There you go again, I can imagine my interlocutors saying in a Reaganesque moment, again with the torture. Between torture and the closely related modern security state, I’ve blogged numerous times (sorry, no links — just do a search) to report my disgust and condemnation, not that any of it matters. Registering those sentiments is irrelevant. So why bring it up again? Because it just stinks, and much as I hate to have knowledge of it, the problem needs repeated airing.

The precipitating news this time is a Salon article by Glenn Greenwald about a recent Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Arar vs. Ashcroft (searchable here). The case is “just” another instance of extraordinary rendition and subsequent torture of an innocent person over the course of ten months, which actions are by now so routine that the terms extraordinary and torture have lost all their impact. Business as usual. Move along. Nothing to see. Greenwald nails it with this comment:

So continuous are the inhumane and brutal acts of government leaders that the citizens completely lose the capacity for moral outrage and horror.  The permanent claims of existential threats from an endless array of enemies means that secrecy is paramount, accountability is deemed a luxury, and National Security trumps every other consideration — even including basic liberties and the rule of law.  Worst of all, the President takes on the attributes of a protector-deity who can and must never be questioned lest we prevent him from keeping us safe.

The court decision (granting blanket immunity to government functionaries in cases of presumed national security) appalls me, not just because it fails so utterly in basic humanity but because the courts are (or once were) our best hope for checks on excesses of the Executive Branch. Congress certainly isn’t applying the brakes.

The state hasn’t merely set its sights on foreigners traveling to or through the U.S. Here is a glimpse of what’s to come as the civil authorities wage domestic battles against the citizenry: “Robocops Come to Pittsburgh.” The array of high-tech assaults now becoming available to police (which now resemble the armed forces) is just astounding. Although these devices are rationalized as means to quell unrest or disperse protesters, those folks out on the streets are usually Americans, and they’re typically reacting to something, sometimes with inchoate, unfocused violence. But they’re increasingly recharacterized by those charged to protect them as un-Americans, anti-Americans, terrorists, or evildoers. Sure, sometimes they’re mere vandals or criminals, but not often. Yet they and others on the scene unfortunate enough to be guilty by proximity (including journalists) are swept into whatever administrative action is decided upon by civil authorities, which typically entails catch-and-release dragnets completed within the 24-hour window where charges must be filed yet function to dispirit and nullify all forms of public protest.

This is what is meant by the dictum Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. The holders of power are insulated from accountability and derive erotic pleasure from deploying power. The connection between sexuality and death is pretty well recognized in the marketplace of ideas. Here is one of many such analyses tied to recent ideology. Will it go away in time with education, shame, moral uplift, protest, etc.? I doubt it. Like other Machiavellian behaviors and institutions, such as slavery, they keep cropping up again and again in disguised or subtly altered forms because their underlying appeal or utility never goes away fully. I guess the dream of world peace is the stuff of beauty queen pageant contestants, who mouth the words for us, telling us what we want to hear about both them and ourselves, so that we can sleep quietly at night. Meanwhile, the atrocities continue.

A friend gave me the first book of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson to read. I don’t read a lot of fiction, but this is a nice diversion from my usual fare. The novel is so thoroughly derivative of Tolkien I find myself irritated frequently, but it has its own ideas and devices, too. Though only halfway into the book, one idea caught my attention distinctly.

Among the numerous races of people and characters are the Haruchai, a warrior class that serves the Lords of the Land. The Haruchai are reminiscent of the Samurai. What struck me, however, is the manner in which the Haruchai came into the service of the Lords. Some 2000 years before the time of the first novel, the Haruchai prepared to wage war against the Land, but the Lords refused to go to war lest the Haruchai be destroyed utterly. Instead, the Lords gave to the Haruchai precious gifts. Oddly, the Haruchai responded by taking a vow of service to the Lords for a debt that could never be fully repaid. Although never quite stated so baldly, the Haruchai basically enslaved themselves to the Lords, presumably out of gratitude.

These two acts — refusal to destroy one’s enemy and self-enslavement — are pretty remarkable. If applied to our current geopolitics, it would suggest that the U.S. might think twice about its preemptive wars against minor powers, and those minor powers might consider some form of tribute for the greater power’s refusal to invade or otherwise engage. Of course, that’s idealistic. What we have instead are the lone world superpower beating up on everyone else, like the tantrums of a schoolyard bully, and the irrational promises of the victim of our aggression to deliver the mother of all battles, only to fail in less than a month yet subsequently mount a surprisingly effective insurgency. If the situation in the Covenant novel is slightly comical, it’s certainly matched by the situation in which we find ourselves.

