A friend of mine is a playwright and former professor of theater at BYU. He took one for the team and saw Convicted Felon Dinesh D’Souza’s movie Hillary’s America. Here’s his review. An excerpt:
Anyway, the real question this film raises for me is this: what did Hillary Clinton ever do to Dinesh D’Souza? What would cause a man to expend this impressive amount of pure vitriol and bile and hatred towards someone? I don’t get it. Why does Hillary have to be some combination of Lady Macbeth, Lucrezia Borgia and Livia Drusilla Caesar? Why does she have to be this monster? Can’t you just say ‘I disagree with her on matters of policy.
4.
Kropadope
I’m not saying that we should have armed insurrection against the government, I’m just saying that the Second Amendment provides an avenue for redress if an election doesn’t go your way is stolen by tyrants.
@Origuy: D’Souza can’t make any money if he were to just say he disagrees with her, or the President, or anyone else on a matter of policy. If Senator Sanders was the nominee he’d have done a movie on him entitled Sander’s United Socialist America. He may be a true believer ideologically and religiously, but he’s definitely a true believer when it comes to grifting off of conservatives.
So after the whole “Lost Boys” thing last night, I have a question for the gents here:
There seemed to be something of a consensus in last night’s thread that young men often look for ways to physically challenge themselves and, with 4 older brothers, I’ve seen that dynamic in play.*
I know that a lot of people who want that kind of challenge go into the military, but further expanding the military right now seems like a bad idea. My question is, could something like an expansion of AmeriCorp or a new Conservation Corps absorb and/or redirect at least some of that energy? I’m thinking of stuff like giving young adults a chance to sign up to be woodland firefighters, or to do maintenance on remote parts of the Pacifc Crest or Appalachian trails, stuff like that, where they could physically challenge themselves while doing something constructive. Am I wandering off in the wrong direction?
* Yes, I realize that there are also young women who want to physically challenge themselves, and I am by no means advocating that they not be encouraged to sign up for these programs as well. I’m just wondering if this is a crazy notion or not.
D’Souza knows that if rank-and-file conservatives got a good look at Hillary’s actual policies as opposed to what the Republicans propose, they would trample over him and his Randian pals to sign up with her. Therefore, he must demonize her lest the rubes catch on that what he’s proposing is actually really bad for THEM.
15.
Origuy
@Mnemosyne: Governor Jerry Brown started the California Conservation Corps in 1976. It’s still going. They hire about 3000 young people every year, about 24% female.
16.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: I’m not sure you’re wandering in the wrong direction, but I’ve long thought we need to have a national service requirement. Two or three years. When you’re done you get funding for university, healthcare, things like that as you’re subject to recall in case of national emergency. Most would serve in the military, with some then choosing to make it a career after they complete their minimum requirements. Others in a variety of other positions. Part of this is that I’ve watched up close and personal the All Volunteer Force become more and more separated from, while being put on a seeming pedestal, by the rest of the country that isn’t serving/hasn’t served/isn’t related to anyone serving/who has served. If we’re not careful we’re going to wind up with a dedicated warrior caste. And that will be toxic. A universal service requirement would resolve some of this. I think it would also make elected and appointed officials a little less quick on the draw to throw the military at everything.
17.
Lizzy L
@efgoldman: You and I are almost the same age: I was a high school senior on November 22, 1963. I remember it painfully well. When I saw Trump’s “Second Amendment” comment as reported on TPM, that day was precisely where my thoughts went.
He has opened Pandora’s box; I wonder if he even recognizes it.
I worry that if we had a much larger military than we currently do, we would be more likely to throw it at problems because otherwise why spend all that money on it? I think that mindset is what got us into Korea and Vietnam to begin with.
But to have an expanded civilian way for young people to do national service would be very useful, I think. It would have to be carefully done, because you don’t want a Teach for America problem of a constant stream of barely-trained kids replacing seasoned professionals, but God knows we have more than enough infrastructure that needs work that there would be plenty to do for some time to come.
20.
Turner Hedenkoff
Just another day in Weimar America. Isn’t it against the law to shout “Open fire” in a crowded theater?
21.
seaboogie
Because I am a kind and caring individual, I am going to interject a musical interlude and (perhaps) an indelible image into the saddest late-nite thread in quite a while.
Scene: Twenty or so seventh grade girls in gymsuits in the 70’s in a middle school gym, doing synchcronized dance to this….. in Wisconsin. Still know a couple of the moves. Completely forgot the schottische….
22.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: Master Lao: “Shiny weapons are instruments of ill omen. Use them only as a last resort”
I understand your point, but thing of the political pressure against something like invading Iraq in 2003 if almost everyone in the country has blood, let alone treasure, on the line. If I’m recalling correctly, when they debated the AUMF there were fewer than 30 members of Congress total at the time that had either served, were currently in the Guard or Reserve, or had children serving. I strongly believe that if 400 members of Congress not only had served, but also had their children and grandchildren serving or subject to call up, they would have debated for longer than 40 minutes!
23.
