Universal Obligation (to Serve) and Selective Service: A Response to Senator McCain

"If we're going to ask every American to serve,

every American should serve." — Hon. John McCain

US Senator, interview 22 October 2017,

quoted on Huffington Post

I recall Senator Ted Kennedy's staff running the numbers a few decades back and concluding that even demanding a year of service from every American at 18 or 19 would be prohibitively expensive. Still, I like the principle Senator McCain has presented, and I'll repeat my suggestion for an affordable and equitable compromise:

Take almost literally, and implement, the official American doctrine of "Universal (military) obligation and selective service."

As long as we require 18-year old male residents of the US to register for the Draft, it's probably safer for liberty to both expand and contract the pool to all American citizens 18 to 80, with everyone filling out a brief form with our physical and mental condition, skills, and current contact information. As future cohorts turn 18, they can register in more detail, including some testing, ending with a little ceremony at which they receive a card that can serve as short-form passport and for voter-ID/registration, and registration as Of Age for the purchase of alcohol and any other legal recreational drugs.

"Old enough to fight, old enough to vote; old enough to vote, old enough to 'drink' (i.e., ethyl alcohol as a recreational drug)." A rite of passage for Coming of Age in America would be useful to help cure the current American epidemic of arrested development.

Everyone in a computerized system makes real "Universal obligation," with the provision that "the System" be programed to call up people for service as needed, with the political tweak that two members of Congress and a US Senator will be called up each month of a military draft: If they got us into this emergency and perhaps declared the war, let's be sure at least some of them fight it.

(Last time I made this suggestion, I had to consider what possible contribution to some war effort could be made by Senator Strom Thurmond, who was approaching 100 years old at the time. I noted that the System could be set up to allow for extreme age in members of the Congress and to give credit for previous military service, especially such superior service as that of Thurmond — no, World War II, not the Spanish-American — and, besides, in Thurmond's case there was always mine clearance …. More seriously, by "service" I meant Federal Service, in the sense used by Robert A. Heinlein in the more carefully considered, and perhaps even revised, sections of his Starship Troopers [1959]: maybe militaristic, in the novel, but not necessrily military. For Representatives and Senators, though: military if at all possible. There're always military jobs as guinea pigs at Fort Detrick.)

Other advantages to Universal Obligation: Senator Sam Ervin opposed military conscription for women with a line something like «America is not ready to see her daughters coming home in aluminium coffins.» That has turned out not to be literally the case so far, so long as the coffins are few; and insofar as it is the case, it's an argument for drafting women. American society can use every check we can get on war fever, and if a squishy sentimentality over the deaths of young women reduces the number of deaths, period, then go for it. Also, the US Left and Center have clearly been way too optimistic about the progress of women toward full integration into American political and civic society. Military service has helped other groups into US society; it should also help women.

Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote; Old Enough to Vote, Old Enough to Drink (and Smoke)

REFERENCE:

Jonathan J. Cooper, AP, "Bill would make California 2nd state with smoking age of 21"

           <http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/health/sns-bc-ca-xgr--california-tobacco-laws-20160303-story.html">

Editorial: "State should pass bill to increase smoking age to 21"

   
        
In spite of short-term public health benefits of raising the "smoking age" for tobacco to 21, the State of California should resist the temptation to do so and move instead to a thorough revamping of our drug and criminal laws to make them more rational and to make 18 a consistent and rigorously-enforced "age of majority" (legal adulthood).

            As many Americans argued during the 1960s, "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote," a principle enacted in 1971 in the 26^th Amendment to the US Constitution. I.e., if someone is responsible enough to decide whether or not to register for the military draft and, if called, whether or not to agree to conscription; if someone is mature enough to decide whether or not to put his (sic) life in danger for his country; if someone is capable of deciding whether or not to agree to kill for his country — then that person is responsible enough to vote and deserves the vote.

            Alternatively American society would have to say that what we want for the Army is pretty much cannon fodder who needn't think a lot; and/or acknowledge that in approving the 26^th Amendment we knew that not enough young people would vote as a bloc to matter much whether they're responsible citizens or not.

            And if someone is old enough to vote — again, unless we say voting isn't really important — that person is old enough to decide whether or not to use a drug like ethyl alcohol or nicotine.

