Dear Mr. Moses:

In your article “Every Hero a Killer?…Not”, you use certain video games as an example to make your point about “heroism” and violence. I don’t disagree with the article, and videogames are certainly open to criticism in this respect. However, you call Metal Gear Solid 3 an example of Pro American ideology. You cite an Amazon reviewer who described how the game shows America’s greatness. First of all, Amazon reviewers are hardly an authority on anything, including the storylines of videogames. If this reviewer had paid attention to the story, he or she would learn that it does anything but show “America’s greatness.”

The story does involve the player controlling an American agent, but by the end of the game you see that the plot is much more than simply Good Americans vs Evil Russians. In fact, you realize that your character is being used, for somewhat nefarious purposes. The game also portrays Kruschev in a good light, and the main villain, while Russian, is a rogue who is trying to overthrow the Soviet government, and ends up killing many Russian soldiers. Another major character in the game, who is supposedly an American defector to the Soviets, turns out to be acting as a triple-agent, and when certain events occur, the US government abandons her, and orders her killed. You, as the main character, end up carrying this out and killing her. It is a very bittersweet ending, and when this soldier returns to a hero’s welcome in Washington, he at first refuses to shake President Johnson’s hand, in front of the cameras. Afterwords, he goes to visit this female soldier’s nameless grave, and salutes the tombstone.

As this game is actually a prequel to the other games in the series, fans know that this character ends up disillusioned by the government he serves, and ends up becoming a mercenary. Whether this changes your opinion of the game or not, I hope that I have at least showed that the game is not as ideological as you may have thought, at least not in the pro-American, neo-conservative kind of way. The game was also made by Japanese designers, as well as written and directed by a Japanese producer. Other games in the series have dealt with Gulf War syndrome, the American hypocrisy with nuclear non-proliferation, and corrupt US Defense Secretaries. There is even a question raised about “videogame soldiers,” and whether they are being desensitized to the horrors of war. These games are certainly not full of right-wing ideology, and while they are violent, they are rated Mature, and the violence is not thrust upon you. There is always a non lethal option to take.

So, like I said, I don’t disagree with your article, but as a big fan of the game, I don’t agree with your using Metal Gear as an example. Hopefully I’ve made my case. Thanks for reading.

Desmond Dapena

Originally Titled: The Most Rev. Dr. Al’s “I’ve Had a Nightmare” speech excerpts

“I’ve had a nightmare that the only place where the sons of sharecroppers and the sons of slave-owners may sit down at the table of brotherhood is in the racially-integrated mess tents constructed on the depleted-uranium tainted soil and sand of oil-rich and militarily stategic nations subjugated by the Amurrakin Empahr all over this God-forsaken planet. I’ve had a nightmare this night!

“I’ve had a nightmare that these sons will unite in a strange and terrible botherhood, not to share the wealth of freedom and peace for all, but to create a plantation spanning the four corners of the globe wherein are imprisoned the new slaves of all nations under the watch and lash of an amoral and malevolent oligarchy. I’ve had a nightmare this night!

“I’ve had a nightmare that scholars, intellectuals, and fence-sitters all across the socio-economic strata of our society will wait until we are past the detour sign on the road to ruin and there is no sustenance left, save serving the war machine involuntarily for one’s daily bread and shelter and uniform; and a flag-draped coffin becomes fair currency for a young life and a family’s tears. I’ve had a nightmare this night!

“I’ve had a nightmare that we may, indeed, have to let our heretofore peaceful and creative protests degenerate into physical force against the unresponsive Leviathan that is beholden, on paper, to follow the lead of the consenting governed; though it may be too late to defuse the whirlwind we may reap as the fruit of our inaction, based on fears, based on lies. I’ve had a nightmare this night!

“I’ve had a nightmare that I may someday soon thank God Almighty that I am dead, dead; dead already…”

Peace, Rev. Al (Alright, so I’m Jewish–so sue me!!)

Remember, we stole it first at Peacefile

My Dear Mr Moses:

I read your article in Counterpunch (Jan 17) with with bemusement and frustration. Rev King was a rare abberation in the history of Christianity. In the main, Christians love peace like wolves love vegetarianism. I don’t have the answers — I barely have the questions. But I do know that the humans as an organism and an organisation will change and embrace peace only after they reject organised superstitious tyranny. Christianty is based on the notion that someone must lose for me to win, a value system that can never bring peace. Thanks, Jack

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Aloha Mr Moses,

You are absolutely correct when you state that “a leftist rejection of the Christian left in America is a certified guarantee of defeat.” Far too much time is spent deriding Christians, as if we were all of the Robertson/Falwell “Christianist” ilk. We’re not.

While I agree that Christian Zionists and other Fascists for Jesus deserve a real thumping, there are groups, like CMEP, and pastors like Jim Wallis of Sojourners, who are making (at least) a dent in the insanity, and doing so in a manner that jives with what they believe. Our support of these people could counter the nasty, hateful neocon version of Christianity spewed by the likes of Coulter, Delay, Dobson and of course Robertson and Blow Them All Away in the Name of the Lord Falwell.

Thanks for reminding the readers of CounterPunch that King was a Christian — and a radical. Reminds me of someone else.

K Lowell
Hawaii

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Subject: Virgin Birth

Dear Greg: Maybe it’s because of the tendency to believe in, rather than to know, “truths,” that people are so easily misled. A guy heard a burning bush talking? And took its words to heart? And then people took the man seriously? Come now… And there are definitely WMD; and the “turris” hate our freedoms. And the moon is green cheese and that irresistable tingle in your naughty bits is bad bad bad–let’s have a “two minutes’ hate” (“1984″) instead of a real release. We are definitely doomed if people keep waiting for the Big Parent in the sky to protect them. Any real faith in one’s ability to handle life must, and does, come from within anyway: “God” helps those who help themselves; or as Islam says: tie the camel to the hitchin’ post (don’t just “trust” it to Allah) AND pray to Allah that all we be well. The great Christian believer (and questioner), Hermann Hesse, said in his book, “Demian”, that “…we create gods, and they bless us.” We make up friends to hold our hand in the terrifying icy impersonal universe of “black velvet futility” as Kurt Vonnegut put it in “Sirens of Titan”. You cannot count on people who believe in magic. They have no backbones–or else they keep marching off the cliff (or pushing others off) with religious fury. They are so easy to manipulate when so deluded. Peace, Al

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Thanks Greg for that article. I’m a menno in NYC and passed this around to some of my friends here. I hate to see the religious right lay claim to the moral high ground, and it’s good you remind us of history. I see both sides, being from the conservative evangelical camp before I evolved into this very left wing stuff. The polarization of this political thought lately is just obscene. We have no dialogue. It will have to swing back and it’s good to remind the left to look for support within the ranks of the “enemy.” Anyway, just thanks for writing and thinking. Susan in NYC.

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There are occasionally religious leftists who have both courage and intellectual integrity like MLK. However they do not believe in power to the people, they believe in power and glory to Almighty God, the same god that has oppressed people all over the world throughout history. The religous have deluded and cretinized the population to accept their power systems and their positions in it. Religion has traditionally been an anti-people ideology which conceives people as sinful, willful and above all disobedient to the Devine and earthly authority people are supposed to obey.

That 80% of the US people give lipservice to the delusions of religion is simply part of the overall political and ideological false consciousness of the population, since a non-corporate political party is not permitted in the political arena in the US power system.