Bill E Pilgrim
The two years I worked closely with government agencies got me thinking that a required government service that involved people working in government itself might go a long way toward curing our ills. Some of them anyway. I came out vastly less cynical, or at least more informed and less likely to say “Oh no one’s even trying”. People not trying was not even remotely the problem. My attitude ever since has been okay, you think it can be done better, you try it. If you think you can fix it, give it a go. Sitting on a barstool or in front of your TV carping about it doesn’t count.
24.
Villago Delenda Est
@Adam L Silverman: Agreed. There should be an alternative to the military, but everyone (no exceptions because your daddy is George H.W. Bush…or Fred Trump) must put in two years.
Wish I could agree but really I can’t. 2 to 3 years is too long for mandatory service, to short to be of any use either in the military or anything else (unless we’re talking the 2 year active 4 year active reserve plan).
See, people of my generation think of this when they hear that song.
27.
Adam L Silverman
@Villago Delenda Est: Yep. Foreign Service. USAID. All sorts of options. I’m not even against allowing state and local law enforcement. Teaching. Park Service.
28.
bemused senior
@Mnemosyne: look up California Conservation Corps. My daughter worked the summer wildfires one summer in college.
29.
Mary G
I visited my grandparents in Austin for a month in the summer of 1963. I was seven years old and flew by myself from California and had to lie about my age. The thing that impressed me the most was how much they spoiled me. A new toy from the dime store, ice cream and a book from the library every day. But I did hear a lot of scary talk from my uncles and cousins and neighbors about the race traitors in DC. I repeated some things I heard when I got home and my mom went ballistic. That was the end of visiting Texas by myself. The 60s were scary.
@Origuy: Thanks for the link in the earlier thread.
If I’m recalling correctly, when they debated the AUMF there were fewer than 30 members of Congress total at the time that had either served, were currently in the Guard or Reserve, or had children serving.
While I agree with the sentiment I’d bet a years pay that your recollection is off on that one Adam.
I strongly believe that if 400 members of Congress not only had served, but also had their children and grandchildren serving or subject to call up, they would have debated for longer than 40 minutes!
And yet the people who got us into both Korea and Vietnam were mostly veterans who hadn’t learned a damn thing who were working with a draft force that often did include their own sons, and they did it anyway.
Maybe the answer is to split the armed forces into the people who do the actual fighting and a civilian corps that does everything else. We’re already using contractors for a huge amount of the admin stuff — let’s make that a separate corps instead and make them civilian government employees.
33.
Lizzy L
@Adam L Silverman: Yes. Teaching. Repairing roads and bridges. Forest Service. Services to seniors, to the disabled (with training). Emergency Services. The CCC is a good model; so is the WPA.
34.
Prescott Cactus
@Villago Delenda Est: Agree. A little hard work and discipline away from Mommy and Daddy. Zero deferments.
Forest Service, National Parks, Military. Data entry to mowing the lawn at Vet’s cemeteries. Plus make it 1,000 + miles from home so that it isn’t suitcase weekends.
Yes. Teaching. EMTs at Community Hospital (with training, of course.) Repairing roads and bridges. Teaching. Services to seniors, to the disabled (with training), have I mentioned teaching? The CCC is a good model; so is the WPA.
See my comment at #23: a program that uses 0.01% of California’s population seems undermanned, to say the least.
(Note: math results not guaranteed.)
36.
Luthe
@Adam L Silverman: Another option is to sweeten the pot on the existing national service options. You can get the military to pay for college, but AmeriCorps only knocks $5,000 off student loans while paying poverty level wages (without providing the food, shelter, and clothing the military does). They’d get a lot more volunteers if the incentives were actually worth the trouble.
God knows we have more than enough infrastructure that needs work
Most of that work takes skilled labor, ditch digging is done by backhoe operators these days. And while it’s not particularly skilled, there are companies whose sole business is to provide flaggers for road construction. What infrastructure needs is funding for design and construction. We’ve come some distance from the WPA, but the CCC is still a good idea.
38.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: It didn’t make a damn bit of difference with Vietnam. I think we’d need to start drafting 50-year-olds and dropping them on the front lines for it to make any political disincentive; people just don’t care enough about their children, or if they do, they find ways to get them exempted (and closing all those loopholes would be as politically impossible as making a tax code without loopholes).
39.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Adam L Silverman: You’re right that it’s dangerous for the military to be too separated from the population as a whole. And you and Mnemosyne are right there are substantial benefits to having a national service requirement. But the numbers are daunting in many ways.
There are something like 40+M people between 18 and 25 in the US.
The military is trying to cut the number of people required for lots of reasons (they’re expensive, they’re vulnerable to death and injury, they’re at risk of capture, they cause size and utility constraints in aircraft, tanks, ships, that increase costs and logistics requirements, etc.).
Sure, in principle, there’s lots of ways that 40+M people could be used for national service and civil society improvements, but we’re not going to have a 5M wo/man military again any time soon, we’re not going to have 10M people building roads, bridges, etc. So we’ll have to have a lottery to pick people to serve, or the time requirements will be short (too short to build a professional and career-oriented organization, etc.). Lotteries and service requirements can be gamed (see Vietnam).
