Things Americans Believe About Themselves

More tomorrow, but this essay from a lit professor at Yale is just weird:

We have begun to talk casually about our wars; and this should be surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United States war has never been considered the normal state of things. For two centuries, Americans were taught to think war itself an aberration, and "wars" in the plural could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger generations of Americans, however, are now being taught to expect no end of war -- and no end of wars.

Later, he talks about how much James Madison and Alexander Hamilton hated war and didn't want the country to fight any.

It's not even April 1st, is the thing.

but they let that other guy have the great line about osama looking like a dirty wizard

Man, that's it. Human existence is officially a mere spectacle.

("I'm Diana Christensen, a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.")

military industrial duplex quarterly

1.) Nice discussion (third item) from Patrick Lang about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the significance of rented violence in those places. In Iraq, Lang writes, "our rentals know that we are leaving."

2.) "False positives": Apparently the Colombian government pays cash bonuses to its soldiers for the dead bodies of FARC members, leading some troops to kill random people and dress up the corpses as rebels so they can claim bonus cash. In effect, the government is renting violence from its own soldiers.

3.) Retired Air Force Col.Chet Richards notes a long [old] post from "Fabius Maximus" about the death of the Constitution. Richards frames the discussion in terms of the oath that military officers take: "As officers, we are sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But what if the Constitution is already dead?" The debate that follows, in the comment threads at both of the linked websites, is not uninteresting, but the post from Fabius Maximus is good stuff, even though I don't agree with all of it. Beyond that, it's interesting to consider the implications: If military officers take an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and a significant number come to believe that the Constitution has been (or is being) destroyed by domestic enemies, what should they do about it? What can they do -- that is, what cure could they apply that wouldn't be worse than the disease?