Last week, in what was probably a bureaucratic mixup, the Burlington daily newspaper began showing up on my doorstep every morning. The Burlington paper is owned by the Gannett chain and I have a low opinion of it, but free is free, so after breakfast on Sunday, I peeled it open to see what it might say.
The front page was bannered with a story about local floods. I’d spent all day Saturday fighting the effects of local floods and had no desire to read about them Sunday. The sports section kept me going for about 15 minutes, but how come newspapers no longer list baseball players’ batting averages in the box score? I have to buy the Boston Globe to get a decent sports page.
The magazine section, a trashy product from Gannett headquarters, had a photo of some Hollywood beefcake on the cover. It went into the pile. I flipped through the funnies; Prince Valiant may be still alive out there somewhere, but he’s dead and gone in Burlington.
For a lack of anything else to read, I turned to the opinion section, where I found a Gannett columnist who is discouraged by the declining numbers of military veterans among our nation’s leaders. I agree the numbers of veterans in Congress and the administration is dropping. Starting with the end of the second world war and running into the late 1980s, a record of military service was practically a requirement for elective or appointed office. The veterans of the world war, growing ever more grizzled with each passing electoral cycle, dominated American politics in the late 20th century, just as the Civil War veterans – north and south – dominated politics in the latter half of the 19th century.
The election of 1992 signaled the passing of the torch from the World War generation to the Vietnam generation, a generation in which many, including the president, said “no” to military service. The veterans, rallying behind Bob Dole, tried to reclaim the field in ’96, but were beaten back.
Vice President Al Gore is a veteran, but neither the secretary of state nor defense is a veteran, nor did the assistant secretaries serve in the military. The director of the CIA is a non-veteran, as is the national security advisor. The opinion writers at the Gannett Corporation find this to be a distressing state of affairs, but I do not. Our Constitution calls for the U.S. military to be subordinate to civilians, and we would do well to keep that distinction hard and bright.
In fact, I think one of the worst effects of World War Two was the damage it did to the American political psyche. The madman Hitler, seizing territory and killing innocent people, had to be stopped by an all-out effort by the forces of justice. And he was. But somewhere in the process, we’ve gotten the wrong idea that our side is always right. Look at the trouble that idea caused in Southeast Asia and Central America. Today it is fashionable in some political circles to paint Saddam Hussein as a madman and a minor Hitler. But Saddam is a madman we built ourselves. In our hatred of Iran, we armed Saddam throughout the 1980s. The blood he sheds today stains our hands, too.
In the upcoming presidential election, we may see two veterans again standing for their parties’ nomination – Al Gore and John McCain. But these men are warriors of a different generation, when combat came to our homes on television and we too saw that war is hell.
War is Over
Last week, in what was probably a bureaucratic mixup, the Burlington daily newspaper began showing up on my doorstep every morning. The Burlington paper is owned by the Gannett chain and I have a low opinion of it, but free is free, so after breakfast on Sunday, I peeled it open to see what it might say.
The front page was bannered with a story about local floods. I’d spent all day Saturday fighting the effects of local floods and had no desire to read about them Sunday. The sports section kept me going for about 15 minutes, but how come newspapers no longer list baseball players’ batting averages in the box score? I have to buy the Boston Globe to get a decent sports page.
The magazine section, a trashy product from Gannett headquarters, had a photo of some Hollywood beefcake on the cover. It went into the pile. I flipped through the funnies; Prince Valiant may be still alive out there somewhere, but he’s dead and gone in Burlington.
For a lack of anything else to read, I turned to the opinion section, where I found a Gannett columnist who is discouraged by the declining numbers of military veterans among our nation’s leaders. I agree the numbers of veterans in Congress and the administration is dropping. Starting with the end of the second world war and running into the late 1980s, a record of military service was practically a requirement for elective or appointed office. The veterans of the world war, growing ever more grizzled with each passing electoral cycle, dominated American politics in the late 20th century, just as the Civil War veterans – north and south – dominated politics in the latter half of the 19th century.
The election of 1992 signaled the passing of the torch from the World War generation to the Vietnam generation, a generation in which many, including the president, said “no” to military service. The veterans, rallying behind Bob Dole, tried to reclaim the field in ’96, but were beaten back.
Vice President Al Gore is a veteran, but neither the secretary of state nor defense is a veteran, nor did the assistant secretaries serve in the military. The director of the CIA is a non-veteran, as is the national security advisor. The opinion writers at the Gannett Corporation find this to be a distressing state of affairs, but I do not. Our Constitution calls for the U.S. military to be subordinate to civilians, and we would do well to keep that distinction hard and bright.
In fact, I think one of the worst effects of World War Two was the damage it did to the American political psyche. The madman Hitler, seizing territory and killing innocent people, had to be stopped by an all-out effort by the forces of justice. And he was. But somewhere in the process, we’ve gotten the wrong idea that our side is always right. Look at the trouble that idea caused in Southeast Asia and Central America. Today it is fashionable in some political circles to paint Saddam Hussein as a madman and a minor Hitler. But Saddam is a madman we built ourselves. In our hatred of Iran, we armed Saddam throughout the 1980s. The blood he sheds today stains our hands, too.
In the upcoming presidential election, we may see two veterans again standing for their parties’ nomination – Al Gore and John McCain. But these men are warriors of a different generation, when combat came to our homes on television and we too saw that war is hell.