It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
A chilling reminder of the dark side of the military's power over the people it absorbs into its ranks comes this morning in the form of a father's excuse for his son's participation in the torture of Iraqi prisoners. In Hyndman, Pennsylvania, Daniel Sivits, the father of court-martialed Jeremy Sivits explained that he blamed the officers who gave his son the order to take photographs of the torture. The elder Sivits said that because his son comes from a military family, "he knows how to follow orders".

Jamey Ringler, Jeremy Sivits's basketball coach, echoed this excuse, saying that when Sivits joined the military, "it was beat into his head that he had to follow orders. So in a sense, in his mind, that was right."

You know, we hear all the time about how the military values honor, but this father's desperate attempt to excuse his son exposes the military's claim to honor as a sham. When it comes right down to it, what the military teaches young Americans is a lack of responsibility.

The enlisted soldiers are taught that they don't have responsibility for anything that they do, so long as they just follow orders. They are told that they can kill and maim and destroy, just so long as it's under orders. Is it any wonder that they follow orders when told to torture helpless prisoners? The military teaches them that they are above the codes of civilized behavior.

The officers, when the brutal behavior of their soldiers is exposed, also fail to take responsibility. After all, they say, they didn't do the torture. They get a slap on the wrist for crimes that would give them hard prison time if the crimes were done back here in the United States. The lack of responsibility among the military's leadership is epitomized by Donald Rumsfeld, who has the brass to say "I take responsibility," and then insist that he receive no punishment at all. This kind of "responsibility" without consequences is not responsibility at all.

It's also of worthy note that Jeremy Sivits's father complained that his son was trained by the military to be a truck driver, not a prison guard. Watch out kids, when the military recruiters come to you and tell you that if you join the military, you'll be getting valuable skills that will help you get a job when you return to civilian life. Oh, you'll learn a trade, all right. The military can promise to train you as an engineer, and then send you off to torture prisoners in a foreign country.

Where are you going to put that on your resume?

Posted by J. Clifford Cook at 6:24 AM. # (permalink)  




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