Like Tolkien’s novels, Donaldson’s work appears to be the subject of considerable analysis. I haven’t read any of it, since I don’t want to spoil my reading pleasure. So I don’t know if this observation has been made, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Donaldson has conceived of his characters and their world as being profoundly stupid, as in cognitively challenged. Sure, they adhere to strict codes of honor and integrity (an almost child-like allegiance), and their florid, Tolkienesque language is sophisticated, but from what I’ve read so far, they’re also bumbling fools in their absolutism and inability to regain lost lore and knowledge. What else but sheer stupidity would compel a people to enslave itself out of gratitude or a generous people to accept such an arrangement?

During a meet-up with friends at a coffeshop, I met a fellow whose background is in radio announcing. He tried to convince us that Rush Limbaugh and Adolph Hitler are/were two of the greatest public speakers in the history of mankind. I responded that while they are clearly effective speakers, I wasn’t prepared to separate their respective messages from the style of delivery and award them my unreserved admiration. He kept insisting that in terms of pure oratorical skill, these two are unsurpassed. I then replied that it is a common modern gloss to believe that recent history is the most important. Considering how the Greeks had raised oratory and rhetoric to a high form of expression, it is impossible to say “of all time” with respect to someone so recent without it being hyperbole. Still, the discussion got me thinking about the differing goals and modes of public speech.

I’ve only really seen newsreel footage of Hitler when his pitch and affect at the end of a speech had risen to that of a madman. Hindsight bias makes that assessment a foregone conclusion. But his renown as a public speaker was very real prior to the worst parts of German history, and he apparently could whip his audiences into hysterics where they would agree to nearly anything by carefully modulating his speech, delivered over a sustained interval of time (sometimes two or more hours), to create an inexorable crescendo where he was literally screaming at the tail end. There were other elements at work, such as staging, lighting, appeals to myth and the occult, and those very snappy uniforms. The totality of the onslaught must have been irresistable.

Limbaugh, OTOH, tends to stay at a high pitch continuously — especially in terms of simple provocation. I find that easy to tune out, but it apparently fuels and satisfies some of the talking head junkies out there (called dittoheads when they’re Limbaugh fans). It’s also clear that a not insignificant part of Limbaugh’s aim is to gather up market share, as opposed to leading the German people during the Weimar Republic, and that saying and doing newsworthy and infamous things to keep attention fixed on himself might be a little less than genuine. In short, it’s a show, entertaining but mean-spirited and manipulative in the extreme.

Contrast these styles of overwrought oratory with Obama’s careful, even prosaic rolling out of policy, opinion, and planning in his speeches, and it’s easy to see why Obama, while credited with being a superior speaker, is unable to motivate the masses to embrace his message without a good many falling away over time or actively opposing him for partisan reasons.

A slick speaker is cause for concern among those of us who recognized that we’re more vulnerable to manipulation and propaganda than we’d like to admit. Which of these speakers is actually more dangerous might seem an obvious determination, but history isn’t yet done with two of them. The question is nonsensical, actually, since the damage wrought by poisoning the public sphere can’t really be quantified as well as, say, the lives lost in WWII.

I blogged before about vertical excitement. The last term to cross my mindspace is vertical drinking, which refers to patronage of bars with cheap drink, limited seating, and few or no food options. It seems some bureaucrat thinks a crackdown on such establishments is due because these bars don’t merely enable but actively encourage drunkenness. This concern over our beverage habits echoes recent consideration of levying a new tax on soft drinks, which would purportedly serve as both a healthcare measure (by decreasing consumption) and a means of closing a funding gap should healthcare reform ever be enacted (don’t hold your breath).