Things were easier when the population was smaller, there was less sophistication in the equipment, and more people were needed to run the DoD, but it still wasn’t a universal service program.
Does that mean we shouldn’t try some sort of national service and think about ways to tie the DoD more strongly to civil society? Not at all. But it will be very expensive to get more people involved (if it’s beyond a “civil defense” type weekend or two a year system), and there will still be issues of the professional military being a tiny fraction of the population.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
40.
Matt McIrvin
@Luthe: Any civilian national service corps needs to pay good wages; otherwise, it’s nothing but another way to replace paid workers with glorified interns, pushing down wages for everyone.
41.
Adam L Silverman
@Davebo: The majority of veterans in Congress at the time were Democrats. There were only a handful of Guard and Reservists. And the parents of those in the service were actually a small number. I once had it actually tallied for my Congress lesson blocks when I was an academic and teaching American Federal Government. It was a very small number.
We listened to the cast album on a road trip (because that’s our thing now) and it really struck me that Sondheim’s thesis about assassins in American life is now totally applicable to mass shooters. In fact, with all of the protections that have been thrown up around national politicians, I think mass shooters have taken over that cultural space that once belonged to assassins.
@Mike J: Sorry, more like 4 times its current size with a 2 year hitch.
45.
Bobby D
“If we’re not careful we’re going to wind up with a dedicated warrior caste.”
Yeah, no. I work on Air Force bases as a civil engineer, and have for a long time. I currrently work at a base with a heavy tech school focus. IOW, I see wave after wave of new airmen both enlisted and butter bars. The gung-ho, snap-to, classic military attitude of when I was IN, rather than working for, the AF (circa 90s), is gone for the most part. I can’t speak for other branches, but the bulk of those under 30 are way different temperamentally than my generation.
I think you are pretty far out of touch with that comment. Pearl clutching, as it were.
This is also a concern — that’s why I brought up Teach for America in a negative way.
In a way, a military model of jobs that can be constantly rotated to new people without too much trouble is probably a good one. AFAIK, the military doesn’t lay off officers because they have a constant stream of new enlisted personnel who are put to the same tasks.
And, again, I’m picturing a lot of physical work that lets overenergetic young men channel that energy: seasonal firefighting, patrolling remote national park areas, assisting search and rescues, etc.
47.
Adam L Silverman
@Mike J: I’m headed to bed, but KP duty works for me.
48.
Adam L Silverman
@Bobby D: I spent 4 years assigned to the US Army War College. I’ve served on Army Service Component Command, Corps, and Brigade Staffs – the first two temporary assigned control and the latter as a special staff element. As far as the Army is concerned, with the career personnel, especially in the officer cohort, the trend/tendency is there. This is also my impression with the career personnel I’ve worked with and/or supervised (and I’ve supervised a lot of O5s and O6s) from the other services as well.
BTW, right now 30 percent of the seasonal firefighting corps in CA is made up of convicted felons who get paid $2 a day. It’s kind of a gray area because (a) they volunteer for it and (b) it’s actually one of the more desirable jobs that provides them with job training they wouldn’t otherwise get since those prison job training programs have been cut to the bone.
Still, I can’t help but notice that the number of prison convicts fighting fires outnumbers the entire California Conservation Corps by about 1,000.
50.
piratedan
well, public service is public service… what needs does the public have? Granted, youngsters with limited skills need to do something… as people mentioned above…
our national forests and parks could use a hand… breaking trails, setting up fire breaks, clean up (from sovereign citizens or uncaring tourists)
train them in trades where there is a public need, say water reclamation, waste disposal, sewage treatment
public service in teaching in areas of need (say rural/poor/native american reservations
providing services for those that need it, say transportation of the elderly
working on elections as poll monitors, doing ballot recounts, census work
It doesn’t all have to be scut work, some of it can be quite useful, needed stuff.. data entry for the VA or Social Security, Medicare, IRS..
Software testing…
We do need the bodies to do some of the heavy lifting, pay them for it… give them a break towards college and give them some skills while they go along.
51.
pseudonymous in nc
The NHSC is a decent model though it kicks in much later, usually after college, often after grad school.
As Mnemosyne suggests, the big criticism of Teach for America in its current incarnation is that it’s resume-padding for participants with aspirations for top-tier law and business school, and doesn’t provide the continuity and actual infrastructure that those high-poverty areas need.
A broader service obligation is better than a narrower one that has become a way for the already-privileged to stay already privileged. But the problem lies in finding projects and roles that can be done without undermining career lifers or introducing the burden of churn. Is it meant to provide training or a service experience? It’s hard to be both a floor wax and a dessert topping. And it’s also a tough sell to a generational cohort that already feels like it has to delay many of the core elements of adult life (long-term home, marriage, career, family) much later than previous generations. I like the idea of a travel or relocation component: there are few countries that offer the same chance to live a completely different life within its borders.
The military top brass would probably hate it. Tough.