Morley, L.A.

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One of the above writers in reply to my asking permission to post comments says: “Sure, use it anyway you want. I’m surprised you want to. I tend to comment on CounterPunch and Z- net articles to clarify my thinking. I don’t know what I think unless I read what I write. You are only the second person out of many who is actually interested in the topic s/he is writing about. I don’t think Americans are interested in ideas. Certainly academics aren’t, they’re too busy doing research.”

So I’ll reply with an idea. In evaluating widespread belief in the virgin birth of Jesus, do we allow for a religious mode of belief? On this question, I think fundamentalists (of the right) and atheists (of the left) speak with a solid front: no such thing as a religious mode of belief. But I think King, following Alain Locke (whether explicitly or not I don’t know) certainly worked with a religious mode of belief that neither atheists nor fundamentalists would be able to share. In this way, either one can speak of faith as a mode of experience or most likely one is not a religious leftist of any sort, whether Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist. There is an art to this mode of belief, but again, you’d have to have a certain view of art to grasp its essential nature. We’re not talking home deco here, although William James does allow the home deco religionists their place as the “happy minded” sort in his Varieties.

No Lip Service to Nonviolence Here

By Greg Moses

ILCA Online / CounterPunch / Dissident Voice

All religions, said Simone de Beauvoir, have “embarrassing flexibility on a basis of rigid concepts.” Practitioners and believers who swear to core principles find themselves fighting each other from opposite extremes of the political spectrum.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/debeauv2.htm

At the time she said it, in the second chapter of The Second Sex, Beauvoir had three great religions in mind: Christianity, Marxism, and Psychoanalysis. In each case there were right wingers and left wingers then, and in each case there are right and left wingers still.

Today, as we blow out 76 candles to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., I am thinking that in a nation where 79 percent of the people believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, there is no good reason not to imagine the possibility of a revived and renewed Christian left.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6650997/site/newsweek/

My thoughts today are drawn to fresh reflections on the New Year’s day activism of Chicago trainees for Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), who challenged a toy store on the question of marketing violent video games. The activists are training to go to places like Hebron, Colombia, Iraq, and Grassy Narrows, Ontario, where epidemics of violence rip through bodies and forests alike.

But the CPT action is less than half of what’s on my mind this morning. I’m more concerned about what happens in a country that is 80 percent Christian when left activists refuse to pay attention to the Christian left, simply because it is Christian. In terms of hardball shrewdness, if nothing else, a leftist rejection of the Christian left in America is a certified guarantee of defeat.

As King once warned bourgeois America that we must not be afraid to say that Du Bois was a Communist, so we might warn the American left: we must not be afraid to remember that King was a Christian.

Paco Michelson, a CPT trainee from Huntington, Indiana, tells me by telephone that he has played “all the games” that he was protesting against on New Year’s Day. He was the one who pretended to play video games upon a coffin, as activists read the names of Americans and Iraqis killed in war.

“I still think the games are fun,” says Michelson. But as a matter of social conscience, he also thinks it would be better if these killing games, rated M for Mature and singled out for violent content, were not sold as toys.

Michelson understands how the image of Christian inspectors is bound to make folks wary. What CPT did in Chicago, taking things off shelves, looks a lot like censorship. But on this birthday of King, our great national icon of nonviolence, we have to demand an answer to the question: so what are we doing about our cultural addictions to violence? especially as the consequences of that sickness are so clearly played out in the body counts of Iraq?

“It’s a conflicting issue for Americans, our addiction to violence,” says Michelson. “I don’t think it’s a very popular thing to think about.” He wrote the CPT press release that claimed a “direct connection between ongoing violence in the Middle East and the impact of violent toys on children.”

Amy Knickrehm served as emcee for the street theater, orchestrating readers who called off the names of people killed: three Iraqis for every American. Knickrehm explains that the ratio of Iraqi to American casualties of war is actually closer to a hundred to one, but the group wanted to cover the names of Illinois natives killed, and if they had read 100 Iraqi names each time, it would have been a very long day.

Although Knickrehm has many friends who play the video games, and although she sees no effects that the games have on her friends, she thinks that keeping the more violent games away from kids is something that her friends would support.

Seven years ago, Knickrehm joined one of the peace churches, the Church of the Brethren, partly because she kept seeing the red baseball caps on the heads of Brethren activists at Chicago street actions. For peace churches such as The Brethren, Anabaptists, Mennonites, or Quakers, a commitment to pacifism goes back to the time of Menno Simons (1536-1561) for whom the Mennonites are named. But that is another story.

What’s crucial for today, King’s birthday, is a reminder to the American left that there are some Christians who have been persistently organized against war for more than 400 years, and they have often been as isolated as they were two weeks ago when they asked a toy store to stop selling war games to children.

When the living King talks about nonviolence, he has a radical and comprehensive vision about a global way of life. For King, the education of our children is seamlessly connected to the violence of our war zones. Toy stores are socially and morally intertwined with Falluja and Hebron. And King often expresses that vision in the language of his Christian faith.

Today, on his birthday, as we survey the eighty percent of Americans who subscribe to Christian concepts, the left cannot afford to ignore those who have never just paid lip service to King.

Dear Greg,
Great piece. I’m amazed more and more how militaristic we are as a culture. About 15 years ago, I remember scoffing at the whole “say no to war toys” movement. In the past few years, I’ve come to scoff at my former scoffing …. Toys ‘R Us … How sad.
Best,
Brian J Foley

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Another CounterPunch reader writes:

If the christian group is striking the “roots of America’s violence”, maybe games aren’t the place to start.

As a Christian, i learned our heritage from Adam and Eve is evil, corruption and pain. That’s part of all humans, no matter the place, games they play, etc. As they told me, the only way to not share Adam’s gift is to be cleansed by Jesus. I belive it to be true. But even then temptation to sin(in effect, all that is evil) is an uphill battle.

People were thiefs and murderers before games settled in. And games create more obese, spoiled geeks than soldiers. We’re not in this stupid war because Bush played Fable. We’re in it because of the monetary and political interests that placed him at the top. Converting more people to Christianism is a more usefull than playing censor.

And you know the worst part? What is today’s “bad influence” will be tomorrow’s “that was better than now’s” And to the record: wich ones a worst infuence, Elvis or Marylin Manson? You answer the later and i’m right.

Gabriel Jacinto Ramirez Cruz

Reply: Ah, human nature. What do we have the right to expect from ourselves? King argued that Liberals systematically underestimate the problem of evil in human affairs. The fall from the Garden of Eden is therefore a classic reminder that something stirs in the shadow side. The email argues that Christians should be busy with the missionary life, not “censorship,” if salvation is to be achieved. On the other hand, I think about King’s Christian activism, and maybe my problem is that I think about it too much (see story above). He was not so much involved in the missionary solution.

For the record, I respect both Elvis and Marilyn Manson, which I hope doesn’t prevent me from respecting Christian activists, too. Where to start is a question with many answers. Certainly, a clear focus on monetary and political interests is crucial. A focus on video games should not obscure anything else of importance, including the broader interests of the culture industry. To mass produce obese, spoiled geeks? Why should the culture industry worry about that?

