism is a soldier or a retired soldier or a stripper with extra coins available if you need them, and 2.) West Hollywood, where cultural diversity is permitted to spread itself across three whole categories of identity. In different ways, at different times, for different reasons, I got/get tired of both places.

And then there's Monterey. It's an isolated community, out on a piece of coastline that you can only get to on small highways. The city has a population of about 26,000 people; throw in the neighbors in Pacific Grove, and it's about 40,000 altogether. (I decline to include Carmel, where we inquired after a downtown playground and were informed that people here would never need or use such a thing, thank you very much. And in fact, the couple of parks we found had some plants and a few benches, and not a fucking thing else. One never really wishes to hear the loud noises of children, does one?)

Spread among those 40,000 people are a dozen institutions that employ researchers and academics. There's a state university, a community college, a mag-fucking-nificent aquarium with a significant commitment to research, and quite a few other research institutes and agencies. That's a lot of latte-sipping elitists for a small town, and I assume that ardent culture warriors get contact migraines just from crossing over the city limits.

There's also a sizable military presence, and a military presence that blends into the category of "institutions that employ researchers and academics." The Naval Postgraduate School and the Defense Language Institute sit on different ends of the town, spreading the camouflaged wealth. (Also in the area: Fort Ord, which used to host an entire infantry division, IIRC. It's now the site of the state college, although there's still a small military presence there.) There's also a biggish Coast Guard facility, but fuck those guys for having such an obviously great job and hanging out at the beach for a living.

So Monterey is an isolated mixture of military personnel and highly educated researchers -- those are circles with some significant local overlap -- in a setting that couldn't be any more beautiful and historically interesting, supported by a very large tourist industry that brings shitloads of cash into town.

For the several days that we were there last week, I kept thinking that Monterey has managed something close to a perfect social balance. At our hotel, shouting distance from the Naval Postgraduate School, we heard at least a half-dozen languages, and a pair of very polite Germans who were totally trying to not seem like military officers thanked our daughter with great solemnity when she offered them a damp fistful of expectorated Cheerios ("Cat!"). At the terrific Dennis the Menace Playground, dudes with very short hair quietly made sure their lunatic five-year-old boys didn't push their way into the line for the big slide in front of my much-smaller daughter. We walked into a sushi restaurant for dinner one night, and there was an Air Force NCO sitting at a table in uniform, and it made me instantly and curiously happy: Look, look, military personnel! (Well, not really military personnel, but the Air Force is close enough.)

Away from Fort Benning and Columbus (and away from the shit-dull sand prison of Camp Buehring, Kuwait), I remembered how much I enjoyed being around people in the military, a certain tiny Louisiana first sergeant excepted. Walking along the waterfront in Pacific Grove -- at some point in your life, do walk along the waterfront in Pacific Grove -- we passed a pair of trucks with DOD facility access stickers on the windshield for NAS Meridian; the drivers were ten feet away in the water, suited up for a dive. (Note to commander, NAS Meridian: It was a weekday -- when you get them back from the NPS, they will not have learned anything.) It was somehow just great to see them, and I wanted to buy them a case of beer or something. (And then drink most of it myself, but still.)

There's a substantial military presence that doesn't overwhelm the town, and a substantial academic presence that doesn't overwhelm the town. There's just enough of everyone that it's always good to see them all.

Of course, I was mostly drunk, so this all may just be in my head.

other people can hear you when you talk on your cell phone

"The, uh, Internal Revenue is overviewing some things about my credit and my, my money, about the small business loan."

and then some asshole said some stuff

The really hella enjoyable thing about the early records of congressional debate is that some of it is recorded with great care and detail, and some of it is recorded with -- actual examples from this morning's reading -- "Mr. Ingersoll made a speech of some length," or "this remark of Mr. Jackson's was debated at great length." So that the record reads, Mr. Smith made the argument that X, Y, and Z, supported by facts A, B, C, D, and E, with further reference to Premises M, N, and O, after which Mr. Jones spoke for three hours, disagreeing.

My own theory is that even the clerks got tired of listening to these assholes, again proving the fact that nothing ever really changes.

Exeunt.

balance (part one)

What follows is the first part of a discussion about Monterey, California. This will not be immediately apparent. So here we go:

I spent two and a half years at Fort Benning, Georgia, a fact that probably merits some very mild pity, which I totally invite and encourage. Benning is the U.S. Army Infantry Center, home to infinity-billion training units and courses -- including the Infantry Training Brigade on Sand Hill, about which I would just like to say fuck you, Sand Hill. There's also a Ranger battalion and a mechanized infantry brigade (or more, post-BRAC) just to fuck up the gender balance a little more and inflict a slightly higher level of sexual frustration on the infinity-trillion infantrymen who call Benning their home.

