Kevin Drum whacks another one into the stands, as he talks about the draft:

…but I have a better (and more serious) idea: mandatory national service.
This is not a new idea, but it’s the kind of thing that we should be seriously discussing these days. Patriotism, after all, does not come from reciting the pledge of alliegance every day or flying an American flag in front of your home. It comes from a deep seated notion that you live in a great country and that you share some of this greatness with your fellow countrymen.
Mandatory national service would oblige everyone who lives here to give something back to their country. It would allow teenagers to see firsthand what other parts of America are like, and what their fellow Americans are like. It would allow blacks to work alongside whites, rich alongside poor, and natives alongside immigrants. It would provide a large workforce that could be deployed both domestically and internationally. It would provide manpower for our inner cities and ambassadors to the third world. Military service would count, of course, but no one would be forced to serve in the military, and the vast majority of teenagers would serve in non-military areas.

Add a few things to this proposal…those who graduate get means-tested subsidized basic health care a la the VA, and education and homebuying aid a la the GI bill, and you’re beginning to be on to something.
Poor kids could spend time in school, catching up. Affluent kids could spend some time doing service. Adventurous kids could go into the military. Disabled kids can contribute too.
All of them would probably benefit from a break between high school and college or work.
I’d steal management from the military for it, though. The military has done a superb job of taking in a random assortment of young kids and turning most of them into adults. This should be boot camp, not summer camp.

One of the cookies I’ve gotten for doing this is the opportunity to ‘meet’ (and sometimes even meet) some really amazing people. There was a flurry of well-wishing emails among bloggers on New Year’s, and one that I sent to Jeff Cooper started me thinking as I rode in this morning.
I told him what a pleasure it was to have made his acquaintance, and that I was impressed by his intelligence, knowledge, and most of all by the obvious decency that shines through everything he writes.
And I started realizing that decency is another of those undervalued traits; it is not unique to the Left or Right, or much appreciated by either. As Jimmy Carter showed, it alone is not enough for a leader. In fact it may be a value that is absent in most great leaders…Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman…hmmm I need to think about this…but it is a value I cherish in the people I choose to associate with and a value that is somehow demeaned in our culture.
We value honesty, passion, those who hew to absolute values. Simple decency isn’t enough.
That’s too bad. From the dictionary:
decent [di snt]
adj.
1. polite or respectable: a decent family.
2. proper and suitable; fitting: a decent burial.
3. conforming to conventions of sexual behaviour; not indecent.
4. free of oaths, blasphemy, etc.: decent language.
5. good or adequate: a decent wage.
6. Informal. kind; generous: he was pretty decent to me.
7. Informal. sufficiently clothed to be seen by other people: are you decent?
[from Latin decens suitable, from decree to be fitting]
We’re talking bourgeois values here. And one of the things that I’m muddling toward is an articulation and defense of those values.
Damn, even I can’t believe that I’m doing this…
(forgot a clause)

So I broke down (and broke the piggy bank) and bought an IBM T30, the full megillah, with a 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4M,built-in Wi-Fi, and a docking station. I may or may not replace the desktop; I may just use the laptop full-time.
Sigh. So much for college tuition for the Biggest Guy…actually not, I got an excellent deal from www.netliquidations.com.

I’ve been rereading the Federalist Papers; among other things they’re available online as a part of the Gutenberg Project.
The most relevant is #10: Here’s a long quote:

FEDERALIST No. 10
The Same Subject Continued
(The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection)
From the New York Packet.
Friday, November 23, 1787.
To the People of the State of New York:
AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations. The valuable improvements made by the American constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality, to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger on this side, as was wished and expected. Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true. It will be found, indeed, on a candid review of our situation, that some of the distresses under which we labor have been erroneously charged on the operation of our governments; but it will be found, at the same time, that other causes will not alone account for many of our heaviest misfortunes; and, particularly, for that prevailing and increasing distrust of public engagements, and alarm for private rights, which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other. These must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations.
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.
There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.
It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.
The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

Read the whole thing and get reminded of what geniuses the Founders were.
I’m also rereading Thucydides, and the important point I’m taking from there is that it is not only the mechanics of governance, but the personalities, moment in history, and social structures that keep democracy alive as well.
Democracy in Athens collapsed shortly after the death of Pericles; somehow Turkey’s democracy survived Ataturk. Why?