            As long as it's set a decent interval after puberty, the age for legal adulthood is more or less arbitrary and should be part of rites of passage that make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are told they're adults, expected to act like adults, and are held accountable as adults a rite of passage can work its magic and children become adults. "Late adolescence" was invented during my lifetime, and treating young Americans as adults at 18 — including demanding adult behavior — could have them again young adults. As Mike A. Males has demonstrated in two major books and other writing, older American teens are pretty much a normal adult American population or frequently doing better than their elders. If a fair number of teens are irresponsible jerks, well, so are many of their elders, the older folk just having less energy to be noisy in our evil and experienced enough to be, usually, more discreet.

            Instead of the traditional grousing about them damn youngins and their bad habits, older Americans need to admit that main-stream adult America is a drug culture with a lot of immature, irresponsible and self-destructive behavior starting with pounding beers and popping pills. And then we need to take vigorous public health actions to help addicts, and public policy actions to significantly tone down the marketing of drugs of all sorts and reverse the message that relief from all manner of pain is at the bottom of a bottle.

            As long as it's illegal for an adult to give 20 grams of marijuana to a friend, it should be a felony to design a marketing campaign around "Bitter Beer Face" and push a gateway beer like Keystone Light to young people.

            Rather than passing laws so that "Parents that host / Lose the Most," we should encourage parents to teach their children that drinking is a choice, and if they choose to drink they can sip like ladies and gentlemen and use alcohol (and softer drugs) responsibly. It should not be too hard to return to the old idea that getting sloppy drunk and puking on a date isn't signaling sophisticated maturity.

            As for tobacco use, we need more to harness even more of those fiendishly brilliant pushers of beer and wine and stronger booze and get them working on ad campaigns that show nicotine use "Soooo 20^th-century!", fit only for old people and the terminally uncool (or whatever the cool word will be for "uncool").

            Making cigarettes a symbol of adulthood is not a good idea.

            Taking yet another step teaching 18-20-year olds that we think they're children and expect them to act that way: that is an invitation to even more arrested development among American youth and a very bad idea.

Young Men's Lives Matter: On the Military Draft, Sex, Age, and Status

            I did not serve in the US military — four years of  high school plus college ROTC is not a military career — but I am "Vietnam Era" and keep as souvenirs from the period my draft card dated on my 18^th birthday and my 1-A classification (immediately "Available for Military Service") dated "APR 24 1970", shortly after I had written my draft board to thank them, sincerely, for having treated me fairly but asserting I could "no longer in good conscience do business with your firm."

            So I have had a long time to think about US military conscription and good reason to think about it seriously.

            My most recent thinking was prompted by the headline for an AP story in my local newspaper for Feb. 3^rd,  "Top brass: Consider women for draft," i.e., consider requiring young women in the USA to register for military conscription even as young men are required to register and, if called, serve.

            If men are to be subject to the draft, women should be as well.

                 * First, our history has been that military service has advanced the cause of oppressed groups, most clearly military service by Black men from the Civil War through Vietnam. Service could serve as well for women.

                 * Second, our rule in the United States is "Universal obligation and selective service," so unless there are good reasons to exempt a group from service, there's no reason to exempt them. In the eras of mass armies, it made sense to draft young men: male mammals are biologically expendable, and young male Americans as a class were usually politically weak and economically expendable; females are biologically crucial. We are, however, past the era of cannons and cannon fodder, and probably past the era when wars of attrition were won — as it is arguable that North Vietnam won — by producing enough draft-age people each year to replace casualties.

                  * Third, Senator Sam Ervin said something like, "America isn't ready to see her daughters coming home in green body bags," or maybe he got it right (body bags are unsuitable for long-range shipping) and that was "America is not ready to see her daughters coming home in flag-draped aluminum coffins." Either way, Senator Ervin had a strong point back then — Ervin died in 1985 — and one that still holds: for motivations more sentimental than ethical, Americans are less willing to have young American women killed or maimed in battle than young American men. That is an additional and powerful reason to include women in any draft and potential combat: as a curb on US bellicosity.

            Nowadays, many young women can render excellent military service, and America can afford the biological costs. By the same logic, many older people can also serve useful military roles, and we have the information technology to identify them. 

            If the military needs police or plumbers or lab technicians, it's inefficient to draft 19-year-olds and train them when you can draft professionals. And if a threat is serious enough to require conscription, it's serious enough that every American adult be in the "universal" pool for a highly selective, computerized Selective Service. 

            Indeed, if the danger is so great that Congress authorizes conscription, it's serious enough to draft by lottery something like one Senator and four Representatives a month for the duration of conscription. There is always something even the oldest and most enfeebled Senator can do, even if it's just low-tech unexploded bomb disposal or mine detection and clearance: if the cause is serious enough that we can conscript the young and healthy to risk being killed or maimed, it's certainly justification for putting at risk powerful members of the generations that got us into such a mess.