52.
KS in MA
@Mnemosyne: Totally agree that an opportunity for national service of some kind is an excellent idea. I’m not sure this could always involve the kind of strenuous physical activity that you’re asking about … but on the other hand, the idea that your country actually wants your help can be really powerful. Kids (or people of any age) don’t get told that anywhere near often enough. Offer a living wage, and I bet there would be lots of applicants, especially in this job market. Ideally it should be mandatory, but save that for later.
53.
SectionH
@efgoldman: I was 12. Even my Republican teacher (oh yes she was*) was in shock and near tears that day. And yep, it was a thing that long ago.
*I was politically aware before that, but 63 was the year they started bringing Voice of America, or some such other propaganda shit in our classrooms, so we could be told about the glorious war in Vietnam. It was vile. This was actually before JFK was killed, not that made a difference.
Srsly – I’ve never even talked with someone who had the same thing happen, but I can’t possibly be the only one. We got this biggish black radio thing brought into our classroom on a cart, and then had to pretend to listen to BS about SE Asia.
Sorry, I almost always read all the comments (uh-hum…). But memory trigger thing.
54.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: “I strongly believe that if 400 members of Congress not only had served, but also had their children and grandchildren serving or subject to call up, they would have debated for longer than 40 minutes!”
There is merit in this argument, I’m sure. And I’ve heard this argument advanced as a reason to bring back the draft. But do you really think a proposal like this would go anywhere in Congress? We got rid of the draft because of the reaction to Vietnam. “Skin in the game” didn’t keep us out of that war, and I remain somewhat skeptical that it would keep us out of indiscriminate military adventuring.
I don’t actually mind the idea of compulsory service of some form or other, whether civilian, military, or some combination. I just wonder how hard a sell it would be.
On the other hand…”I got your debt-free college/health care right here” might be a mighty persuader.
On the other hand…”I got your debt-free college/health care right here” might be a mighty persuader.
A one or two year hitch making our country strong would be a great incentive for debt-free college/health care right here”. We might even be able to sell the Rethugs that, we are not giving it away, they earned it.
In my dream fantasy world every one of those jobs would include union membership. Time to climb on my unicorn and follow the rainbow to another pot of gold…
@Prescott Cactus: You would absolutely have to have a non-military option though, like they do in many (most?) other compulsory service countries. Then it could become “the democrats want to give these damn hippies free college and healthcare for life after a stint in the peace corps!”, though.
Ehh, who knows.
OT: I scheduled a vet house call on Saturday. Samwise is due anyway.
Adam’s the one who wants to make it mandatory. I just want to make it an option.
59.
SectionH
@KS in MA: I think that’s why JFK’s assassination hurt people so hard. Even if he did steal it from Pericles, “Ask Not…” was a real thing for 12 yr olds, and people a lot older. Peace Corps, Space stuff…
Miss Bianca, and Prescott, what’s not to like about some idea like that? In theory…
I’ve clearly never mentioned it here, but I was thrilled to meet a young woman who was actually in America-corps (?) was it called that? but it was a sort of domestic Peace Core (no, I know it’s Corpse, or, wait… damn! whatevs). Pretty sure it was an EVIL CLINTON Thing. Somehow she was very happy with what she was doing.
@NotMax: I want to make it mandatory, too, but that’s just the service. The form of service, that we can be very flexible on. The military is just one example. As Adam points out, there are a great many other possibilities. The key thing is that everyone goes through it. You’ve got say a month of orientation where the high, middle, and low all stress together. It’s military only in the sense that you’re engaged in physical training in the morning, then the rest of the morning and afternoon it’s classes on what your options are. Some may opt for ditch digging. Others may opt for the Navy. Still others may find prep for teaching, or foreign service, or some other government task more to their liking. Say field studies in forests for future botanists. On the ground training with the Army Corps of Engineers. Internships at NSA for geeks. Yes, it needs to be reasonably paid, but it also needs to be a pathway to a future for the country and the individuals.
62.
Mary G
We are crazy short of quality child care that doesn’t cost a fortune. It would give kids attention they desperately need and young people would learn skills for their future families.
63.
Aleta
August 9, 1974 saw the end of a major constitutional crisis with the resignation of Richard Nixon from the Presidency. With Nixon facing impeachment, and at a time when he was showing signs of mentally unstable behavior, there were many Americans who realized that there was a potential danger of martial law and other dangers from a mentally deranged President under stress.
Thankfully, Richard Nixon had enough presence of mind to understand that any dictatorial actions on his part would be resisted by the Pentagon on orders of Chief of Staff Alexander Haig and that his reputation in history would be far worse in the process. So the nation emerged from this crisis in the best possible way, with a new President, Gerald Ford.
Now, however, and ironically on the 42nd anniversary of that historic moment in American history, we have a new constitutional crisis that is arising, and in many ways, reaching its peak.