To everyone out there, conservative and liberal alike, patriot and internationalist, a good year.
(Unless your definition of good involves deliberately killing a lot of innocent people.)
…and remember, tonight’s the night for the ‘amateur drunks’ so drive, ride and walk carefully…

It may be Ann, who’s fed up with my lefty-patriotism meme and practising her imitation of Sabrina, but so far this week, we’ve had:
1) two plumbing crises;
2) two incontinent cats (the 16 year old cat is apparently competing to be annoying with the diabetic one);
3) one leaky British motorcycle;
4) a power outage;
5) a dead laptop (don’t buy consumer-grade Compaq laptops and expect them to last more than 18 months);
6) and now, the ne plus ultra, a dead hard drive on the house file server. I backed it up last week, but in all the hoohah this week, failed at my job and didn’t back it up Sunday night. We’ll see what we can recover.
So I’ll be starting the new year by supporting the consumer economy, and giving back some of the ground we’d gained on our credit cards…sigh…
Blogging may be light as we only have one working computer in the house for the four of us; Middle Guy’s new ‘puter will show up Thursday, and mine the day after, I trust.
For a laptop, a friend just got an iBook, which seems like the bargain of the week; my only problem is that I use Visio and Access extensively and I don’t think there are any cross-platform versions or equivalents…
….so what kind of (physically durable) notebooks are people using these days?

Mostafa Sabet, over at meaux than you can handle, posts his theory on how the PA could splinter into someone who could be negotiated with…
….checkitout…

While surfing through the OxBlog links, I tripped over this article in Dissent by Michael Kazin…‘A Patriotic Left’:

I love my country. I love its passionate and endlessly inventive culture, its remarkably diverse landscape, its agonizing and wonderful history. I particularly cherish its civic ideals-social equality, individual liberty, a populist democracy-and the unending struggle to put their laudable, if often contradictory, claims into practice. I realize that patriotism, like any powerful ideology, is a “construction” with multiple uses, some of which I abhor. But I persist in drawing stimulation and pride from my American identity.
Regrettably, this is not a popular sentiment on the contemporary left. Antiwar activists view patriotism as a smokescreen for U.S. hegemony, while radical academics mock the notion of “American exceptionalism” as a relic of the cold war, a triumphal myth we should quickly outgrow. All the rallying around the flag after September 11 increased the disdain many leftists feel for the sentiment that lies behind it. “The globe, not the flag, is the symbol that’s wanted now,” scolded Katha Pollitt in the Nation. Noam Chomsky described patriotic blather as simply the governing elite’s way of telling its subjects, “You shut up and be obedient, and I’ll relentlessly advance my own interests.”
Both views betray an ignorance of American history, as well as a quixotic desire to leap from a distasteful present to a gauzy future liberated from the fetters of nationalism. Love of country was a demotic faith long before September 11, a fact that previous lefts understood and attempted to turn to their advantage. In the United States, Karl Marx’s dictum that the workers have no country has been refuted time and again. It has been not wage earners but the upper classes-from New England gentry on the Grand Tour a century ago to globe-trotting executives and cybertech professionals today-who view America with an ambivalent shrug, reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s line, “America is my country, Paris is my hometown.”

