Wasn't This Supposed to Be Vietnam?
The Associated Press's reports from Raleigh, N.C., on a trend no one has observed:
American troops killed their own commanders so often during the Vietnam War that the crime earned its own name--"fragging."
But since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has charged only one soldier with killing his commanding officer, a dramatic turnabout that most experts attribute to the all-volunteer military.
And this is news . . . why exactly? The AP says fragging occurred with shocking frequency in Vietnam:
Between 1969 and 1971, the Army reported 600 fragging incidents that killed 82 Americans and injured 651. In 1971 alone, there were 1.8 fraggings for every 1,000 American soldiers serving in Vietnam, not including gun and knife assaults.
The AP doesn't say how common fragging has been in other wars, but our sense is that it was vanishingly rare. The AP seems to be correct that it didn't have a name before Vietnam; the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1970.
In other words, frequent fragging appears to have been a phenomenon unique to Vietnam, which means that its absence in the current war is surprising only to those who see all wars through the prism of that one. Which of course is precisely what the so-called mainstream media do.
The AP report offers this explanation for fragging in Vietnam:
"These people knew the war was pretty much lost, that they were going to be sacrificed," said Texas A&M University history professor and Vietnam veteran Terry Anderson. "They just wanted to get out of Vietnam."
After the 1968 Tet offensive, enlisted troops in Vietnam increasingly felt their lives were being placed at risk for a losing cause.
Troops in Iraq might feel the same way, if they believed the relentlessly downbeat media coverage of their effort. It's to the AP's credit that it reported the fragging nonstory in a way that makes clear this isn't Vietnam redux--but not that that realization took six years to achieve.
Everyone Thinks Alberto Is Weird
From an Associated Press report on the confirmation hearings of Attorney General-designate Michael Mukasey:
An internal Justice Department investigation is looking into whether [Mukasey's predecessor, Alberto] Gonzales lied to lawmakers about the administration's terror programs and illegally let politics influence hiring and firing of prosecutors. Gonzales, a close friend of President Bush and a former Texas Supreme Court justice, has denied any wrongdoing.
The scandal tainted the Justice Department's long-cherished independent image and has demoralized its 110,000 employees.
How does the AP know that this "demoralized its 110,000 employees"? Did reporter Lara Jakes Jordan interview every last one of them? Was there at least a poll of a representative sample of Justice Department employees?
Remember when you were a kid and you'd say something like, "Everyone thinks she's weird," and a grown-up would scold you, pointing out that you couldn't possibly speak for "everyone"? It looks as if that's the AP's approach to journalism, minus the grown-ups.
Hey, Kid, What Am I, Your Mother?
Rosa Brooks of the Los Angeles Times, last seen declaring that "9/11 was bad, but . . .," has another gem of a column. It seems that she has a nursery-school-age daughter, and it has come to Brooks's attention that being a mother is hard work:
Having kids is the simplest biological imperative there is. But, somehow, we let "having kids" get turned into "parenting," which is more or less a full-time job, with logistical challenges that would bring a CEO to his knees. . . .
Intensive parenting is a relatively recent American invention, and the evidence suggests that it's not one of our better contributions to humanity. . . . It's not a coincidence that the emergence of the modern ideology of intensive parenting directly tracks the large-scale entry of women--especially mothers--into the workplace. In 1975, 39% of women with children under 6 worked. By 2000, 65.3% of them did.
Decades ago, when most mothers didn't work outside the home, there was far less cultural anxiety about child development, safety and "parenting skills." Stay-at-home moms of the 1960s cheerfully sent the kids outside for hours of unsupervised neighborhood play while they did housework (or maybe just had a stiff drink). Only when large numbers of mothers did the unthinkable--found paid work--did Americans suddenly "discover" that truly effective "parenting" requires at least one adult to be focused 24/7 on the children and their "needs." Surprise!
So Brooks longs for a simpler time when moms didn't have to worry about their kids but were free to spend their days doing housework? But of course those stay-at-home mothers didn't need to be as "focused" on their children, because they were available for them 24/7. Brooks argues that "we can all do our bit to restore sanity--to change 'parenting' back into 'having kids.' " But somehow we doubt this means she's willing to quit her day job.
The traditional division of marital labor--husband working outside to earn money, wife caring for the home and children--was obviously far from ideal from the standpoint of women with professional aspirations. But in many ways it was better for children than today's two-career norm. Life is full of trade-offs, and in some ways these questions are more difficult for women than men. Still, there's something unbecoming about a mother complaining in the pages of a major newspaper that her daughter is too much of a burden.
Wannabe Pundits
From the fashion site Daily Candy Seattle:
Doc Brown's plutonium heist. Scooter Libby's chat with The Washington Post. Your dormmate's attempt to grow bud in the closet.
You're justifiably skeptical of a man with a plan.
But here's a reason to make an exception: Halo Salon stylist Johnathan James's Ionic Rescue hair conditioning treatment.
Then there's Greg Mancina of the Saginaw (Mich.) News, an actual pundit, albeit only part-time:
As someone who works in the sports department but gets to grace the Metro pages with a weekly column, many times I come up with cross-reference thoughts that usually do not make it into print.
This week, I'll give it a try. If we treated our politicians like we do our sports heroes, and especially our team's coaches, our country would become a much different place.
Why, he wonders, can you fire a coach but not a president?
Let's say the coach, President George W. Bush, sent the team over to find weapons of mass destruction and there weren't any. Suppose he told us to dismantle the army, and they all became dissidents now killing Americans. Fathom the fact that the place is plunging into a civil war, and the coach won't admit it.
The quarterback's appearance in front of Congress--Gen. David Petraeus--was like asking a real quarterback if he needed more time to get the offense moving, or should we just punt and hand it over to another quarterback. What response did you expect?
If Bush were a coach and Petraeus a real quarterback, fans would be calling for an ouster and a benching. But Bush is the president and Petraeus the commander, and the hard-core Republicans stand by their man.
I just don't get it.
If you "just don't get it," maybe you shouldn't be writing about it.
Mrs. Clinton Sells Out
Columnist Bob Novak has one of the day's funnier Capitol Hill stories:
Would the Democratic-controlled Senate approve a $1 million earmark to celebrate Woodstock-era baby boomers, carved out of a bill funding health care and education? It would, because its sponsored by New York's influential senators, Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer--and they promote the pet project of a big-time Democratic donor.
Nevertheless, as the Senate began consideration Wednesday of the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) proposed an amendment to eliminate the earmark. The $1 million goes to the performing arts center of the Bethel Museum in Liberty, the site of the original 1969 Woodstock Festival. Coburn argues that a "taxpayer-funded Woodstock flashback" cuts into the government's Education for Homeless Children and Youth grants. . . .
Even by Congress' shameless standards, the Bethel earmark is extraordinary. "What Cooperstown is to baseball," says the museum's Web site, "Bethel could be to the baby boom." Earlier this year, Bethel advertised a "Hippiefest" as a "return to the flower-powered days of the 1960s."
The hippies of the 1960s fancied themselves iconoclastic, idealistic free spirits, as exemplified by Mrs. Clinton's 1969 student commencement speech at Wellesley College:
Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive--now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see--but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. . . . It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere.
But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves.
Well, maybe when we sought a liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves, our reach exceeded our grasp. But we're willing to settle for a million bucks from the government!
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