What You Do to the Least of These - Vol. 2 (More of an End of the Year Spectacular):
So here we are, in the darkness at the edge of the new year, and Time magazine goes and makes the American soldier into the Personages of the Year. Yep, they're always there for us, ready to be turned loose on the streets of Your Town, USA, should there be another terrorist incident and martial law is declared and, oh, dream of neocon dreams, the Constitution is suspended, like a class clown with one too many whoopee cushions.
And the military is just great because all those minorities and no-teeth poverty-stricken sunsabitches (and daughters) have somewhere to go to provide them with three square, a salary, benefits like the possibility of a college education (and, with budget cuts to student loans, Pell Grants, etc., the G.I. Bill is becoming one of the only moderately assured places where the poor and disenfranchised can get the money for college).
And, shit and goddamn, yee-haa, let's not forget the violence factor, where you get to carry guns, shoot said guns, kill A-rabs with said guns and the shiver to your nuts that causes. You get to rough up reporters, dodge bullets just like Arnold Schwarzenegger, beat prisoners. Motherfucker, what a rush. Sure, there's the downside of getting killer, injured, mentally fucked-up. But that's a small trade-off for a guaranteed college education, combat pay, and all those great perks.
Of course, that's our ideal military, our fantasy military, our government broadcast military - it doesn't have dick to do with reality, which is a constant stream of the Bush administration fucking over the current and former members of the armed services. Between the cutbacks in iminent danger pay, the slash in pay for wounded soldiers, and on and on, and we have some major (and non-com) dicking going on. Of course, it hardly needs to be pointed out that those who command the military from the White House (minus one Colin Powell) have the combined military experience of the actors in Saving Ryan's Privates.
Now we have word that, with the extension of tours of duty, members of the military, stretched thin, committing suicide, are having retirements postponed and are essentially being held as prisoners of Bush's war. Yep, nothing like extending enlistment periods for the morale of the personages of the year.
The point here is obvious: the Bush administration will trot out soldiers as props for the next election. There will be wounded, one-legged, scarred-face, no-testicled boys in wheelchairs and dress blues pointed to during the State of the Union as proof of the good of those who fight for "us." But the constant mistreatment of soldiers and veterans ought to concern us all. Because if those who fight, whether for noble causes or under orders from a faux commander in chief, can be so readily disposed of on a whim of budget, then what hope is there for the rest of us?
