Vignettes

As 50,000 soldiers, some of whom are friends of mine, wait for the end of their time in Iraq to come to an end and, most likely, their new misadventure in Afghanistan to begin, my colleagues and my family discuss the “end of the war”.

As “The Muslims” prepare to build their victorious hard-on of a community center in New York City and fundamentalist Christians continue to stir the post-presidential election casserole of woeful angst, I prepare to receive my students for my third year of teaching.

Moving into my new classroom, I notice one large American flag hanging on the back wall and two smaller flags mounted onto the whiteboard in the front. Our JROTC cadets installed these flags last year under the direction of the superintendent and, after a decade of absence, the pledge of allegiance is now recited each morning in classrooms across campus. The principals and several teachers continue to berate and punish students who do not partake in the national communion and, since this has begun, I have had to become more careful when I tell my students that they cannot be required to recite one word of the pledge.  

One of our JROTC instructors, during a lull between staff meetings, tells me that the Japanese never built a victory monument at Pearl Harbor and I concede his point yet remind him that Islam is not a nation, has no worldwide hierarchy, never made a formal declaration of war and that, among other things, the Japanese lost World War II. Appearances suggest that the United States, a nation that has continually had to order smaller and smaller jockstraps since the end of the Cold War, is neither winning nor losing its war. By virtue of our friendship of a few years he and I agree to disagree,

I know parents who, when reviewing video games their children would like to play, differentiate between “war violence” and any other type of violence. War violence is permissible while criminal violence, in the traditional sense, is not.

Old Spice

The United States, in being one of the first nations truly born out of The Enlightenment, received arguably the two greatest products of the era: nationalism and the notion of civil liberties. The former has remained intact and has only swelled to gargantuan proportions in the intervening years while the latter has become a slogan.  

The idea of civil liberties in the United States or, as they are more often called, freedoms, are the towel around the “Old Spice Guy's” waist. They are the cloak in which we wrap ourselves to avoid having to look at our private parts. So long as we wear that towel and, in a more literal sense, so long as we continue to bombastically imbibe the righteousness of our free society in the great bathroom that is planet Earth, we are safe. We are safe to wiggle around until someone pulls off the towel, smells our armpits and realizes that we are not quite what we hold ourselves to be.

Our “freedoms” are only useful to most so long as these “freedoms” can be easily hoisted to the shoulders to tout our greater love for nationalism. If our “freedoms” disappear, I would venture to guess that most Americans, rather than fleeing the country or taking to the streets, would simply attempt to locate another reason for our stout, BBQ-sized boner for the flag.

Number One!

When it is said that we are the greatest democracy in the world and we beat our hairy and white Uncle Sam chests, what is meant is that we are militarily the most bad-ass freedom-loving dudes on the block. When lists are compiled that attempt to isolate the freest nations in the world, America has not, in any research I have seen, taken the #1 spot. Most of the time we are relegated to somewhere between #5 and #10 and, in some cases, even further back than that. I do not mean to say that these surveys are necessarily foolproof or unbiased, but when the greatest democracy on Earth is not perceived as such, then there is a disconnect in viewpoint that is being ignored by one or many parties.

We are the most heavily armed democracy and we are certainly the most warlike democracy, having spent the better part of the 20^th Century laying waste to a small agrarian Asian nation, firebombing a defenseless German city, dragging our feet in The Philippines or throwing the whole of Guatemala into nightmarish chaos for the sake of the American United Fruit Company and their delicious bananas.

When we do chance to see ourselves in the mirror and realize that $49.7 billion has been requested by the Department of Education for FY2011 while the Department of Defense has requested $708.3 billion (this does not take into account supplemental, which in 2010 totaled $33 billion), many of us return to the lovely old bumper-sticker that reads: “If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you can read this in English, thank a soldier.”  

Notes and References:

• I am receptive to any criticism or correction of any figures that may be found in this blog – if I have made an error in my assessment of data then I would be thankful for feedback. My aim is only to offer commentary and, if in doing so, I have made errors then I would like to be corrected. If I have offended then I would appreciate if the offended party refrained from name-calling or any other sort of sophomoric behavior.

• Perhaps since most school districts rely on local and state funding I should be more careful in being so snarky about this gap in funding. All 50 states and their local districts for FY2010 are listed to have spent a total of $952 billion ($272.5 billion state and $697.7 billion local).

• (Reference: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20.html

• (Reference: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget_factsheets_departments)