As usual, a plethora of competing issues opens up. Politicians have apparently learned little from the experience of Prohibition or the failed so-called War on Drugs. Taxing and/or criminalizing behaviors deemed unsavory or unhealthy has never been a path to success in achieving the stated goal — even if the stated goal is honest. People simply circumvent or flaunt the law or pony up the dough to pay the sin tax; little or nothing changes in the underlying behavior. Further, whether a matter of deep culture or the result of the thrum of marketing machinery, the public’s desire to imbibe booze or carbonated sugar may by now be beyond the power to resist, at least for most of us. Despite a misplaced faith in the ruggedness of the individual and his or her associated free will, it’s more true that we are all products of our environment and its conditioning. Once the soft drink was successfully bundled as an indispensible ingredient of every meal, it followed that everyone would accept and even expect soft drinks rather than seek something better or neutral, such as water. And since booze has long been established as a primary social behavior (which manages to overcome the initial wretchedness of the flavor before booze becomes an acquired taste), it’s virtually a foregone conclusion that nearly everyone with means and opportunity will try drinking and have to work out some equilibrium with it.

Do drinking establishments that promote vertical drinking (that is, until the patron passes out and goes horizontal) create or answer the demand? It hardly matters. Nor does it make sense to try to regulate or legislate drinking behaviors. People gonna do what they’re gonna do.

While traveling recently in the Southwest, I made a startling realization, more like a reminder than a discovery. When traveling, one’s usual feeding and grooming routines are interrupted, and if one lacks access to kitchens and showers, one is forced to improvise and/or forgo some of the basic maintenance we perform daily, almost automatically and without much circumspection. The reminder is often expressed after a nice, warm shower and a decent meal, whereupon one begins to “feel human” again. Of course, the natural world is indifferent to whether humans are fed, clothed, housed, and after that, cleaned up, powdered and pampered, and entertained in the myriad ways that we now take for granted as being civilized. The utter indifference of the natural world to the considerable energies spent on such basic maintenance is often interpreted as hostility, especially in a difficult clime like the Southwest, where plants and animals have evolved some fairly elaborate and effective means of survival where the heat of the sun and the lack of water make men blanche. Some of those means survive beyond death, as I discovered when I was occupied clearing away a dead cactus and ended up covered in burrs, bloodied pinpricks, and scratches. Once upon a time, humans had also adapted to that environment, but those cultures are now gone.

Our civilized ways have moved beyond most conscious thought as technologies have arisen to make civilized prerogatives largely invisible. For instance, we live and sleep in warmth (or in hot summers and southerly locations, relative cool), drink from the tap, take hot showers, and power our many devices via wall plugs. We telephone the utility companies to activate services. Automatic timers and thermostats regulate such devices for us, removing them further from our day-to-day awareness except for bill paying. Very few of us have experience with hauling water or applying our labor to turning a grindstone or digging a pit for an outhouse. But if predictions of many awaiting the imminent collapse of industrial civilization come true — which predictions range from as close in as 20 years to as far off as 150 years — we are assured that those still here on the other side of the collapse (a far smaller population than now exists) will be less familiar with the relative ease we now experience in the First World as “civilized people” and will become far more familiar with a bleak austerity where practical skills confer more power than pushing electrons around a computer screen or network. Whether society declines gradually to such a state or hits a figurative wall where everything falls apart at once is still the subject of considerable debate in some circles, but the eventuality is scarcely worth questioning anymore. The short-sightedness of human nature and the ineffectiveness of our leadership and institutions have already carried us beyond the tipping point, whether or not we have the courage to accept it, so no hope for a technological fix or a last-minute turnaround are reasonable to a rational observer of the direction history is taking us.

The newly emerging primal fear is that those in the halls of power when the crunch comes, who may be among the most “civilized” among us, will mount a last-ditch though futile effort to preserve those structures that have performed the basic maintenance to which we’ve all become accustomed. The power elite have most invested in industrial civilization. The masses will cling to an unsustainable past, too, until it becomes clear that, like the disproportionate amount of wealth (nearly half) controlled by the top ten percent of earners, provision of basic services is no longer their right or preserve. Severe dislocations and deprivations like those experienced post-Katrina will be the norm, except for those who retreat to well-prepared and -armed enclaves, abandoning the masses to their lot even more fully and abjectly than today.

Like others deeply enmeshed in the Information Age and its myriad technologies, I spend a lot of time at the computer. I use it for work and for information gathering. I don’t use it much for games, entertainment, or viewing video. So I found myself wondering recently what numskull conceived of the computer screen in landscape orientation when almost everything I read is better in portrait orientation. All the documents I create are in portrait, and the inability to see more than a portion of the page is irritating. Almost immediately, the answer occurred to me that, despite the computer display’s meager origins in command-line user interfaces and vertically scrolling text, the screen itself had more in common with the landscape orientation of the TV than with the portrait orientation of the printed page.