Ronald L. Feinman, a historian who’s written a book on assassinations and threats to the Presidency
My kid did the Jesuit Volunteer Corps for 2 years, and the 2nd one was in Alaska. She went up to Sitka and worked for peanuts in a domestic violence shelter, and became part of what turned out to be a whole phalanx of young people who cycle through there. Some are JVC, some are Americorps, some stay on for a few years because Alaska. The town kind of depends on this system to keep its agencies staffed.
We must be the same age, btw. I was 12 when JFK was killed, and I know that there was propaganda about Vietnam because of a very early diary of mine in which I recorded my thoughts about the war as explained to me by someone. I don’t have a memory of where I learned about it, but it was definitely not at home. No papers, no attention paid to news, etc. I sound on that page like a young zombie parroting impressive-sounding anti-commie talk. Within a few years all 3 of my older brothers would be in the military.
@NotMax: I go for mandatory but would settle for option. I believe that the incoming class of 2016 can be broken up into 2 to 6 categories:
1 Warrior Caste 1
2 Troubled Youth 1
3 Undisciplined child 1
4 First or second offender. 1
5 Macho Rambo Want to Be 2
6 Patriot Son 2
With one big wide bow you may, just may be able wrap that up into just one or 2 categories. I am NOT knowledgeable about what type of legislation would be required, but magic can happen !
“Welcome to legal adulthood; your ass is now ours for two years” rubs against the grain of a pluralistic culture. Regimentation does not suit all.
In order to be a “patriotic and good member of our society” you will set aside 2 years that you will be working for your country. Payback is enrollment in All age medicare and debt free tuition program. Failure to join would be life in Ma & Dad’s basement with a monthly Cheetos delivery.
Considerings the physical, security and environmental work our county could accomplish! I have no problem with youths in infrastructure projects, but we can as democrats,cannot pay less than Davis Bacon (prevailing wage) .
70.
Anne Laurie
On the grounds that you might read the comments on this post (but not the last one), next time you’re running an opera group (/snark), might I recommend Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures?
The show is set in 1853 Japan and follows the difficult Westernization of Japan, told from the point of view of the Japanese. In particular, the story focuses on the lives of two friends caught in the change.
The title of the work is drawn directly from text in a letter from Admiral Perry addressed to the Emperor dated July 7, 1853:
“Many of the large ships-of-war destined to visit Japan have not yet arrived in these seas, though they are hourly expected; and the undersigned, as an evidence of his friendly intentions, has brought but four of the smaller ones, designing, should it become necessary, to return to Edo in the ensuing spring with a much larger force.
But it is expected that the government of your imperial majesty will render such return unnecessary, by acceding at once to the very reasonable and pacific overtures contained in the President’s letter, and which will be further explained by the undersigned on the first fitting occasion.”…
Built around a quasi-Japanese pentatonic scale, the music contrasts Japanese contemplation (“There is No Other Way”) with Western ingenuousness (“Please Hello”). The score is generally considered to be one of Sondheim’s most ambitious and sophisticated efforts…
Given the unusual casting and production demands, Pacific Overtures remains one of the least-performed musicals by Stephen Sondheim. The show is occasionally put on by opera companies.
Good for your daughter, first, and yeah, Alaska’s … many of those “A” words: awesome, amazing start the list. We visited there before Sarah Palin, and last summer, for Mr S’s birthday. I can totally see how people fall in love with it.
The young woman I met was a guest of the Morris side my son was a member of in Lexington KY years ago. Most of the local Morris ppl were in the CS Dept at UK or closely related, so I was srsly touched to meet her, and listen to her. She loved what she was doing. It was lovely.
I’m a Very visual person, which is why after all this time I still see 1963 and that giant ugly machine being wheeled into my classroom.
72.
SectionH
@Major Major Major Major: Sorry, I was pretty happy then: I don’t have to go to Kansas City next week (meaning, leave Saturday).
I need to write a story where the heroine’s name is Carrie Daway…
In theory I think the idea of national service great, I just don’t know how we make it work in a meaningful way for the many millions of people who would become eligible either for the opportunity or the mandatory term. If it was mandatory, It seems to me there is a chance for an amazing bureaucracy growing up around it to deal with the all aspects of working with the 15 or 20 million people involved in the process of any one given time. The mind reels.
Forced labor is forced labor no matter how it is gussied up.
In order to be a “patriotic and good member of our society”
Reading that sends icy chills of trepidation down the spine. As does the intimation that there would follow a stratum of officially designated second-class citizens.
75.
Kathleen
@efgoldman: I was a freshman in high school. I will never forget that day. I recommend the book Dallas 1963, which provides not only context for November 22, 1963 but some eerie parallels to today’s political scene.
76.
SectionH
@Keith G: That bureaucracy never existed? You have got to be joking.
77.
Kathleen
@SectionH: I’ve met a few AmeriCorps volunteers in my community. They’re working for non profits that are focused on economic development, education, etc.
78.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
Radio Rwanda has done a fine job of preparing the ground and planting the seeds on Hillary. With each knowing sneer, every one of those right wing fuckstains have been cementing impressions which are demonstrably false, yet so conditioned and imbedded in the brain that they’re impossible to remove. For those who’ve spent absurd amounts of time listening to winger material and participating in winger discussions, you cannot budge them with fact, because their conditioning denies the validity of your facts. The only way the impression falls apart for many is when they talk to the even truer believers and see the absurdities expected (that’s how it has worked for me).