Yup, America is my country…I like the sound of that…

I’m working on a longer post about democracy (and the fact that we aren’t one, thankfully) and its history as a political concept in the West. but that’s going to take a while. and in the meantime I keep hearing people on both the Right and the Left say that the problems in the Third World stem from ‘a lack of democracy’, and that many problems, including the problems of Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East cannot be solved until the United States gets out of the way and ‘supports democracy’.
People keep using that word, but I do not think they really know what that word means…
Look, democracy isn’t like Vitamin D tablets, which we can airdrop into poor countries where rickets is prevalent. It’s not a consumer product we can package up and export in shipping containers. Soldiers with guns and bombs can’t enforce or create democracy. People who suggest that they can are simply ignorant of two or three thousand years of political history.
The history of First World efforts to ‘give things’ to the Third World is fraught with examples where we’ve taken something, plunked it down, and wondered why it didn’t work.
We might as well take a million Ducati 998 racing motorcycles and airdrop them into Afghanistan. They’re fast and sexy, but out of the million, half a million won’t be running in a year, and less than 10% in the year after that. It’s not because the Afghans are mechanically ignorant; they are brilliant at improvising ad-hoc machining to make parts for, for example, guns. They self-manufacture clones of AK-47’s and other weapons in artisan’s shops.
But to keep something as complex as a Ducati running implies a number of things; it implies a public infrastructure of smooth roads, synthetic oil, and premium gasoline. It implies a network of artisans trained in maintaining electronic fuel injection and desmodromic valve trains. It implies a supply of parts, from tires, which only last about 3,000 miles, to spark plugs, wires, bodywork, brake pads, etc. etc. etc.
The product that we see…the motorcycle…is the visible peak of a complicated pyramid of relationships, skills, and assets.
And an industrial product such as a motorcycle is vastly less complex than the social, cultural, economic, and political systems necessary to stably and peacefully share political power among the citizens of a nation. You have, first of all, to have the concept of citizenship, which implies a concept of nation.
Look, this isn’t some racist ‘the wogs aren’t ready for self-rule’ position. Nor is it a ‘the revolutionary vanguard must guide the lumpenproletariat’ one. But I’m frustrated at the shallowness of the commentators who casually toss off the notion that a Healthy Dose of Democracy will cure whatever ails folks. Democracy doesn’t come in doses, and while I’m positive that non-Western forms of democracy can bloom and thrive, I’m also sure that they won’t be created by fiat.
This is an important issue, because within U.S. politics, the temptation to simply assume that we can help create foreign democracies where there are none of the cultural or political precursors is a ‘cargo cult’ that we must get beyond.
So can we find another panacea?? Or better still, can we start thinking a bit harder about this and come up with something that might actually work?
Better still, go read the The Federalist Papers and then talk casually about how simple it is to ‘create democracy’…
UPDATE: I swear I hadn’t looked at OxBlog, where David is apparently taking a contrary position. I’ll read him and follow his links when I get a chance, and we’ll see if he can change my mind. I’m dubious…
(fixed typos)
(Updated)

Via Rough & Tumble, another column on the silencing of dissent.
Marjie Lundstrom, in the Sacramento Bee, writes about three instances in which dissent was silenced.
The New York Times’ spiking of columns critical of it’s anti-Augusta stance; the new Berkeley mayor Tom Dean’s trashing of student publications critical of him just before his election; and the generalized ‘silencing of dissent’ on the coming war in Iraq.
There’s just one problem…
…only two of the three are real.
I’m the poster child for ambivalence on this coming war. I need to write something about it, and have trashed about six false starts. But I’m certainly not feeling like the voices opposed to the war are being silenced. Not in the L.A. Times, not in the New York Times, not in the Washington Post, not in the Chicago Tribune.
From the Bee:

Letters
Published on December 21, 2002, Page B6.
Striking first
Re “Bush sanctions strike-first plan,” Dec. 11: It makes no sense that the U.S., a sovereign nation, is “allowed” to have weapons of mass destruction, while other sovereign nations are not “allowed.” It is both ironic and terrifying that this country may use such weapons to prevent another country from producing its own. On the day that President Bush pushes the nuclear button, will you be proud to be an American?
– Matt Nelsenador

From the Tribune:

Protesters denounce U.S. Navy presence
Items compiled from Tribune news services
Published December 27, 2002
MARSEILLE, FRANCE — With chants of “no blood for oil,” about 1,000 people marched through this southern French port city Thursday, protesting the presence of a U.S. Navy battle group and the prospect of an American-led war against Iraq.
Dozens of police kept order during the rally, which was peaceful even though demonstrators briefly shouted at a small group of U.S. sailors…

From the New York Times

THREATS AND RESPONSES: DISSENT; Protests Held Across the Country to Oppose War in Iraq
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON (NYT) 911 words
Late Edition – Final , Section A , Page 22 , Column 1
LEAD PARAGRAPH – From a morning blockade of a federal building in Chicago to a lunchtime march to the White House to an evening discussion at a Y.W.C.A. in Detroit, a cross-section of activists, celebrities and everyday Americans held more than 150 events across the country today to oppose a war with Iraq.

From the Los Angeles Times

December 27, 2002
COMMENTARY
A Fight for Freedom of Speech
Dissent doesn’t mean a lack of patriotism.
By Eric Foner and Glenda Gilmore, Eric Foner is a professor of history at Columbia University. Glenda Gilmore is a professor of history at Yale University.
We are two of the professors to whom Daniel Pipes refers when he asks: “Why do American academics so often despise their own country while finding excuses for repressive and dangerous regimes?”

These took me three minutes to find. So help me out here…
Why exactly are the opponents of the war acting like the Ministry for Prevention of Protests is about to beat them back into the burning building?
Sadly, the examples of repression she cites that appear real…the New York Times and Berkeley stories…represent the casual use of repression by the left, not of it.
Honesty, folks. It all starts with honesty.
(cleaned up some wording)