And this reminds me also of Gandhi who said the important thing always is to exercise your courage. A passive life is not worth living. Therefore, a soldier’s life may indeed be morally preferable to many. That’s why William James suggested a moral equivalent of war. My goodness, what an email! –gm

Every Hero a Killer? Not:
A Spring Syllabus for America 2005

By Greg Moses

Indymedia Chicago / Counterpunch / ILCA Online / Global Resistance Network / Dissident Voice

“Every hero must learn to kill,” says the online invitation for Fable, the Xbox video game by Microsoft. “You can save those in peril and aid those in need. But you are also free to be as wicked, violent and dark as you wish.”

For me, this promo also describes the reality game being played across the globe by the USA. Send the tsunami relief supplies if you want, but you are free to drop bombs on Falluja. Like the game Fable, we are invited to choose the kind of hero we want to be. And we are buying an ideology that says in order to be heroes we must be ready to kill.

So I am pleased to get word via email that a group of activists in Chicago, while training to join Christian Peacemaker Teams, kicked off their new year by inspecting the video-game shelves at a local toy store.

http://www.fable-game.com/

According to the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), Fable earns a rating of ‘M’ for Mature, which means the game is not recommended for children under the age of 17. In addition, ESRB tags the game with descriptors for “Blood, Strong Language, Violence, and Sexual Themes.”

http://www.esrb.org/

On a recent visit to the online video-game page at Toys “R” Us hosted by Amazon.Com, Fable was one of three headline games featured in a limited-time offer, along with Metal Gear Solid 3 and Ace Combat 5.

Like Fable, Metal Gear bears a Mature rating. The Playstation game by Konami Digital is described by ESRB as having “Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language, and Sexual Themes.” One review by an Amazon.Com user from South Carolina (does AFB mean the writer is also from an Air Force Base?) gushes that, “Awesome movies and great story that highlights America’s greatness make this mind-challenging game the ultimate must-have for serious Metal Gear fans.” More ideology in a box; along with the game you get a double shot of America’s greatness. Another reviewer recommends the game to “spy theorists” who will thrill to the intrigue between Cold War agents and double agents who vie for an enormous sum of covert money and control of a Soviet weapons genius who must be stopped from putting his “nightmarish weapon” into the wrong hands.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-

/B0006FHBCO/104-9557521-4098334?v=glance&n=1060624&s=toys&m=A3UN6WX5RRO2AG

http://www.konamijpn.com/products/mgs3/english/

Although the ideologies are heavy handed, there is something eerily compelling to these games as you click your way into richly visualized landscapes of peril. You drive the story with your hand clinched, eyes locked, and floodgates of adrenaline at full rush. Open the leather-and-gold binding to the virtual book of Fables online, and a magic pen in blood-red ink warns you, “this is no fairy tale.”

“There once was a boy with a mind of his own. Alone in a dangerous world, his destiny, the paths of good and evil were his to follow.” The letters appear like invisible ink swabbed by an invisible hand. Tubular bells and violas invite you to turn the page. And there stands an old hag on a rickety ladder, raising her crook to an apple tree. With one tab you can fill her basket with apples and bake her a pie. With the other tab you can rock the old hag’s ladder until, yes, she falls to the ground dead, her blood draining into the page.

Delicious wickedness presents itself. Why sit still for a horror show directed by Hitchcock, when you can make it all happen yourself. You can shoot an arrow into a poet’s mouth, get a girl drunk until she pukes, and stab Tinkerbell to death, until there is no more room for war between good and evil. Finally, it’s just you and the dark side. And if this is the tease you get from the online promo, imagine what you could do with the real game at home.

“Toys ‘R’ Us is in the joy business,” says President John Barbour in an October press release posted at the website of the U.S. Marine Corps. One million dollars will be given to a charity, and the company will collect more donations to help get toys to children for Christmas. In September the company announces that it will assist adoption agencies in “helping children achieve the dream of finding forever families.”

http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf/0/DB95DB5B0A2E457585256F43003BC9DE?opendocument

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/9/prweb154135.htm

On or about 11 a.m. on New Year’s Day, three pacifists in training for Christian Peacemaker Teams in Chicago walk into a Toys ‘R’ Us store and began removing the Mature games from the shelves.

http://www.cpt.org/archives/2005/jan05/0009.html

“I was horrified to find so many ‘M’-rated video games for sale in a children’s toy store,” said Kimberly Prince in a press release posted at the CPT website. “Our inspection revealed that there is no system in the store to sort and display video games according to their classification. Adult-rated, violent video games, meant for those ages 17 years and over, are displayed on the same shelves as games for young children.”

Along with fellow peacemakers-in-training Noah Dillard and Jan Benvie, Prince then approached the store manager with the video games and a letter explaining why the CPT group had concerns. The manager “listened respectfully to the inspectors’ requests and accepted the letter, but explained that he did not have the authority to remove the games from the shelves,” says the press release. “However, he agreed to alert his supervisors to CPT’s concerns.”

“It seems like managers from local stores take orders from higher up,” explains Claire Evans, speaking by telephone from the CPT office in Chicago where she has worked for about six years. She helps to coordinate CPT delegations to trouble spots around the world; places like Iraq, Colombia, Hebron, and Grassy Narrows, Ontario. She attended the New Year witness, but did not go into the store.

“Store managers,” says Evans, “have limited decision-making capabilities.” She has just said a mouthful about free enterprise as we know it, with its top-down command and control structures. Recall if you will the final episode of the latest Apprentice, where the ex military guy gets hired by Donald Trump, partly because one of The Donald’s friends felt strongly that military service was a most excellent training ground for corporate culture.

Evans is a Lutheran, and she explains that folks who work with CPT come from many different denominations other than the Mennonite or Quaker peace churches which founded the organization in 1988. When I ask her if any atheists help out, she says that CPT asks participants to identify themselves as Christians.

“Toys ‘R’ Us was the first chain to stop carrying look-alike weapons,” says Evans, noting that the retailer has been responsive to some issues in the past. (I called the media relations department and left a message to see how this latest campaign might be going at corporate offices, but I have not yet received a reply. I also left contact info with CPT in case the actual participants might be available for comment, but no reply there yet, either. Stay tuned.)

The New Year’s Day activity appealed to me, because like millions of folks across the country this week, I am gearing up for the Spring semester. So I had syllabus on the brain when Simon Harak from the War Resisters League circulated the Jan. 8 CPT press release via email. As if in reply to Stan Goff’s recent call to begin a massive public education campaign, the CPT trainees had written the first lesson of the syllabus in the street, kicking off a Spring semester course about some fundamental issues in violence, mass media, and education.

The group that approached Toys ‘R’ Us was a temporary affiliation of folks brought together for training, so it is not clear that a follow-up campaign is planned. But there are millions of us looking for some alternative path to cut through the thicket of our day, and we could pick up the lesson where CPT leaves off.

I have from time to time indulged in these video games, so I don’t want to come off as holier than thou. War Craft has been my favorite weakness, sometimes for weeks in a row. I lost interest as soon I tried playing the game online, because it takes a 14-year-old kid about five minutes to exterminate my forces completely from the cyber field (yes, genocide), all the while sending me these little messages about how foolish I am to be challenging the master of the universe. Recently, I started playing America’s Army, but that’s going to go a little slower, because the Army is very particular about its training, and I have not yet qualified on the rifle range at virtual Ft. Benning, although I have tried a couple of times.

If we find genius in Poe, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Stephen King, Anne Rice, or Ridley Scott, then we know there is something sublime that stirs with images of the shadow side. But we also know from scholars such as Col. Dan Grossman of Killology.Com that these video games mimic precise techniques developed by expert military trainers who want to make effective killers out of High School recruits.