Although we live in three-dimensional space, the height dimension is so thin or flat compared to length and width that height is poorly perceived by the human visual sense. (Side note: height used to be spelled heighth, with the same final th as length and width, but that concordance was dropped at some point.) Prior to the last century, we had no flight, no buildings taller than a few stories, and relatively few needs to process visual stimuli in terms of height. Accordingly, we believed for millennia that the world is flat, and our mental maps were organized primarily in two dimensions: along and across the horizon. We took a landscape view of most visual stimuli: having depth and width but little meaningful height beyond the scale of the human figure.

In fact, I suspect the height of the portrait orientation derives from the obvious need for vertical space in portraiture. Why the printed page also settled into portrait orientation isn’t so obvious to me. On occasion, one finds a book created in landscape orientation, but that’s usually when publishing a picture book, typically a children’s book. Printed music varies more widely than text, but it also uses the portrait orientation as the standard. A perfectly square area might be the obvious compromise, but it appears only rarely — mostly in charts, graphs, and maps that are more constrained by the information they present than are text or imagery. Photography may be the sole medium where changing orientation has clear utility and is accomplished so simply by rotating the camera 90 degrees.

Back to the computer screen. The origins the screen and display technology were in pictorial display, which is to say, visual processing of moving images on TV rather than reading text. If the CRT (cathode ray tube) constrained early computer screens to landscape orientation, that limitation was overcome with the rotatable screen, which though still available has not been widely adopted. As computer usage has matured, it’s become clear that the medium is better suited, like the TV, to video than to text. Although reading from the screen isn’t foreclosed, the nature of the medium inevitably transforms reading into something else, something akin to reading but not quite the same, really. Christine Rosen develops this idea in a fascinating article in The New Atlantis titled “People of the Screen.”

The introduction of the widescreen display for computers clearly moves the computer away from being a work machine towards being an entertainment device. Any argument that it can be both simultaneously strikes me as hollow, along the lines of the TV being an educational device. If the computer does eventually become the complete home media center and replaces the TV and stand-alone stereo system as hoped by many technophiles, perhaps it will be fulfilling its destiny, with obvious implications for further debasing the literacy and erudition of the general public.

Any given week, I have at least a dozen blog ideas. Most of them don’t get written because my style of blogging requires more time than I have to devote to careful consideration and eventual organization and writing as a thoughtful blog. With all the reading I do, I have a much higher input than I do output. So the ideas and links pile up and get stale. If I’m to be honest, most of them will never make their way into a blog post. So I’ve decided to purge some of my link file, in no particular order, and make a few comments on each. As always, comments are welcome.

A library in Massachusetts has decided to relinquish its book collection in favor of digital media. A friend of mine characterized the book as the flagship carrier of knowledge. A library without books begs the question whether it can still be called a library. Either way, it’s a short-sighted move and pretty risky in terms of how students best learn.

Until fairly recently, I knew practically nothing about subatomic physics. I still know almost nothing, but I keep running across mentions of the Higgs boson, also sometimes called the God Particle. This question/answer from The Straight Dope describes it pretty well.

Names for geological periods exist in multiple timescales, from supereons to eons to eras to periods to epochs and finally to ages. Those who consider such things believe that we’re at the end of the Holocene epoch as global warming and climate change threaten to destabilize what we’ve known through all of human history. Most apocalyptic discussions focus on the collapse of civilization. This one is about the end of human dominion.

A video that discusses media ecology and the impact of, ironically, video. Media ecology has been one of my preoccupations in the last few years, primarily from reading Neil Postman.

Dmitri Orloff offers a comparison of the former U.S.S.R. and the current U.S.A. vis-a-vis our ability to cope in the event of systemic collapse. The hindsight perspective is instructive because the U.S.S.R. actually did collapse, but Orloff believes the U.S.A. will be far less able to transition to some new style of social organization when the time comes.

This brief argument avers that hope for a solution to global warming and climate change is futile, and worse, even harmful. Therefore, we should abandon hope and simply begin living now in a sustainable manner.

This is a more elaborate and scientific argument about our declining energy future suggesting that we give up our oil addiction sooner rather than later. I’ve heard it said that if you aren’t yet convinced of our inevitable decline/collapse resulting from environmental destruction, oil scarcity, climate change, etc., then you simply don’t understand the science. This article aims to provide a convincing explanation.