Because Fort Benning has uncountable numbers of nineteen-year-old riflemen, and because they serve alongside the twelve female soldiers who work there as personnel clerks and dental technicians, the neighboring town has certain distinctive features. Victory Drive, right outside the gates, has strip bars, strip bars, strip bars, and a couple of pawn shops. And some strip bars. They are, words fail me, dismal. At the end of the work week, the newest company of infantry soldiers is released from the fourteen weeks they spend restricted to the post; by Saturday evening, the strippers have all the cash those kids have accumulated in unused paychecks during those fourteen weeks. And yes, she promised to marry you, but no, she didn't mean it, and dude, tell me you didn't give her all your fucking money, because we still have to pay twenty-six dollars for this motel room.

Just to throw this in, here, my team leader greeted me at my first post-training unit by taking me to the Lucky Seven, a place that still makes me instinctively pat myself down for crabs when I think about it. While we were there, one of the strippers walked over and asked if Corporal [Name Deleted] wanted to shoot some pool with her. She was mostly naked. He did want to shoot some pool with her, yes. So he started pulling quarters out of his pocket to feed the pool table, but he came up one short. And then the stripper said, very slyly, that she would take care of it. And she reached into her...

(Skip this next paragraph, if you'd like.)

...vagina, with two fingers, and pulled out a quarter of her own, and dropped it onto the pool table. And as she sashayed away to get a cue, Corporal [Name Deleted] leaned over, shaking with excitement, and said something like, "Did you see that shit? That's so fucking hot." (And I said something like, "Yeah, there's nothing hotter than a woman who stores spare change in her vagina." But Corporal [Name Deleted] was beyond noticing Private Bray's deadpan routine.)

(Despite a solid effort, Corporal [Name Deleted] did not end up having sex with the stripper. And our next team building exercise was that he took me to his house to introduce me to his wife.)

The bars in Columbus are so depressing they actually begin to cause physical exhaustion: Heeeey look, it's three hundred dudes with army haircuts gathered around four women who don't want to talk to them because they're tired of sexually desperate soldiers.

Benning is home to the School of the Americas; they call it something else now, but it's still the School of the Americas, and School of the Americas Watch still wants to close it. One year while I was there, I joined a group that went into downtown Columbus to drink beer. When we realized that the place we went to was crammed full of anti-School of the Americas protestors -- they travel in by the thousands every year, I think in November -- there was a long pause. The group of protestors had a gender imbalance issue that was just like ours, except backwards, and we were all taking a few moments to notice it. And then one of the dudes in the group said, "These chicks hate us. And holy fucking shit, they're so fucking hot."

We went back the next night, too.

And that was Columbus, Georgia: I'm gonna try to fuck that chi-- hold on, I gotta fucking puke, blaaaarrrrrggggghhhh, and anyway, let's kick somebody's ass, you want another beer?

It was sometimes kind of entertaining, but mostly sooooooooo dull and predictable, and my first sergeant once explained to me that he drove home to Atlanta every day -- three total hours of driving, five days a week -- because "I can sit in my motherfucking backyard and not see one motherfucker with no goddamn army haircut." His neighbor was a doctor, civilian issue (one each); they sat in the yard and exchanged bullshit over beer and cigars, talking about "anything but the fucking army." Me, I spent every long weekend in Athens or Savannah, except when we piled a group into a car and headed for the beach in Florida or the mountains in South Carolina.

And thus endeth part one. Part two tomorrow.

we're home!

Monterey, California: It was cold(*):

But our young lady managed to locate a seafood buffet of some kind:


And then it all just kind of slid downhill:



Full trip report, with exciting military references, to follow.

(*) It was California cold -- the temperatures plunged all the way into the low 60s, many exclamation points. We're lucky to have survived.

traveling

Posting will be light. If you can imagine such a thing happening here.

great moments in history

In the 1730s, a recent Harvard graduate named David Parsons moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, and took up the pulpit at the town's First Congregational Church. The historian Leonard L. Richards reports that Parsons "drove a hard bargain, getting the town to grant him two lots of land, ₤175 toward building a parsonage, ₤100 salary soon to be raised to ₤160, and sixty wagon loads of wood per year."

Parsons stayed on for forty-five years, but some in his congregation eventually began to resent him. "The wood allowance, especially, struck many as excessive. For most farmers, it meant a lot of additional work." But Parsons steadily negotiated for an ever-greater quantity of wood: "His wood allowance was increased to 80 loads in 1744, to 90 loads in 1749, to 100 in 1751, and 120 in 1763."