For the time being I want to set aside the meaning of these games for adult audiences, who may even belong to military occupations (an interesting pun that I’ll leave in place), and who certainly are able to make judgments about differences between combat, games, and other forms of life. I was a kid once at Ft. Benning. I know these soldiers when they come home at night as daddies, so I don’t want to say anything quick about these games under adult circumstances. Let’s deal with that issue another week.

But it does seem to me that the Christian Peacemakers have clear logic on their side when they express concern about these games, rated for blood and violence, promoted and displayed behind a logo that represents “toy joy” for children.

“Participants outside the store drew public attention to the direct connection between ongoing violence in the Middle East and the impact of violent toys on children,” says the CPT press release from Chicago. “The witness included a prayerful vigil in which CPTers read the names of U.S. soldiers from Illinois together with names of some of the thousands of Iraqi civilians who have died over the last two years in Iraq. As the names were called out, one participant pantomimed a child playing a violent video game, symbolically represented as a coffin.”

Last night I watched Citizen King on my local PBS affiliate and I can assure you that it is flatly untrue to claim, as Fable claims in its copy, and as the video industry echoes in chorus, that every hero must learn to kill. Every hero must certainly stake his or her life, which means that Christian Peacemakers and Martin Kings are heroes as big as they come. James Forman died this week. Dramatize the challenges that such heroes face, and there will be enough reason to grip your game controller as you dodge the Klan, the FBI, and who knows what else, as you do whatever is necessary to save the soul of America from demons that never really die.

With the sad and wasted 2004 fully buried in the past, a Spring syllabus is just the thing I’m looking for. And thanks to the Christian Peacemakers, a profound national syllabus is lifted up from the streets. It is a syllabus about the roots of violence that we nurture in our American life. Every hero must learn something. Learning about the roots of our own violence can help to make heroes of us all.

Philosophical questions: does an all-volunteer military under structural conditions in the USA today lend itself to becoming what Reserve Commander Helmly says it is on the verge of becoming? The moral equivalent of a mercenary force? Has the USA military in other words become most simply a corporation in which those who make war for money hire soldiers who make money for war? As the people look down from coliseum seats waiting for their master of ceremonies Ann Coulter to plunge both thumbs down, we ask: Is the socialization of military service under these conditions a method for restoring to the spectacle some moral vocabulary that cannot be uttered by pure Fox News bloodlust, greed, and ignorance? Or will the draft simply enable more death with even less purpose?

The Peacefile blog may be missing a few posts, but we’re back up and running. Thanks for your patience.–gm

Hi, Greg,

Thanks for tackling this story. I don’t know, though … I also read the report that you cite about the SS woman “stopping by” the Brethren Service Center and it worried me a lot, but there is also Rick Jahnkow, someone I would say is a national expert in counter-recruitment and draft issues with Project YANO in San Diego who has been telling us for the last three years that hype about a draft tends to sidestep the more immediate injustices of the poverty draft. That is, he feels a draft is very unlikely because of the huge resistance it would almost certainly encounter, but stepping up recruiting in the high schools and elsewhere – through such means as the video games you describe – are the ways the military will get the people they need. And this is what we are seeing and hearing from students, teachers and counselors when we are in the schools.

Also, I do have a concern about the last paragraph where you urge kids to “sign up with the peace churches”. I realize you are being partly sarcastic here, but one of the messages our Nonmilitary Options group tries to stress when we talk to students about conscientious objection is that they don’t have to belong to ANY church, or espouse any religious belief in order to object to participation in war. As you probably know, case law in the early ’70′s provided for “moral or ethical beliefs” to be grounds for CO status as well as “religious beliefs”. I think it’s really important that this be as well known as possible. We are always encountering people who still
think you “have to be a Quaker”, or some such in order to be a CO.

You may be right, and maybe a draft really is around the corner. But, so far it seems that the poverty draft dovetails so closely with the depressed economy that the vicious cycle of war spending & resulting decreased funding for jobs programs, college grants, etc. continues to draw plenty of young people into the military….

Susan Van Haitsma
Nonmilitary Options for Youth
www.progressiveaustin.org/nmofy

Author Replies: The last paragraph of the “Getting Real” story refers to the choice that would be posed if and when the draft were re-instated. At that point young folks who gain CO status would be shuttled into alternative service. Peace churches are the only folks I know actually planning to provide such service, but others may well be on the way, and I look forward to writing them up. Sorry if my story suggested that in order to be a CO, one must first belong to a peace church.

As for the theoretical challenges that my article poses to existing accounts of draft possibilities, Alex Jones is another voice who says we already have a draft if you consider the coercive policy changes that are keeping soldiers in combat longer than would be normally expected. If we add this to Rick Jahnkow’s thesis about a “poverty draft,” then we arrive at a point where we ask not if there will be draft, but what kind of draft will it be? And this is the point from which we have already seen folks such as Charlie Rangel, the Congressman from New York, supporting a lottery method as more fair than the economic and policy coercions now in place. Add up the staunch Republicans, the Jack Reed Democrats, and the Rangel alliance, and there you have it. Can this alliance sell America on a lottery?

“The draft would be political suicide,” writes another reader, “but if Bush got away with a war on the wrong country, I don’t doubt the American people aren’t so dumb they wouldn’t buy a draft.”

And this suggests one more reason why a draft would have some benefit to the political climate in the USA. As they say, the gallows concentrate the mind. Since we now have a clearly belligerent infrastructure, it might not be a bad idea if voters indeed began to think more carefully about the consequences of war policies carried out in the collective name. In a draft lottery, Ann Coulter’s kill, kill, kill might confront its organic antidote. Had a lottery draft been in place two years ago, would Americans have supported the Iraq invasion? In its distribution of risk, a lottery draft may very well distribute some much-needed sobriety among the people who ultimately vote these policies up or down.

Will it be an irony of history that neo-con strategists, building upon an ideological base of rugged individualism, pursued policies of state so aggressive that the situation caused by those policies made it necessary to legislate a re-socialization of American life that had been so deliberately dismantled since Reagan? Compulsory National Service. Or may we say that their aggressive warmaking brought them to the point where they needed to invoke the one war policy most likely to increase resistance to warmaking among the people? The Draft.

Philosophical questions: does an all-volunteer military under structural conditions in the USA today lend itself to becoming what Reserve Commander Helmly says it is on the verge of becoming? The moral equivalent of a mercenary force? Has the USA military in other words become most simply a corporation in which those who make war for money hire soldiers who make money for war? As the people look down from coliseum seats waiting for their master of ceremonies Ann Coulter to plunge he thumb down, we ask: Is the socialization of military service under these conditions a method for restoring to the spectacle some moral vocabulary that cannot be driven by pure Fox news bloodlust, greed, and ignorance? Or will the draft simply enable more death with even less purpose?

I remember Sartre: we choose our dead.

Here’s a Spring ‘04 story from the National Catholic Reporter about pro-draft progressives:

http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/washington/wnb041404.htm

And a few addresses to draft watchers:

http://www.peacehost.net/EPI-Calc/Draft.htm

http://www.geocities.com/draft_in_2005/main.htm

http://www.comdsd.org/

Why the Peace Churches are Meeting in March

By Greg Moses

Z-Net / CounterPunch / Sam Hamod’s Today’s Alternative News /

Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a Democrat and West Point grad, has an interesting theory about Iraq. Call it the Korea thesis.