This article called Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence examines and elaborates on the old saw that one accomplishes nothing through the use of force.

Some of the superrich have gotten the memo that things are going south sometime soon and are quietly preparing to hunker down in fortified compounds whilst the rabble fend for themselves. The prerogatives of the rich have always been different from those of the masses, but I can’t shake the mental image of Nero fiddling as Rome burns and the highly questionable morality of insulating oneself from our collective fate.

Earlier this year, concerns about food security led many to buy seeds and start gardens. However, eventual scarcity may be a future created long ago by upsetting the intricate balance of the ecosystem and shifting agriculture to chemical- and oil-based production. In our technological cleverness, we may well have outwitted ourselves.

In perhaps the worst news of the last month, Obama says he won’t give up rendition as a tool of the state. I guess we’re supposed to trust that no further torture will occur. I don’t believe it for a moment.

Here is a heartbreaking discussion between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth that amounts to fussing over the option of fighting the industrial apocalypse (not quite denying it, but strangely similar) or more gracefully accepting our collective fate. Maybe it’s not an either/or proposition, or maybe it’s just about arranging the proverbial deck chairs on the R.M.S. Titanic. Either way, it’s certainly odd to be entertaining such discussions.

In disparate superhero narratives where there exists a surfeit of characters with extraordinary powers, someone eventually chimes in something to the effect that once everyone is special, then no one is. Devaluation of special status exists elsewhere, notably with grade inflation in schools and the refusal to keep score in kids’ sports. Both are perversions of the egalitarian instinct. (I’ve also heard it put that we’ve mistaken education for an exercise in affirmation, but that’s another diatribe for another time.) The example that really chaps my ass, however, is the automatic standing ovation.

Public performance is usually regarded as having three components: the creative content, the actual performance taking place on stage, and the audience response occurring both during and immediately after the performance. The creative content might be in a fixed form having existed for decades or centuries, it might be partially mediated by reconstruction or reinterpretation (e.g., a modern setting for a Shakespearean play), or it may be improvised in the moment of performance based on structures and ideas worked out in advance (e.g., improvised jazz and comedy shows). The quality of the performance is ideally what elicits a response from the audience, whether the audience’s emotional resonance sensed by the performers or mere applause. Accordingly, the audience must do its part by attending to the performance, being in the moment, and exercising some critical judgment at the conclusion. Yet audience response in many performance venues has become calcified and mannered. The audience no longer performs its role:  providing feedback. Outdoor summer concerts are probably the worst. The sound is usually inferior, and most of the audience treats the on-stage activity as wallpaper while some other activity — talking, eating, reading the newspaper, or merely soaking in the atmosphere – is the real focus of their attention. (This behavior might be an implicit answer to Milton Babbitts’ infamous challenge, “Who Cares if You Listen?”, the answer being yet another question posed by the audience: who cares if we listen?)

Worst of all, at least for this cultural critic, is the automatic standing ovation at so many concert performances. In many performances, despite a high level of execution, the performers appear to be “phoning it in.” Yet someone is sure to leap immediately to his feet (it’s usually a man) and spark a lazy, rambling ovation that has become as inevitable as it is meaningless. It’s impossible to assess whether the standing o is in response to the performance quality, the performer’s stature, or an irrational need to validate one’s own experience. Maybe it’s a foregone conclusion simply because the audience is rising to see over the other goobers standing in the rows directly in front.

What the audience may no longer realize, if in fact it ever did, is that there is considerable power in disapproval. If excellence is a value worth exercising our critical faculties to reward, then the audience can’t simply award virtually every performance its  stamp of emphatic approval in the form of a standing ovation. Withholding applause following an on-stage trainwreck where someone is revealed, for example, to be lipsyncing or talentless (or both), might be a hole gaping enough to shame the performer. But that’s really closer to damning with faint praise. Once in a while, I’d like to witness full-on booing and heckling the way performers used to expect when they failed. Those behaviors still occur in comedy, where racist jokes or jokes simply told too soon can dampen a room very quickly. We need some of that responsiveness in the concert hall.

I saw this YouTube video of a piano concerto written for a cat and my head just about exploded with all the mixed emotions and conflicting ideas it caused.