            I'm in my seventies, but I can still type and do clerical work or, if necessary, walk across a minefield with, or without, a mine detector. And, although such documents are no longer necessary to locate Americans, I still have my draft card and registration number, and that 1-A classification suitable for most Americans for a Presidential invitation for, minimally, a free physical and mental exam and possibly, as the old draft notices read, "induction into the Armed Forces of the United States."

Cops, Civilians, and "The War on _______" (1 Feb. 2014)

             I'll repeat a story here from the "Troubles" of the spring of 1970. After the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State, after the National Student Strike and disruptions at a number of major American universities, after occupation of sections of the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois by demonstrators and then Illinois State Police and then units of the Illinois National Guard — after a whole lot of shit went down, a group of very nice Methodists or Unitarians or some such thought it would be good to bring together "the kids and the cops" for some discussion sessions.
            Ah, yes: "What we got here is ... failure to communicate."
            The "kids" that showed up were largely graduate students in our mid- and late 20s — the "youth rebellion" never included all that many teenagers — and the cops were a pretty elite group from U of I in-service programs for police on their ways up in their departments.
            Relevant here is one word from the conversation between the professional students who were practicing low-power politics and the professional police who were living, for a while, like grad students: the word "civilians."
            The cops talked about the "civilians," and we asked "Who?" and then snickered.
            "Hey, man; this ain't 'The 'Nam,' and we're not the Cong — and you're not the 101^st Airborne."
            Still, we protesters got a kick out of "civilians," and both groups came to use it for people neither protesters nor cops.
            What turned out to be significant is that use of "civilians" by cops in general conversation, or, more exactly, what it represented, or, still more exactly, what it came to represent. For a long time, a lot of cops had felt themselves separate from "civilians"; by 1970, even highly educated and sophisticated cops were willing to express such feelings in words, to "civilians."
            That cops identified as a group and said so wasn't a big deal; I identified as a graduate student and teacher and more specifically a graduate student and teacher in English; the rest of youse guys were "civilians." In the decades since 1970, however, there have been trends that make that cop/civilian distinction significant, and given those trends, dangerous.
            Since the end of the Vietnam War and military conscription, there's been an increasingly wide gap between a voluntary professional military and a non-military civilian population. Simultaneously, there was quiet undermining of the problematic Posse Comitatus Act and undermining of the much more positive tradition of keeping the military out of civilian law enforcement except in extreme cases, most especially in forcing state authorities to recognize the Constitutional rights of Black people.
            Additional trends were to talk about a "War on Crime" and a "War on Drugs" and to back up the rhetoric not only with using the military for drug interdiction but also with militarizing police forces with SWAT teams and heavy armament.
            And along with that relatively low-profile use of the military to enforce laws — "Counter-drug operations" are part of the US Navy's SEALs' mission — there has been a medium-profile arms race among drug cartels, police forces, and average US citizens.
            I grew up in Chicago back when the City wouldn't have sent grief counselors over to my high school if some kid got shot. Still, it was a shocking story when my mother told us how she and her sister had to hide behind a car during Prohibition when a territorial dispute was moved along by a drive-by shooting with a "Tommy gun"; automatic weapons with magazines were rare. Such weapons are not so rare nowadays, and, indeed semi-automatics and firearms generally are common in much of the United States.
            Cops and the military may be converging, and both can legitimately see themselves separated from and other than the civilian population — at the same time as that civilian population is becoming, in one sense, less civilian. A cop must assume that many of the people around him are armed and trained, or, perhaps more dangerously, armed and untrained in the use of firearms.
            Throw into this set of trends something very good: most police nowadays are far more likely than, say, in the 1950s, to blatantly "profile" Black people and other minorities and mistreat them, at least not where the police brutality might be observed and recorded and cops behaving badly might find themselves and their departments sued. Nowadays, indeed, police officers are far more likely than in 1970 to be Black themselves — or Brown or female or Asian — and far more likely to treat civilians alike.
            The downside here is what I'll call increasingly equal-opportunity "wogification" of that civilian population: civilians are Other and not us and all potentially armed and dangerous and to be treated without obvious brutality — certainly no more public lynchings or castrations — but as if they were all dangerous criminals.
            And maybe detainees and POWs in those wars on drugs and crime.