“Consider South Korea,” said Reed in early December. “We have been there since the early 50’s. It was not until the 80’s that we began to see an irreversible commitment to the democratic process to complement an aggressive market economy.”

“If we are unwilling or unable to “stay the course” in Iraq,” continues Reed, “a premature departure by the United States or an ejection by a frustrated Iraqi government will lead to civil conflict and an explicit or implicit partition of the country that will force adjacent countries to exert their influence over events in Iraq. This situation will create a ‘Lebanon on steroids’ in the apt words of Tom Friedman.”

Reed’s Korea thesis of Iraq is fascinating to think about as we ponder the meaning of an upcoming assessment of the occupation to be undertaken by retired Army General Gary E. Luck. It’s not that I don’t believe the New York Times when they dwell on Luck’s character as a gentleman and a scholar. But I’m stuck on the General’s well-known experience as commander of the Korean theater.

Luck became a kind of underdog hero among Congressional hawks when his request for more missiles in Korea was ignored on Capitol Hill. In a 1995 letter to Georgia’s Democrat Senator Sam Nunn, Luck argued tersely for a missile system in Korea that would be “highly flexible, extremely mobile, capable of 360 degree coverage and able to counter the full threat spectrum.”

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/abm062l1.htm

As luck would have it, before he was sent to Korea, the general in 1990 was the newly minted commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, shortly before they were dropped into Saudi Arabia as first boots down to Gulf War One, says Odessa.com.

In a terse timeline, Odessa reminds us how Daddy Bush planned that First Iraq Invasion in consultation with Texas oil buddies James Baker and Rob Mosbacher; Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney; Joint Chiefs Chair Colin Powell; and Texas-buddy-to-be Robert Gates, who now oversees the Bush campus otherwise known as Texas A&M University in College Station. (Rumsfeld at the time was just entering his service at General Instruments, the real name of a company which according to his official biography was a “leader in broadband transmission, distribution, and access control technologies.”) But the point of this guest list is simply to remind us that Luck has been point guard for a whole team of coaches who have not retired from the game.

http://www.odssa.com/chrono.htm

So these are the questions: Is it likely that the same general who once ordered Airborne into Saudi, and who lectured Sam Nunn how to be a hawk, is going to come back from Iraq and say, aw shucks fellas, no way we can handle Iraq. Or will he more likely, based on past performance, return with a hard-core plan to secure Iraq for as many decades as it takes to get, in the words of Sen. Reed, “an irreversible commitment to the democratic process to complement an aggressive market economy.” As one of my students petulantly informed me, one does not place question marks after rhetorical questions.

Which brings us to the strange visit reported by the Brethren Service Center of New Windsor, MD this past October eighth. One Cassandra Costley (yes, like General Instruments, that is her real name) Director of the Alternative Service Division at Selective Service stopped in, “because I happened to be in the neighborhood.” But come to think of it, now that she was there, she did want to know if the famed peace church was geared up to handle the demands of alternative service for conscientious objectors just in case a draft were, you know, kinda needed hypothetically at some undetermined date in the possibly near future, although clearly the White House had said nothing to her personally that such a thing might be in the works, etc.

This chance meeting led to other meetings, because peace churches have been watching war states closely for about four hundred years, and on March 4 the peace churches of America will convene near Chicago to get their alternative service act worked out. One would have to wonder if they are not meeting a week too soon, seven weeks from today, after General Luck has returned with his professional assessment about what needs to be done in Iraq.

http://www.brethren.org/genbd/newsline/2004/dec3104.htm#2

And let’s not forget the timely Democratic Senator from Rhode Island, Jack Reed, who was quoted this week by Baltimore Sun reporter Tim Bowman, one of the reporters who found themselves in possession of a leaked memo from another general about the exhausted Army Reserves.

“By consistently underestimating the number of troops necessary for the successful occupation of Iraq, the administration has placed a tremendous burden on the Army Reserve and created this crisis,” said the very same West Point, Airborne, and Harvard man who thinks Iraq looks a lot like Korea to him.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/01/06/MNG2VALREE1.DTL

So it looks to me, kids, like it’s time to get real about the draft. Either you can get your conscientious objector papers together and sign up with the peace churches, or you can prepare for employment in the newly restructured Army Reserves, which is going to be rotating folks into Korea, I mean Iraq, for the rest of your lives. They say it’s a free country you live in, boys, so they might even give you another whole month to decide.

http://www.bluffton.edu/~mastg/pacifism.htm

Let me conclude by sharing with you my sense of the road ahead in Iraq . There are several possible outcomes. Iraq could emerge as a stable and responsible regional power with a political system that exhibits democratic characteristics and an economy that is more tolerant of private enterprise. This will not happen unless we are committed to a long term and expensive presence in Iraq . Consider South Korea . We have been there since the early 50’s. It was not until the 80’s that we began to see an irreversible commitment to the democratic process to complement an aggressive market economy.

If we are unwilling or unable to “stay the course” in Iraq, a premature departure by the United States or an ejection by a frustrated Iraqi government will lead to civil conflict and a explicit or implicit partition of the country that will force adjacent countries to exert their influence over events in Iraq. This situation will create a “ Lebanon on steroids” in the apt words of Tom Friedman.

http://www.senate.gov/~reed/speeches/SalveSpeechDecember62004.htm

2) Council endorses Selective Service conversations, alternative service consultation.

http://www.brethren.org/genbd/newsline/2004/dec3104.htm#2

The Annual Conference Council has given its endorsement to continued conversations between the General Board and Selective Service in a telephone conference call Dec. 10. The endorsement was given in response to the invitation by Selective Service for the Church of the Brethren, as a historic peace church, to develop a plan for alternative service opportunities. The council also endorsed Church of the Brethren participation in an Anabaptist meeting on alternative service opportunities.

Earl K. Ziegler, chair of the council, called the group together to discuss the matter at the request of Stan Noffsinger, general secretary of the General Board. Noffsinger turned to the council in its capacity as executive committee of the Conference, reported Conference secretary Fred Swartz. Noffsinger told the council that he considered the opportunity and call to be larger than a General Board program, and an invitation to the entire denomination to be involved in a positive witness to its heritage and faith.

“The council understood from the background material given that Selective Service, or the Bush administration, have no plans in the offing to institute a new draft,” Swartz reported. “There have been discussions during the past two presidential administrations of the eventual possibility of some kind of general national service. Selective Service officials explained to General Board staff that they want alternative service opportunities to be in place if and when such a program would be launched.”

The council unanimously agreed to “give the general secretary our encouragement to maximize our efforts to have alternative service opportunities in place” and “to continue to explore the relationship with Selective Service.” The council added a strong urging for all Annual Conference agencies “to renew the task of resourcing the church with tools to guide our youth in their choice of nonviolent service.” Noffsinger reported that he will give On Earth Peace a full report of the conversations with Selective Service and will make sure that agency is a participant in the discussion. “We don’t want to miss the part of providing resources to our youth that will help them understand and embrace the Brethren peace witness,” commented Chris Bowman, moderator of the 2004 Conference.

Noffsinger and Jim Hardenbrook, 2005 Annual Conference moderator, also reported to the council their participation in a recent meeting of executives and moderators of Anabaptist communions. Although this fellowship has met annually, the Church of the Brethren has not been involved for six years. The meeting also included officers of the Mennonite Church US, the Brethren in Christ, the Conservative Mennonite Church, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) US, and the Mennonite Brethren USA.