First of all, the concerto is fairly craftily written around video that was undoubtedly assembled out of sequence from different bits to create a “performance.” The scare quotes are purposeful, since the cat at the piano would never be able to reproduce the performance. While the composer’s skill is evident, the cat’s skill is equivalent to that of elephants, monkeys, and earthworms that “paint” abstracts, which is to say, there is no skill at all beyond having figured out the basic mechanism for applying paint or making noise at the piano. The immediate, positive response of the audience is to be expected, I suppose. It’s the same sort of pandering stunt as the robot conductor that everyone liked about a year ago.

It bugs me, obviously, that the technical skills to produce the video or program the robot make decidedly crass artistic choices inevitable. Such decisions are made all the time by promoters and marketers trying to attract audiences. But the core audience for classical music has been shrinking for decades. So how effective is it, really, to debase the art just for a cheap stunt? It’s quality that’s compelling.

Many aspects of the dominant culture confound me. Why do people still chase money as an end unto itself? What makes watching sports (as opposed to doing sports) so compelling? Why are so many people so lazy and incurious that they settle for lifelong intellectual feebleness (probably without realizing it). Why are people so desperately afraid of boredom and/or being alone? The list goes on and on. Still, there are a few questions that for me rise above these mundane examples.

Identity Politics

The very natural tendency to identify with some group(s) on the basis of ethnicity, sexual orientation, lifestyle, religion, nationality, political orientation, etc. is sensible in the respect that we all feel most comfortable amongst other like us. Preserving the unique culture of a group, especially folk cultures developed over many generations, is also worthwhile. Yet the lines of division between rival groups have become so hardened over time, each staking competing claims to victimhood and right to protection under the law, that the whole notion of belonging to a group has morphed into a liability. Many groups also have by now rigid dogma that makes membership forbidding rather than inviting.

The Cult of Celebrity

Why should anyone care who is sleeping with whom, who gained or lost weight, or what someone wore to a show? Why is there a whole industry (blogs, magazines, tabloids, paparazzi, etc.) devoted to tormenting celebrities just to keeping us informed of the latest jiggle of some starlet or utterance of some dude whose strongest claim on our attention is typically having won the genetics lottery? And considering that each newsbit is replaced by the next at a rate that makes it difficult to keep pace even for those with the attention span of a gnat, is there some point to this endless idol fascination?

Reality TV

There is very little reality reflected on TV in general, and perhaps even less in so-called reality TV. Most are showcases of human trainwrecks, parades of people in pointless cycles of competition, or at their most compelling, a combination of the two. The manufactured storylines and excessively long, pregnant pauses and locked stares make daytime soaps look like Shakepearean drama by comparison. Sure, reality TV is cheaper to produce than most other programming, but why are people tuning in?

Superheros

The underlying structure of consciousness as narrative is increasingly clear, but the ancient and enduring fascination with heros, or more recently, superheros with superpowers, gives me considerable pause. According to Joseph Campbell, the short form of the hero story goes like this:

The hero is introduced in his ordinary world, where he receives the call to adventure. He is reluctant at first but is encouraged by the wise old man or woman to cross the first threshold, where he encounters tests and helpers. He reaches the innermost cave, where he endures the supreme ordeal. He seizes the sword or the treasure and is pursued on the road back to his world. He is resurrected and transformed by his experience. He returns to his ordinary world with a treasure, boon, or elixir to benefit his world.

The bastardized version we typically see today, stripped of most of its formerly robust formal elements, is an antihero winning the day through superior force of arms rather than skill or persuasion – totally ignoring that victory can’t be justified through deployment of superior power alone. An argument can be made that skill and persuasion are simply more subtle versions of power than brute force, but it’s that very subtlety that truly informs narrative, not the bullying of a thoughtless barbarian.

Support of the Military

This is the one certain to piss off more people than any other. Why does the U.S. military (or any foreign military when not handily redefined and dismissed as enemies) deserve our automatic, genuflecting respect? Is their service more valuable than that of firemen, police, and teachers simply because the military responds to threats to the state, whether real, perceived, imagined, or created out of thin air by venal government officials? Further, the military draws its personnel from the same general population as other labor groups, except that many who join the military do so because it’s a refuge of last resort for those unable to do anything but offer themselves up as cannon fodder. And because normal, civil behavior is frequently suspended in theaters of conflict, the conduct of rank-and-file service personnel (no longer just servicemen) often descends into a moral abyss, as evidenced by the steady stream of stories of rape, pillage, profiteering, and torture. It’s certainly not my contention that the military does no good on balance. Rather, it’s more nearly a dirty job that someone has to do.