But what do Walmart moms think of not so subtle suggestions of assassination?
Now I have to hear about Walmart moms nonstop because of 20 randomly selected apparently brain dead Ohioan and Arizonan women were in a focus group.
81.
Death Panel Truck
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
We will always be un-Real Americans.
82.
Barb2
One of the benefits of some sort of mandatory National service should be a massive randomly assignments away from friends, classmates etc.
Then everyone has to work together as a team. There must be some way to strip learned racist mind set and replace it with how much we have in common with our fellow humans.
I was in high school when JFK was assassinated. I lived on a military base in the SF Bay area. We went to Fisherman’s wharf frequently the summer before he died. What is still vivid in my memory were the radical right hate group’s fliers nailed to wooden posts all over Fishermans wharf. Pictures of JFK and hateful words.
JFK was my father’s Commander-in-chief. JFK was a Veteran and a hero. He was always held in respect – top of the chain of command. But there in a public place there were dozens of derogatory posters, some encouraging violence against JFK. The fliers must have been removed daily, because every time we returned for SF Sour Dough bread the wooden posts were covered with new hate fliers.
Back then confusing stuff wasn’t expained. We were told to ignore the fliers and look elsewhere.
By November JFK was dead. The citizen’s militia didn’t assassinate JFK – but the hate was in those fliers.
That first wanted flier posted above with JFK photos, is similar enough to the ones I saw in San Francisco, that the old memories are clear again.
That was a rough and dangerous era. Cuba missile crisis and the right wing hate groups.
83.
Patricia Kayden
@Origuy: The bigger question: Who cares what a convicted felon has to say about anything?
84.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
Adam, here’s a research project or 10 on the radicalizing effect of the wingnut Wurlitzer.
Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC) was a Rwandan radio station which broadcast from July 8, 1993 to July 31, 1994. It played a significant role during the April–July 1994 Rwandan Genocide.
The station’s name is French for “Thousand Hills Free Radio and Television”, deriving from the description of Rwanda as “Land of a Thousand Hills”. It received support from the government-controlled Radio Rwanda, which initially allowed it to transmit using their equipment.[1]
Widely listened to by the general population, it projected racist propaganda against Tutsis, moderate Hutus, Belgians, and the United Nations mission UNAMIR. It is widely regarded by many Rwandan citizens (a view also shared and expressed by the UN war crimes tribunal) as having played a crucial role in creating the atmosphere of charged racial hostility that allowed the genocide to occur. A study by a Harvard University researcher estimates that 9.9% of the participation in the genocidal violence was due to the broadcasts. The estimate of the study suggests that approximately 51,000 deaths were caused by the stations broadcasts.[2]
Prior to the Genocide
And you people who live…near Rugunga,… go out. You will see the cockroaches’ (inkotanyi) straw huts in the marsh… I think that those who have guns should immediately go to these cockroaches… encircle them and kill them…”
Kantano Habimana on RTLMC, April 12, 1994[3]
RTLMC was established in 1993, primarily railing against on-going peace talks between President Juvenal Habyarimana, whose family supported the radio station,[4] and the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front.[5] It became a popular station since it offered frequent contemporary musical selections, unlike state radio, and quickly developed a faithful audience among youth-aged Rwandans, who later made up the bulk of the Interahamwe militia.
Félicien Kabuga was allegedly heavily involved in the founding and bankrolling of RTLMC, as well as Kangura magazine.[6][7] In 1993, at an RTLMC fundraising meeting organized by the MRND, Felicien Kabuga allegedly publicly defined the purpose of RTLMC as the defence of Hutu Power.[8]
The station is considered to have preyed upon the deep animosities and prejudices of many Hutus. The hateful rhetoric was placed alongside the sophisticated use of humor and popular Zairean music. It frequently referred to Tutsis as “cockroaches” (example: “You [Tutsis] are cockroaches! We will kill you!”).
You need to get out of Kentucky more. Trust me on that. And I don’t mean on diving trips (even though I envy you those). Go visit real cities. Spend s few days in Seattle or Portland or San Francisco or San Diego. Or drive 4 hours to St. Louis, ffs, it’s more vital than Louisville has ever been, including the racial shit. Or go to Chicago, which is so not my favorite city, but many ppl love it, and I totally acknowledge I’m in the minority and have a personal filter. Or go to a dozen East Coast places. Kentucky – well, you’ve tried.
No fucking joke: I still own a house in Leftington (as the redneck assholes call it, or Mexington, ha ha ha, they are so funny) but I spent too many years there being beaten down by the entire environment, even though Lexington is a wonderful place, but it’s always under siege, and the Ville is too. It just gets you down after a while.
I don’t have a solution*. But ffs, don’t let the rednecks get you down.