Richards quotes an observation from a local: "I never found in any records, a minister who consumed as much wood as Mr. Parsons."

(Insert all your own jokes anywhere you want, in here.)

Anyway, and then came the American Revolution. David Parsons remained in the pulpit, but quickly turned out to be the town's most ardent Tory, preaching to a congregation that included the most prominent local opponents of the king. Once, called upon to read a proclamation calling on God to protect the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Parsons editorialized and called out, "But I say, God save the king." Scandalously, someone in the congregation shouted back that he was a "rogue." (And there were children present, ladies and gentlemen.)

And so erupted a great and mighty struggle between the forces of monarchical tyranny and republican liberty, yadda yadda, and the congregation found the perfect weapon to take to the battle: They "shorted him on his wood supply."

SNAP!

(Long pause.)

When his monarch-loving son took over the pulpit in 1781, the congregation hit the kid where he lived: 25 annual wagon loads of wood.

Armed revolution, people. That shit ain't pretty.

trouble in mind

All of the stories I'm reading about the soldier in Iraq who just killed five other servicemembers focus on the question of combat trauma, suggesting that his multiple deployments may have driven him crazy. But here's the part they don't look at very closely, and (it seems to me) the probable key to the thing: "Sgt. John M. Russell, 44, first joined the Army National Guard in 1988; he went into the active Army in 1994."

Twenty-one years in the military, fifteen of them on active duty, and he's an E-5. (I did four years of spectacularly undistinguished active duty in the same army, and was promoted three times; I finished as an E-5.)

Doesn't it seem likely that this guy was a chronic shitbag?

sigh

A former New Yorker staff writer tells stories about the magazine:

As any writer knows, editors almost never suggest stories. Generating story ideas is the real work; researching and writing them is the easy part. In one of our conversations, though, John let drop a real jewel: “We have this sense that we should be paying more attention to the military,” he said. (This was now early 2003, as the country was getting ready for war in Iraq.) “Thing is, nobody here cares about the military, and nobody here knows anything about the military.” Well, I certainly didn’t know anything about the military but I did find it interesting, so I piped up, “I can do that!” I wasn’t worried about my lack of experience or knowledge in the field of arms.

The mighty watchdog of the republic, grr.

ornaments

"The Duchy of Württemberg was a further example of an army which was not large enough to defend the state. Duke Eberhard Ludwig was entitled to retain 2,000 soldiers after the Peace of Rijswijk in 1697, whom he dressed in pretty yellow uniforms."

-- John Childs, The Army and the State in Britain and Germany during the Eighteenth Century, here.

in other news

I changed the template. Because white text on a black background gave me brain bleed. It looked totally cool, right up until the moment that I tried to, you know, read the thing.

all our base are belong to us

An early nineteenth century conception of federal power that just made me throw up in my mouth a little, with emphasis added:

The idea that the United States cannot raise a regular army in any other mode than by accepting the voluntary service of individuals, is believed to be repugnant to the uniform construction of all grants of power, and equally so to the first principles and leading objects of the Federal compact. An unqualified grant of power gives the means necessary to carry it into effect. This is an universal maxim, which admits of no exception. Equally true it is, that the conservation of the State is a duty paramount to all others. The commonwealth has a right to the service of all its citizens; or, rather, the citizens composing the commonwealth have a right, collectively and individually, to the service of each other, to repel any danger which may be menaced. The manner in which the service is to be apportioned among the citizens, and rendered by them, are objects of legislation...

In support of this right in Congress, the militia service affords a conclusive proof and striking example. The organization of the militia is an act of public authority, not a voluntary association.

-- James Monroe (Acting Secretary of War), Message to the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, October 17, 1814.

Monroe goes on to add that, hey, no worries, the government mostly means to take the "unmarried and youthful, who can best defend it, and best be spared." The whole message is a fabulous muddle, puddled with curious reasoning and contradictory arguments about power and compulsion: We're all in it together, and responsible to one another as equal participants in a social contract, so we totally own your ass and you better knuckle the fuck under.

My favorite part is the great "or, rather..." We own your ass, or, rather, you own your ass, so we own your ass, because we're you. Monroe's vision of the militia went over poorly, and was a distinctly minority view, but it was nevertheless what an important policymaker thought of the militia in the early republic: He thought it wasn't a voluntary public institution, but rather a way for the state to capture the service of its citizens for the purpose of its own preservation -- not theirs, but its. It seems to me that we don't hear that part of the story very often in our histories of the early republic.