So: So let me make a couple of suggestions.
            First, everyone, cool it with figures of speech using "war" unless you maybe want to combine William James on "The moral equivalent of war"with Arthur C. Clarke's observation in 2001: A Space Odyssey that space exploration could be as exciting as war. If anyone wants to talk about "the conquest of space," that's fine with me, just think a bit before you open your mouth about how big space is and how ludicrous the idea that it can be conquered. Aside from that: if it doesn't involve intentional production by the State of huge-scale property damage and impressive numbers of dead, wounded, and maimed, it ain't war.
            Second, moving toward third, let's call off "The War on Drugs" and replace crusades against crime with intelligent, compassionate, effective, and robust enforcement of sensible laws.
            And finally, we need some cautious disarmament. Indeed, even as long-term survival of human civilization on a large scale means substantial and rapid reductions in the total number of nuclear warheads, even so, quality of life in the United States depends upon gradual arms reduction among the military, cops, and civilians. Where we Americans are currently, the Second Amendment isn't so much guaranteeing the rest of the Bill of Rights as undermining key parts of it (think "stop and frisk" and locker searches at schools). We also need a cultural shift suggesting that truly tough guys and gals get by with martial arts and, at most, weapons more personal and elegant than point-and-spray descendants of Tommy guns or even aim-and-shoot cowboy guns.

            We need to get to more civil civilians and to cops who are less street soldiers with paramilitary backup and more civil civil servants and civilian officers of the peace.

Solidarity For-ev-er! (repeat 2x): E.R.A.! E.R.A.! NOW! (9 Oct. 2014)

            I've recently sent in a contribution for HIV/AIDS research, and, when contacted, I contribute to the local group that helps poor women get breast cancer screenings; and once a year or so I contribute to research on prostate cancer. These are all worthy causes, but aside from using the return-address labels for GMHC and their "Essential Survives to Men, Women, and Families Living with HIV/AIDS" — and aside from what I just wrote (and purchasing [sic] a life-membership in the National Organization for Women) — I haven't done anything more for those causes.

            No ribbons or marches or contacting friends, and when I write, as now, it is to point out that for women in the United States, death by cancer of any sort is less likely than death by heart disease and stroke. Indeed, for White and Black women, heart disease alone — not counting strokes — is the leading cause of death. In 2008, 24.6% of deaths among White women were from heart disease, 21.6% from cancer. In 2008, 24.9% of deaths among Black women were from heart disease, 21.6% from cancer.
            And "HIV Disease" was number 14 out of 15 as cause of death in the US in 2008, ranking behind homicide and tied with congenital malformations.
            Rankings on "Morbidity and Mortality" are more reliable and significant than, say, Newsweek's ranking of colleges and universities, but such grim statistics are only suggestive; and they need to be analyzed in detail. It is significant, for example, that congenital malformations ordinarily kill children and young people 1-24, that homicide is a significant risk primarily for the young and relatively young, and that AIDS kills in the socio-economic prime of life: ages 25-44.
            What I try to stress in my writing and politics are the cold numbers of Morbidity and Mortality tables. And I stress them for the important reason that the sex-related and journalistically "sexy" diseases of breast cancer, prostate cancer, and AIDS are less of a threat than diseases with less powerful political connections like heart disease and "Cerebrovascular Diseases (Stroke)."
            "So attention must be paid" to diseases specific to women and to men gay and straight, and, to American men who are gay: very few men will get breast cancer; no women will get prostate cancer (though there may be something similar); and in the USA — as opposed to Africa — HIV/AIDS has been most importantly a disease among young gay males. And at various times that attention must be drawn by agitation, propaganda, protest, and even disruption: the standard ways political things get done by people not running a country.
            But attention must also be paid to unnewsworthy, "background" threats like heart disease and stroke, and diseases that threaten pretty much everybody: diseases that should inspire causes that can bring together working coalitions of men and women, gay and straight, incandescent White or of color of various sorts.
            Similarly, to get around to my title topic, "for everything there is a time, and a season," as Koheleth saith (Eccl. 3.1), and I think it now a time that my friends (and unfriends) on the Left return to an emphasis on coalitions, and coalitions built around the decorous uniting theme of equality.
            Greater equality of income and, more important, wealth, for a primarily goal, but that will be a tough fight: people with a lot of money are more into Pride than Greed among the deadly sins, and being better off than other people and a whole lot better off — radical inequality — is precisely the point. With a long-term fight over wealth distribution in the background, however, it is time to get to a more immediate, achievable, and too-long-put-off goal: ratification of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, with the process reinvigorated by a campaign in the 113^thor 114^th Congress.
            Look, if the old hard-radical feminist critique is correct, there is a monolithic structure of (White, European) male privilege of ancient and awesome power, and therefore not much hope for change. For sure, there'd be no reason beyond altruism for any XY and/or male-gendered human beings to do much for women or anyone else below them in the food chain. But there was never "The Man," and men are far from a monolithic group; and a lot of actually-existing guys have a fair sense of fairness and some vague idea that we are far from the top of the food chain and would be better off in a more equal world.
            And greater equality can begin logically and sensibly with the biggest inequality around: patriarchal/sexist exploitation of women. So:

Section 1: Women shall have equal rights in the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2: Congress and the several States shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

            Rape, sexual assault against women, and domestic abuse will remain issues in the United States, but those are crimes and need to be effectively handled as crimes. The cultural contexts in which such crimes are enabled are bigger and more complex problems; I'll note, though, that "The Law is the great teacher" — schoolmaster? — "of the commonwealth" (as someone said), and a fine teacher of the basics is specific expansion of the US Bill of Rights with an ERA for women. If "The Man" still exists in some sense and has problems with the ERA, then he can be shouted down and out-voted by the gals and guys. If some women worry that the second sentence of section 1 might make women susceptible to conscription, and if war-loving men worry that a country that drafts women would be reluctant to go to war …. Well, it may be my privileged off-White, politically straight, and XY-male privilege speaking — or just my souvenir 1-A draft card (Available for [Immediate] Military Service) — but screw 'em. If there's a literal "existential threat" against the USA, then every American from age 18 to 80 should have our names, health status, and brief résumés in the computer, and if we've got needed skills, off we go to defend the Motherland: with one Member of Congress drafted by lottery each week for the duration, and one Senator a month (I'll insist strongly on that last part: drafting members of the Congress).
            Solidarity forever folks; let's return to some old political priorities NOW, if perhaps just for now. 

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Teachers (3 Nov. 2014)

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            I entered the Ed Biz in the late 1960s in large part because the government of the United States made me an offer that was difficult to refuse: I could be a teacher somewhere in the USA or (most likely given my size) tunnel rat with the Army of the United States in Vietnam.
            General Lewis B. Hershey, Director of the Selective Service System, made clear to the male youth of 1960s America that the law was "universal obligation" for us and "selective service" — with the criteria for selection dictated by the policies, needs, and interests of the United States. America needed teachers, especially young males as inner-city role models, so teaching could get a guy out of the draft.
            And so, for a while there, teaching in the US got a young-male subsidy to be added to the far longer-running and more important female subsidy: for a long time, nursing and teaching were two jobs a woman with brains could hold and remain respectable.
            Selective Service has been on idle with registration but no conscription for the last couple generations, and women in the US now have far better job opportunities than in the 1960s and for some five or six millennia before that.
            Like nursing, education has to compete now for bright young adults, and it is not surprising education is not doing all that well.
            Salaries have improved since I started out, but that was largely the result of unionization, and American unions are losing clout. And during The Great Recession, school administrations have shown that they will keep up teachers' salaries if they have to, but will do that while cutting expenses by reducing teaching staff: firing the untenured and "letting people go" for "financial exigency" for those with seniority.
            There has always been anti-intellectualism in the US, and teachers have had trouble getting respect. It wasn't just, "Those who can do; those who can't teach" but also the idea of teaching as "women's work" when the non-child-producing labor of women was radically undervalued — plus the idea that teaching is not really work at all: "Oh, do you teach, or do you work?"
            Nowadays things are particularly bad because of deprofessionalization in a wide swath of American life. It's increased equality, I guess, but that's about the only up-side for all but Management when physicians and lawyers, mid-level executives and engineers are reduced from fairly independent professionals to "professional employees" — and then just employees, to be managed and supervised.
            And managed and supervised ever more closely. To cite one extreme: When a condition of employment is having to urinate in a cup while someone watches, people aren't seeing you as a person whose dignity has to be respected.
            Americans today often value schooling and credentials and applicable forms of cleverness. General Hershey had taught for a while at Ohio State University, and I think he actually respected education. In any event, he thought that an American teacher might be as valuable as a hunter-down and (with luck) killer of highly motivated Viet Cong. It was a weird kind of compliment that draft deferment, but it was one I treasured at the time and still appreciate.
            Some people have a fairly literal sort of calling, and teaching is the one thing they want to do with their lives. I for one generally enjoyed teaching and got good student evaluations for enthusiasm — but most of us aren't borderline obsessives in having a vocation and can find what joys we will find in various ways. If teaching doesn't offer job security, dignity, respect as a professional, some autonomy and a chance to get your job done — all of which are related — then competent young people will go into jobs that may not be any better in most ways, but require less preparation and hassle, and can pay a lot more.