*well, sofa – I know you can spend money, etc.but you’ve got BJ friends
You’ve got a point – while the People’s Republic of Louisville is an awesome place, it does feel like we’re constantly under siege. The feeling is that we’re about this close to having Frankfort strip any vestige of home rule, attach a tap straight to all revenue to send to religious hucksters, crony contractors and hilljack county governments, all while mandating strict blue laws on alcohol and requiring that the only full service restaurant to be allowed is Cracker Barrel.
I think it’s the constant feeling of “it can’t last because my country cousins don’t want it and don’t want better, and would prefer that I can’t have it either” that is getting me down.
88.
Joel
@Origuy: Colbert nailed D’Souza way back when he was arguing that liberal, decadent New York had it comin’ on 9/11.
89.
Matt McIrvin
I guess I’m generally skeptical about national-service schemes just because, in general, a labor shortage is not what we have, and especially not an unskilled-labor shortage. We have a shortage of desire to pay for things, and if we had that desire, we could generate all sorts of good paying jobs in public service that would not have to be mandatory. It’d just be seen as a career path–which might be great in itself, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing people are talking about.
More specifically, we just don’t need enough people in the modern military to make most of those jobs military, so the whole point of getting skin in the game to disincentivize war, or to establish in people a life-and-death stake in the common good of the republic Starship Troopers style, doesn’t fly. There’s a vague nostalgia for the situation that existed during World War II and the early Cold War, but that is not actually a situation any nation wants to be in.
90.
Matt McIrvin
…Also, there’s just the general moral fact that I feel really uncomfortable advocating a return of the draft now that I’m safely past draftable age. I know I really didn’t like the idea when I was young enough.
91.
Donalbain
No. No. No.
Teaching is a skilled profession that requires serious training and dedication. It is not something you can just throw unqualified kids at and hope for the best. Teach for America is bad enough, this idea is even worse.
92.
philadelphialawyer
@Adam L Silverman: Flatly disagree. If a military draft is needed to protect the country, that is one thing. Forcing every young person into some dictatorial, mandatory “service” project just because it seems like a good idea is another. We don’t live forever. Two or three years is a big chunk of our lives, and an even bigger chunk of the best years of our lives (ie our young adulthood). Even a year of forced “service” sounds like crap to me.
@Mnemosyne: tl;dr the thread, but AmeriCorps is still going on and does disaster services as well as regular stuff. As a former Vista volunteer, I’m an alumna. It’s perpetually underfunded by Republicans in Congress (duh).
I also believe we need a mandatory national service. Especially because Libertarians and Republicans like to equate the mandatory volunteer service requirements at many public high schools with slavery. So they need to do more service until they learn the difference.
@philadelphialawyer: and your opinion sounds like crap to me. There are obligations that should go along with the privileges of citizenship, and too many people are refusing to recognize those obligations.
95.
philadelphialawyer
@satby: Obligations? Like paying taxes and jury duty? Even a military draft, if the country is in danger? I agree. Not made up ones like “national service.” Our society does not need this “service,” rather, it is the worst kind of know it all, old folks telling young folks what to do “for their own good,” nanny state, bullshit. We have a lot of real problems in this country. A working government, fully funded by taxing the rich, would go a long way towards fixing them. Folks with a bug up their ass because “kids these days have it too easy” and so some sort of indentured servitude is needed doesn’t fit that bill.
96.
philadelphialawyer
@satby:”I also believe we need a mandatory national service. Especially because Libertarians and Republicans like to equate the mandatory volunteer service requirements at many public high schools with slavery. So they need to do more service until they learn the difference.”
Maybe you should learn the difference between “mandatory” and “volunteer.” Hint: If something is required, then it is not voluntary. No, community service requirements for high school students are not slavery. But they aren’t voluntary either.
And I like how we should punish all young people just to teach folks who disagree with you about the requirements for graduation from public high schools a lesson. No authoritarianism here!
97.
manyakitty
@Mnemosyne: They could have a super useful option with the National Park Service. Also, we have government laboratories – what about aiming STEM-oriented kids there? Honestly, it’s a brilliant idea, and its participants will feel like they have skin in the game.
98.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Origuy: You Tub has this flick’s preview as advert and it looked hilariously bizarre. A bit like some paranoid wingnuts rant done on film. Good to hear the director did prison time.
Well, as a young woman who was a Vista volunteer before it was all put under AmeriCorps, I found it enlightening and frustrating in about equal measure, but it also exposed me to people and viewpoints I wouldn’t have encountered had I stayed on the same path and in the same environment. It changed my life, as it does for a lot of alumni.
Your verbiage gives you away:”indentured servitude” “punish all young people” “nanny state, bullshit”.
A national service is not a punishment, it’s an opportunity to expand your life and build new skills and relationships on the government’s dime. But as long as we have IGMFY as a national motto, I doubt we could ever have a national service amounting to the puny AmeriCorps we have now.
100.
