It’s been interesting to be at Ft. Benning for the last few days. Biggest Guy had two ceremonies – the ‘Turning Blue’ ceremony pictured below, and a final graduation at which he and his peers (all except six young men who failed post-Christmas drug tests and were shown the door) were officially accepted as infantry soldiers.<\/p>\n
The cultural gap between our family home and his new home are wide – not just everyone in the movie theater standing for the national anthem played before the feature, but the fact that everyone obeys – seriously – the speed limits, the clerk at the videogame store who wouldn’t let Littlest Guy buy World of Warcraft without my OK, and that the level of courtesy and helpfulness from everyone from the checkout clerk at the PX\/mall to the guard who noticed our expired vehicle pass and sent us back for a new one puts my courteous, helpful suburb of Los Angeles to shame.<\/p>\n
I worry more than a little about the military being far too isolated from not only mainstream America, but from the cultural and political elites that run it. The feeling of being in a cocoon on base – in almost every way – got my attention in a not-good way. <\/p>\n
But in a Blue America where veterans are objects of fear or pity, I guess it makes sense.<\/b><\/p>\n
I had fantasies that the New York Times series that I dinged last week<\/a> would be better than the lead article suggested. The second article is out, and it looks like it won’t be.<\/p>\n The article is a human-interest story about a badly damaged veteran, his crime, and the consequences of his crime.<\/p>\n Power Line<\/a> does the best take on it, and asks the reader to compare the Time’s coverage of a murderous vet<\/a> with a Medal of Honor winning one<\/a>.<\/p>\n I’ll stand on my original comment:<\/p>\n “Because it’s not part of the narrative of how our soldiers are either depraved or damaged.<\/i>”<\/p>\n It’s funny; I passed up all the Army swag at the PX as kind of tacky – you know, the bumper stickers and license plate frames that seem so cheesy. <\/p>\n After reading the article, I went and ordered one – “I [heart] my soldier”. Once we mount it, I can’t wait for the reactions our hybrid gets when we valet park it in West Los Angeles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Armed Liberal reads the NY Times while at Ft. Benning, and sees some contradictions .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}