At the Anabaptist meeting, the MCC’s executive director Rolando Santiago brought a proposal urging Anabaptist churches to intensify their witness to service. After Church of the Brethren representatives disclosed the contacts with Selective Service, the group made plans for a consultation of representatives of Anabaptist communions to discuss the tradition’s understanding of service and how to prepare for alternative service opportunities. At Noffsinger’s invitation the consultation will be held at the Church of the Brethren General Offices in Elgin, Ill.

After hearing the report, the Annual Conference Council took action to support “our denomination’s participation in a consultation on alternative service March 4-6, 2005, to be held in Elgin, Ill., as proposed by the council of moderators and secretaries of the Anabaptist churches, and in which the Annual Conference moderator and General Board general secretary will participate on behalf of the Church of the Brethren.” Council members participating in the meeting were Ziegler, Bowman, Hardenbrook, Swartz, Ron Beachley, Joan Daggett, and Lerry Fogle.

Chicago Sun-Times Jan. 6, 2005:

The government is going to double check your filing, so fill out the forms carefully. Of particular importance at the moment, is the fact that the government will check on whether male students have registered with Selective Service for any potential military draft.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/savage/cst-fin-terry062.html

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Washington Post, Jan. 7, 2005:

“I do not think we can stay in Iraq in the fashion we’re in now,” Brzezinski said. “If it cannot be changed drastically, it should be terminated.” He said it would take 500,000 troops, $500 billion and resumption of the military draft to ensure adequate security in Iraq.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54680-2005Jan6.html

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So which path do you think BushCo will follow? Will they hand the country to Sistani and walk away?–gm

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The editor of freeinternetpress.com writes Jan. 7, 2005:

Editor: You know, I’ve had discussions with people in various capacities. Sometimes they cannot officially say “This is true”, but they can make helpful suggestions. Selective Service officials are not saying that the draft will be revived, but they are suggesting that the church gets their [CO alternative service] program ready.

http://freeinternetpress.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2675

The note accompanies a clip from Religion News Service, suggesting that peace churches have been encouraged by Selective Service to get “alternative service” programs ready. The date of the story is unclear. It appears to be fresh, but may date back to Dec. 29:

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/158/story_15893_1.html

http://www.ethicsdaily.com/article_detail.cfm?AID=5172

Here’s the horse’s mouth from brethren.org:

2) Church staff meet with Selective Service.

Three staff directors of the General Board met with staff of Selective Service at the agency’s office in Arlington, Va., Dec. 2. The meeting followed up on an unannounced visit to the Brethren Service Center in New Windsor, Md., on Oct. 8 by Cassandra Costley, director of the Alternative Service Division of Selective Service.

New Windsor has a long history of being a site where Brethren have organized and gathered around issues of conscience and military service, most notably hosting Civilian Public Service workers from 1944-46. Selective Service is the federal agency that registers and maintains a database of young men as they reach their eighteenth birthday in order to maintain an accounting of those available for military service in the event of a military draft.

“We went into this meeting with a clear agenda of opening a conversation with Selective Service in an effort to better understand why this visit to New Windsor occurred, and how we as a church could make clear our historic and active voice as a people of peace and nonviolence,” reported Phil Jones, director of Brethren Witness/Washington Office. Also in the meeting were Brethren Volunteer Service director Dan McFadden and Brethren Service Center executive director Roy Winter.

The meeting lasted well into three hours, Jones reported. Was the New Windsor visit an indication that Selective Service was gearing up for a military conscription program, the group asked. “The answer is no, according to Costley, and her immediate supervisor, Richard Flahavan,” Jones said. Costley, Flahavan, and the newly installed Director of Selective Service William Chatfield, who joined the meeting briefly, all indicated that their work was in regards to preparedness only. The New Windsor visit was made because Costley was in the area for other business and took the opportunity to make an outreach visit.

Flahavan went on to explain that there is no draft and that none is coming as indicated by statements from the White House and Pentagon in recent months, Jones reported. “He also pointed to the late October vote of Congress that overwhelmingly defeated a proposed draft bill” (HR 163), Jones said. “The gearing up for a draft and the sheer amount of funding and staff increases that would be necessary are reasons enough to indicate there will be no draft,” Flahavan stated, indicating that a draft would cost in excess of one half billion dollars to initiate. Most of the meeting was spent in learning more about Selective Service and how its Alternative Service program would operate if there were a draft.

“The fact that they were asking us a lot of questions shows that one of the things we have developed as a peace church is a lot of respect for our position,” commented Stan Noffsinger, general secretary of the General Board. Within a week of the meeting with Selective Service, Noffsinger and Annual Conference moderator Jim Hardenbrook reported on the meeting to the Council of Moderators and Secretaries of the Anabaptist Churches. The council also includes officers of the Mennonite Church US, the Brethren in Christ, the Conservative Mennonite Church, Mennonite Central Committee US, and the Mennonite Brethren USA.

Planning is underway for an Anabaptist churches’ Consultation on Alternative Service, to be held at the Church of the Brethren General Offices in Elgin, Ill. Details will be announced after the first of the year. McFadden will represent the Church of the Brethren on the planning committee along with Noffsinger.

“Now’s the time to talk about the issues of alternative service and its future,” Noffsinger said. “To me that’s the value” of the conversation with Selective Service, he added.

http://www.brethren.org/genbd/newsline/2004/dec1704.htm

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On this point, I think the peace movement can support alternative service on “religious freedom” grounds and other voluntary measures such as a tax form checkoff for a Dept. of Peace. These measures can begin to build pacifist seeds of infrastructure.–gm

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Looking at Google for Retired Gen. Gary E. Luck, who is off to Iraq on a mission assessment for the Pentagon. He seems to be famous for his pro-missile campaign when he commanded Korea. My guess, he will come up with hard-hitting military assessments about what is needed from a command perspective, i.e. no more “Iraq lite”.

On “the future of the military” question, it looks like he’s got a pretty strong commitment to
intervention. The NYTimes report echoes Helmly’s leaked memo, that the Reserves are in extreme distress.

Challenge me for a prediction: a “national service” draft that will pull folks into the reserves. It will be sold politically as a quasi-public service with dual uses: developing civilian talent at home that can help with various civilian needs, yet most useful for emergency deployment abroad. So the draft scare was not just electioneering.–gm

http://www.utne.com/webwatch/2004_147/news/11211-1.html

To help us fully equip the units that need it most, in 2005 the Army Reserve will begin implementing the Army Reserve Expeditionary Force (AREF), consisting of modular force packages organized at the battalion level and below. It allows the Army Reserve to provide sustainability, availability and predictability to both the soldier and the combatant commander. AREF leverages our core competencies of civil affairs, medical, military police and transportation, which are not as readily available in the Active Component Army. Each package rotates through various stages of readiness and responsiveness, culminating in a 9- to 12-month call to active duty every five years.

AREF calls for organizing our go-towar units (AA units) into 10 packages for rapid deployment over a five-year period. The units in Year 1 would be “on alert,” ready to be called to active duty and deployment almost immediately. Units in Year 5 would be reconstituting, most likely from a recent deployment.

The Army Reserve is a very different organization from what it was 20 or 30 years ago. Our units have been deployed more frequently in the last 12 years than during the previous 75 years.

