November 6, 2006
Kerry’s Joke Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:40 PM EST An interesting piece in The New York Times’ “Week in Review” section yesterday notes that what people took to be John Kerry’s joke—what Kerry said, rather than what he later insisted he meant—was in any case wrong. Kerry had ad libbed that if you don’t do well in high school, you’ll get stuck in Iraq; he claims he meant to say that if you don’t study hard, you’ll get us stuck in Iraq—like President Bush did. I would never rule out Kerry’s claim that he screwed up a joke. But as it happens, and as the Times points out, American soldiers on active duty are likelier to have a high school diploma than are Americans who are not serving (of Americans over 25, 85 percent have diplomas, compared with 97 percent of the people in the military). As for college, its trickier: 17 percent of soldiers on active service have B.A.s, compared to 28 percent of adults in the general population, but a lot of people are recruited out of high school and join up for the education benefits. It seems strange that it took the Times so long to check this out, since anyone familiar with the armed services and America knows that a daunting number of inner-city kids cannot pass the tests to get into the services. But people who work at the Times may not know too many people who join the Army.
I don’t think the Democrats are going to lose this election, but if they lose the next one, it will probably because the attitude suggested by this joke-as-actually-delivered will seem evocative of something a majority of the electorate detests and associates with the Democratic Party: ignorant elite contempt for ordinary people, and for people who possess an older notion of civic virtue. That older attitude is not restricted to good old boys from the red states: after 9/11, when someone in my sister’s office disclosed that her son had dropped out of Harvard, where he had just been admitted, to join the army, no one admitted to anything but somber admiration. That was an office in Manhattan, where employees need law degrees, generally good ones. At my workplace, however, the standard assumption seems to be the one gotten across by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11, that military service is a blood tax on the poor and desperate. It does not seem to occur to many of my colleagues that to join the Army as a volunteer, during wartime, may be a product of motives other than economic desperation.
The assumption that people who enlist are idiots, misfits, and failures was a widespread assumption in Anglo-American society before 1939, when the United States and United Kingdom were the only societies to disdain peacetime conscription. The attitude is now out of date, although a revised version of it seems oddly common among educated people in my part of the world. The revised version comes out as (at best) pity for those who serve, and the assumption that such people are in the service because they are so desperate that they cannot do anything “better” and safer. This attitude is bred of pretty pure ignorance, and small wonder for the ignorance: The last member of my faculty to have served in wartime retired a number of years ago, and I am not sure that we have anyone on the teaching staff who served in peacetime. I do not think this attitude, and this ignorance, is restricted to academics. A friend who was twice embedded in Iraq tells me that alternately genial and hostile contempt for the brains and character of American soldiers, mixed with pity, was not wholly uncommon among reporters who were not embedded. Reporters are no longer themselves anything like a working-class profession, which they were for a good bit of the twentieth century. That social rise may be a mixed blessing.
My attitude toward people who nowadays enlist in the Army was shaped by a very little bit of experience. One part of that experience: I became friendly with retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters after I did a Q&A with him in American Heritage. Ralph is a sixth generation coal miner who enlisted as a private in 1975, is genuinely trilingual in English, Russian, and German, gets around in a lot more languages, and has since published around 20 books. When we took him to lunch at a local club, my editor pointed out a painting by Kensett, and Ralph gave an extempore lecture on Kensett’s interest in Swedenborg and its probable influence on that painting. I find it odd that Ralph patronizes academics rather less than the academics I know patronize soldiers. I find it vastly depressing that a lot of people I know are similarly patronizing.
|