I also thought that Monroe's claim about ends and means -- "An unqualified grant of power gives the means necessary to carry it into effect. This is an universal maxim, which admits of no exception." -- sounded a lot like, say for example, David Addington. Recent theories of power seem to me to not be all that recent.

housekeeping and random stuff

1.) Reader contest! Win a prize!* Come up with a name for this blog that doesn't make me wince every time I see it! The winning name will cleverly refer to state and paramilitary violence, suggesting the slippery boundaries between the two, while suggesting that the blog is meant to blend history and current affairs. If I ever become less lazy, this blog may actually even do some of that.

2.) If you make pancakes for your wife, keep an eye on the fucking things until she eats them. Otherwise, your elderly cat will lick off the butter and syrup. And then, because he's licked off the butter and syrup, he'll vomit. He'll vomit directly onto the pancakes. He'll do this precisely as your wife rounds the corner and comes into visual contact with the said pancakes.

And then? Cereal for breakfast.

3.) Jeff Huber is a retired U.S. Navy type, and says that the Navy offers precisely the thing to solve the Somalian pirate problem.

(*Prize is an authentic, fully certified "nothing." Win yours today!)

convicted, condemned, commanding

John Fries, a Pennsylvania militia captain sentenced to death as a traitor after freeing tax resisters from federal captivity in 1799, survived his death sentence when President John Adams decided to pardon him. But his treason conviction did have a serious consequence: Fries lost his position as a militia captain. Removing him from that office, the militiamen of Montgomery County instead elected him [added later: in 1800] to the rank of lieutenant colonel. So, you know, militia officers had to be very careful not to commit any capital crimes in the early republic, because it might get them promoted.

Also elected to field grade in Pennsylvania that year: Thomas Cooper, a republican newspaper editor convicted under the sedition act. He became the colonel of the Northampton County militia while still confined in a Philadelphia jail.

The standard history of military force in the early republic has Americans opposed to a professional army and preferring to rely on the militia. But it's difficult to overstate how little the people in political power believed they could rely on the militia -- and not just because they regarded the militia as an ineffective military force. Presidents and governors didn't trust the militia because they couldn't trust the militia. My sentiments are entirely with Fries and Cooper, who were on the right side against a gang of High Federalist assholes, but the point is that government officials preferred professional forces precisely because they could separated from the people at large. They could be held to the political will of their leaders in a way that the ordinary men of the militia could not.

See also the January, 1799 address of Georgia Governor James Jackson to the state legislature: "And here I have to remark that lieut. col. Watkins, of the Richmond county regiment, has also made declarations in the public prints, that he will never consider himself bound by certain parts of the constitution. This, as a public officer, is going to great lengths indeed. Will never feel himself bound by certain parts of the constitution, and those parts not specified!"

Despite their many flowery speeches about the glorious militia of the republic, early American political leaders never much wanted to turn their backs on the thing. It was a problem that they never solved, but also a problem they never stopped trying to solve. They did not prefer the militia to professional military forces.

what the fuck?

Comments?

that's, like, real mature

Third paragraph of an AP story on an attack that killed 45 people at an engagement party in Turkey:

"Citing Ozen, NTV said the motive could be an old feud between rival groups of pro-government village guards who fight alongside Turkish troops against Kurdish rebels in the region. If that is the case, the government would come under renewed pressure to rein in the militiamen, some of whom have been linked to drug smuggling and other crimes."

The usual argument about state violence is that new, still-developing states try to leverage private violence for state purposes, then cement a true monopoly on violence over time. But here's a well-established state that uses "village guards" to fight against Kurdish nationalists. States are usually happy to find a little extra violence that they can put to use. And the "drug smuggling and other crimes" usually come with it.

"basketball was batch"

This is really a great pleasure to read. Keep reading -- it's about war, too.

Famous Oxymorons

In September of 2006, while I was parked in the headquarters of an infantry battalion in Kuwait,  the U.S. embassy in Damascus was attacked. Purely for the sake of curiosity, we spent our excruciatingly dull shift in the TOC trying to figure out who did it, why they did it, how they did it, and how successful they were. The guy sitting next to me that night worked in the S-2 shop, so he fired up the super secret squirrel computer and started reading through the classified intel reporting.

We also turned on the radio and listened to the BBC World Service. Throughout the night, we compared what we were getting from classified sources to the information we were getting from radio and cable TV. The "secret" stuff -- I didn't have a "top secret" clearance, 'cause I was just an E-5 and nobody loved me -- was well behind the open sources; we'd learn X fact from the radio, then get X fact an hour later on the magic secret box. (The running joke: "But don't tell anyone that, because it's classified." While the dude on the TV was saying it for the the fifth time.)

So this new column from William Lind made immediate sense to me.