The Army Reserve is changing in deep, profound ways. It is more than just superficial adjustments. It is a total overhaul—a depot-level rebuild—of the organization, while it is fully engaged in supporting the global war on terror-ism. I have compared it to rebuilding an aircraft while the plane is in flight. We are changing the Army Reserve culture so soldiers know that mobilization is the expectation, not the exception. We have implemented tougher, more realistic training to make sure our soldiers are warriors first, technicians second.

http://www4.army.mil/USAR/news/word_2004-12-22.php

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The intent of the Army Reserve is to use the energy and urgency of current Army Transformation initiatives and the operational demands of the global war on terrorism to change from an over-structured, technically focused, force-in-reserve to a learning organization that provides trained, ready, “inactive duty” soldiers poised and available for active service, as ready as if they knew the hour and day they would be called.

The Army Reserve also seeks innovative ways to continue contributing to training across the Army. To support combatant commanders, the Army Reserve is pursuing the creation of the Foreign Army-Training Assistance Command (FA-TRAC), which will conduct foreign army training, a mission that is currently conducted by soldiers of the Army Reserve’s 75th Division (Training Support) Advisory Support Team in Tallafar, Iraq.

The mission of FA-TRAC, similar to the mission of the 75th Division today in Iraq, will be to provide foreign armed forces with advice, training and organizational practices in leadership, soldier skills and unit tactics. Army Reserve soldiers assigned to FA-TRAC will deploy to the combatant command to live, train and eat with the hostnation soldiers. The FA-TRAC will be built from the existing structure of a current Army Reserve division (institutional training). FA-TRAC will provide “plug and play” training teams to the combatant commander.

Since mobilization is no longer an unexpected event, we are striving to reduce post-mobilization training to less than a month and focusing it on critical collective unit tasks, theater-specific training, mission rehearsals and validation.

http://www.ausa.org/pdfdocs/GB/Helmly.pdf

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Sustaining members of AUSA: Sustaining Members are major industry leaders, businesses and professional organizations, approximately 25% of whom are international companies. These companies are involved in research, development and production of weapons and equipment for the Army and form the nation’s defense industrial base.

http://ausa.org/membership

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A military philosophy of ed:

http://www.ausa.org/pdfdocs/Schneider.pdf

Thanks for your article in Counterpunch, Greg. Children are allowed to watch the tsunami victims but cannot see the victims of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, etc. Children are allowed to play video games enabling a military mentality and learning how to kill before they know how to love, develop compassion, and probably never have a social conscience.

They can go to churches and learn how to lie. They can watch all the inconsistencies and contradictions of american society. They can confuse the flag with an old mattress ticking…[if we have a flag, it should at least be somewhat artistic]

They can learn what a dysfunctional family is by observing their daily experiences with their family, if they have a family. They can learn about the legal system when their parents get a divorce and confuse the children more than they were previously.

They will see through all the crap…then become brainwashed, after which many will believe more lies, while others avoid mainstream everything, except eating. And that will be difficult also. Then these dropouts will learn about consciousness and how they have been going thru life in a sleeplike state.

Social conditioning will become a fun topic to dabble with occasionally. And the story goes on…some die young others die and forget to fall over, while others still keep breathing……

Keep writing Greg,
Joe Ciarrocca

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Just to wish a equally hard punching 2005 as 2004. Your views are a reminder that not all humans are carniverous reptiles: smell, see, attack, eat, smack jaws!

LK

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Thanks, Greg, for telling me all about free downloadable war games! Do you mind if I give them a pass?

You know, it strikes me that conscription (or whatever it’s more nicely called) is simple slavery. So, maybe the guys (and gals) do get a salary, of sorts. So, maybe they do get – if they’re lucky – bandages after getting all shot to heck. Fact is, however, that they don’t seem to have much choice, once Uncle Sam calls. Penalty for disobedience? Well, let’s not go into that, ’cause this is a civilized email. From what I’ve read, I’m not sure the difference (except, perhaps, workplace) between conscription and slavery. Whenever the government abrogates uno itself the right to do as it wishes with one’s life and one’s body, surely there is a name for that. Slavery. (By the way, just how WERE those pyramids built?)

Regards,
Evelyn vd Riet

P.S. By the way: w/ or w/o conscription, the war in Iraq STILL stinks.

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / OpEd News / Dissident Voice

I was fifty five percent done with my download of America’s Army, the game you can get for free on the internet (or in CD format from your Army recruiter if you don’t have broadband, kid) when notice came down an anti-war list that the Army Reserve is, according to a leaked memo, “rapidly degenerating into a ‘broken force.’” Since memos are to be taken seriously when leaked the day before Congress convenes, I’ve little choice right now but to toggle between my Army made Army game and this Army induced article, which is good preparation, don’t you think for the all-Army future that is bringing purpose and clarity to your muddled life and mine.

The author of the (ahem) leaked memo, James Helmly, is no whiner, having worked his way up from Vietnam-era Private to three-star General and Chief of Army Reserves. In Sept. of 2003 he was quoted in USA Today saying that the Army Reserve is now on “a war footing” and needs to enter full war mode. In fact, he seems to have a pretty clear idea about how Congress can help him fix his ‘broken force,’ according to testimony that he gave to the House Armed Services Committee on March 31, posted at globalsecurity.org. But before we get started on that long, boring agenda for readiness among our children’s children, including perpetual rotation into combat, please start your own download of America’s Army so that you too can begin to acclimatize yourself to the appropriate mood. Meanwhile, please excuse me as I unzip my file.

In a footnote to his Congressional testimony, it appears that James Helmly makes a note to himself to reduce the use of acronyms, “which Congress hates.” Actually, Congress only hates the acronyms it does not use on a regular basis. Some acronyms, like PATRIOT Act, Congress simply loves to speak and hear, even if nobody knows what PATRIOT stands for anymore, the acronym or the word. So Helmly need not give up all acronyms when speaking to Congress, and I like the one he keeps, OPTEMPO. I like OPTEMPO for two reasons, first it does seem to compress the idea of the speed of war, conveying the impression that operational tempo can be conducted at a more rapid flick of the Commander-in-Chief’s wand. As an acronym it conveys an intent to adjust the velocity of things.

The second reason why I like the acronym OPTEMPO is because I find it only three words removed from “statutory” in Gen. Helmly’s testimony to Congress, where he seems to say that a new OPTEMPO for the Army Reserves will require new laws. Since his concerns about what will happen if Congress does not follow his advice have been recently (oops) leaked, we might want to revisit a full paragraph from his March testimony:

Changing the way we employ Soldiers starts with changing the way we prepare for calls to active duty. The current process is to alert a unit for calls to active duty, conduct administrative readiness preparations at home station, and then send the unit to the mobilization station for further administrative and logistical preparedness processing and to train for deployment. This alert-train-deploy process, while successful in Desert Shield/Desert Storm, today inhibits responsiveness. By changing to a train-mob-deploy model, and dealing with administrative and logistical requirements prior to active duty, we will reduce the time needed to bring units to a campaign quality level needed for operations. This will require us to resource more training events at home station through the use of devices, simulators and simulations. As you would expect, this shift in paradigms will increase pre-call-to-active-duty OPTEMPO beyond the current statutory level and will require greater effort and resources to achieve. We are confident that the increased costs will pay significant dividends in terms of readiness and deployability.

You can read the rest of the testimony for yourself, but it looks to me like Gen. Helmly wants to see a beefed up and “rotating” Army Reserve in which soldiers go active on a four or five year rotation. They can work at home, go active, and then rotate back home in what Helmly calls the “train-mob-deploy” model, or what we might better call Bush’s answer to the New Deal. For Helmly, the Army Reserve will need to rely less and less on folks coming out of the Army, more and more on new kids gearing up for their first Army experience. This is handy timing, because older soldiers aren’t coming back to reserves like they used to.

In the new order of things, the Army reservist’s “home station” will be equipped with “devices, simulators and simulations.” Excuse me again, while I click the next button on my InstallShield wizard for America’s Army (these Army downloads are sharp, I gotta say). After clicking everything that says I agree (who knows what we’ll be agreeing to in the future?) the wizard tells me my name and asks me to fill in my organization. Peacefile should do nicely. Install this for anyone on the computer? Why not. Click install. This may take several minutes. Okay, back to OPTEMPO.

OPTEMPO pertains to what Gen. Helmly calls “pre-call-to-active-duty.” In order to provide for the American Army more “predictable and sustainable rotations” of freshly groomed soldiers, Helmly needs good pay and benefits. He needs an advertising budget. He needs support services for families, new computers, and a batch of new contractors who can help secure bases, train leaders, and plan exercises.

“This global war on terrorism, as our president has described, is a long-term campaign of inestimable duration, fought in many different places around the world,” concludes Gen. Helmly’s March testimony. In order to give the President what he needs, Helmly has a pretty clear idea about what Congress needs to do next.

On my home computer, the America’s Army installshield is asking me do I want to install GameSpy Arcade? “GameSpy Arcade is the fast, free way to find games and opponents,” says my nifty dialogue box. “Join millions of other players just like yourself!” I like that exclamation point that follows “other players just like yourself!” I’m going to remember how enthusiastic folks get about that phrase the next time someone calls me a commie because I think equality would be enjoyable, you know, where millions would be just like myself, etc., and we could play these games together more often. “Would you like to install GameSpy Arcade?” Click yes. Oh wow, look at this. Click yes, yes, yes.

What’s cool about GameSpy Arcade, says the screen now in front of me, is that it offers “cheat free servers.” This idea is appealing, because the next time I get my ass kicked online playing WarCraft, I would like to know that it wasn’t because of cheat codes. So okay, sign me up for another download. But I do wonder how GameSpy got itself bundled into the Army install shield. Maybe I could get some help from the info hacks on this. Does the Army take bids for little perks like this? The “wise” wizard also offers SeeMePlayMe and Xfire, both of them service providers that will take your credit card number right away. At last, when I start up the game finally, it confines my cursor inside the military frame, no more toggling here. Either play America’s Army or don’t.

As I roll the credits for America’s Army, looking for the music composer, I think about the creative and strategic genius that is being put to work here with tax dollars that have been borrowed from our children’s children. Free war games all around, in preparation for a future of interminable strike forces and routine rotations into and out of combat. Here is the new American system, ever ready for the next little war in the next little country. Boot up America, your Army is waiting, and your ship of state is puffing hard, damn the leaks and full speed ahead. Click yes to play.

LINKS

Helmly Memo Leaks

http://blog.democrats.com/node/2347

OPTEMPO

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Aug1999/n08181999_9908181.html

Helmly Calls for Reserve War Mode—USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-09-15-reserves-chief_x.htM

Helmly Testimony

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/congress/2004_hr/04-03-31helmly.htm

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch

My New Year’s resolution is to be more reliable than the New York Times, not simply on par with its mea culpas. But more importantly, I want to live a life worthy of the transparent universe, a world in which every human error will be transcribed, imprinted, and preserved on a Justice Department chip.

It was Yoshie Furuhashi who got me thinking about the transparent universe. Her exquisite weblog treatment of Wal-Mart included a tiny detail about dust-sized inventory chips that will be scattered over everything in the Wal-Mart distribution chain. At first the little bugs will be readable from close range, but later on, who knows? We may be able to scan them from satellite. Thanks to these dust-chips of inventory and our new satellite capabilities, we will soon be able to report planetary inventory. Every roll of toilet paper, yes, and every kilo of hash will be scrupulously reported from planting time to final flush.

So what are we going to do with Wal-Mart’s inventoried planet? Why, of course, we are going to do just what Karl Marx said to do. We’re going to democratize it and put it to work for the workers. After the revolution, there won’t be any room for Fox News on cable, because the bandwidth will be taken over by really important information, like where is the toilet paper kept, where is it being made, and which way does it travel across the Pacific Ocean, east or west?

Then we’re going to have a digital channel for income inventory, where you can see how much everybody in the world gets paid this week. Everyone who is underpaid will be linked to an employer who will then be called into the Justice Department for an explanation. Like I said, no error will be forgotten. And everyone who is overpaid (bad news for North America) will be balanced by computerized assessment, linked preferably to someone belonging to a class of people that the violator has explicitly disparaged. Ann Coulter’s capital gains, for example, will be transferred to Islamic schools. My excess earnings will go to ex-Fox pensioners such as Ann Coulter, etc.

It was A. Philip Randolph, the great radical leader of train porters and civil rights, who said that income transparency would solve the problem of democracy overnight (I read it somewhere at the Schomburg). So please stay tuned for channel Cayman-Geneva, where the holdings of all numbered accounts will finally be revealed. No more Kudlow and Cramer BS about how to be Bull-headed all the time, we’re going to have a financial channel that actually shows you where the money is, including Kudlow’s and Cramer’s.

Tracking all the kilos of pot, heroin, hash, and cocaine will also usher in a great age of freedom when it is seen who really gets most of the good stuff and all of the money. This information will also be kept on chips at the Justice Department to control for hoarding and profiteering. Bust the trusts, not the people, that’s what the newly-minted DEA badges will say. According to my NORML newsletter this week, the combined law enforcement authorities of the USA busted three quarters of a million people for pot last year. That’s 750,000 people kicked around by the state for what? Believe me, when the narco-trade goes public, that nonsense will stop.

What else? Land. Real Estate holdings. Donald Trump, you’re fired. All your luxury-schmuxury condos will be given out on the basis of who puts in the most hours for the shittiest pay. Hot, hot water, sleep-number beds, and remote-control fireplaces given out to every gal working the counter at Rite-Aid. But if you can handle the task, Donald, you could be hired for that, too. And, of course, you’d have a claim on all the excess income that I earn from say, my profits at CounterPunch.

Finally, these inventoried motion detectors are going to be good news for the sexual revolution. That sound you hear is all the hypocrisy of starched Christianity going pop. Look who’s doing it with whom. My word. And all these years, we let them guilt whip us? No more. You just know the masturbation channel is going to be a total mess.

Workers of the world, hang in there. The difference between those who point and those who get pointed at is rapidly approaching a curve. The rest of you, have a Happy New Year anyway.

DISCLAIMER: Any reference to workers revolution is intended for entertainment purposes only, and is not to be confused with inciting jihad. Apologies also to Donald Trump for naming him in the same breath with Ann Coulter. No similarities in character are intended to be imputed from such proximities of prose. The difference between the two of you is huge. Finally, to Keith Stroup, this was supposed to be a kind of thank you note for your work, but somehow I wandered off topic. Mea culpa, Keith. Enjoy.