FlipYrWhig
@philadelphialawyer: @Matt McIrvin: IMHO the goal wouldn’t be so much labor or discipline or toughening up or what have you but an experience of going someplace other than where you live and learning to deal with people other than the ones you’ve known your whole life. You’d pretty much have to learn about and put into practice things like cooperation and respect for diversity. I don’t know if it’d have to be two years…
@FlipYrWhig: This. And Vista is (maybe was) one year. Peace Corps was two because of the investment in training, language school, and need for program continuity.
Volunteers wouldn’t have to replace teachers, they could do a great deal just as classroom assistants, PE aides, NPO assistant staff; there are lots of things that can be done with more hands that don’t require specialized skills or displacing workers.
102.
manyakitty
@satby: Yes. Thanks for summing that up better than I seem able to.
Yes, I know Americans have a “you’re not the boss of me!” attitude that might make mandatory service unpalatable.
On the other hand, I’d say we have several serious fucking problems in this country that this type of service might help to address.
One of them being that “Lost Boys” phenomenon Adam alluded to in his article on hashtag terrorism – we have an awful lot of young guys wandering around, hopped up on inchoate rage and resentment, who seem to need some sort of guidance into becoming mature and productive men. In the absence of any meaningful societal/tribal rituals that help accomplish this task (you can vote when you’re 18! But you don’t even know what that means! You can walk into a bar and order a drink when you’re 21! Yay?), what do we as a society do to tackle this problem?
Racism is another huge fucking problem. I think a program like this would have to be committed to mixing folks together outside their home communities, outside their comfort zones, and making a racially and gender-mixed cohort. Say what you like about the military, but with all its problems, it’s a lot more de-segregated than most of the rest of our society. It’s harder to take the bs race/anti-LGBTQ propaganda spewed by our media seriously if you have personal experience of people of other races and gender orientations.
As for what work these young folk do together…I honestly don’t know if that’s the most important part.
ETA: And in the time it took me to stumble over my words and drink coffee while I drafted this, I see other folks have managed to make the same point, with slightly less verbiage. ; )
104.
gvg
Childcare cannot be solved by national service. People want background checks on childcare workers. Random kids are not acceptable. Plus frankly most kids are bad kid sitters. Dealing well with lots of different children who aren’t your young relative is not even close to universal. Add in that good childcare that we actually want is a kind of preschool, not a park the kid somewhere where he won’t get hurt all day but it’s too much trouble to actually train all of them. Being a childcare worker worth anything actually takes training and the reason we don’t have it is we don’t pay for it. In fact a large portion of our population cannot afford to pay for it. I can’t think of any solution except a kind of public “school” for pre kindergarten and I don’t know how we could set up something that covers the fact that our workers have a lot of shifts that aren’t 9-5. Around here I don’t know of any day care that is past 6pm and that’s a problem for me even though my job is 8-5.
I don’t think highly of Teach America. Teaching is a professional skill. Teach America is slightly useful but more real teachers would be better IMO.
I have always liked the idea of nearly universal service but when I go to think about the nuts and bolts I tend to think we just don’t need it enough compared to other things. Clearly we aren’t teaching civics enough.
@gvg: I’m a lifelong volunteer both here and abroad; background checks are routine for almost all service that might remotely deal with children or vulnerable populations even in other countries.I have to get another one in a few weeks if I do a project I’m considering this November, but they also have to be done close to the start of a project. And classroom assistants in lots of schools are parents who volunteer, they don’t have any special training either. But they are supervised, as any classroom assistant would be.
I have a friend who is working in a 90% poverty rate school as a teacher with Teach for America; she had a degree and a Masters, went through additional educational and classroom management training and was a “student teacher” with a mentor for (I think) her entire first year. She may be an outlier, but that school is lucky to have her.
Edited to add: she is very much a “real teacher”.
106.
VOR
@satby: I suspect one of the issues with AmeriCorps, or reviving Great Depression era programs like the WPA or CCC, is those government run services compete with the private sector. We have to properly revere the “Job Creators”, after all.
Trump claims the real unemployment rate is close to 40%. If that were true, government putting people to work on useful things like a WPA or CCC would make a ton of sense.
107.
Matt McIrvin
@VOR: A lot of the “FDR made the Depression worse” claims from people like Amity Shlaes are referencing the same old paper that, if I recall correctly, intentionally counted the people employed by those programs as unemployed, on the grounds that it was something like prison labor.
I suspect one of the issues with AmeriCorps, or reviving Great Depression era programs like the WPA or CCC, is those government run services compete with the private sector.
Yep. And if it’s a service so unprofitable that the private sector isn’t willing to do it, conservatives demand that the government pay a private company enough to make it worth their while, even though that means it will cost more than it would if the government just did it their own damn selves. Because it’s not actually about budgets or cost effectiveness, it’s about Government Bad, Private Sector Good.
109.
wenchacha
@Mnemosyne: I have written about my daughter who did time in the WCC, in the PNW. What a great program. There are so many young adults, just out of high school or college, who want to do good things. They want to improve The Commons, for everyone. As a nation, we should help our young citizens become more invested in the future.
While I agree with the sentiment I’d bet a years pay that your recollection is off on that one Adam.
Democratic vets voting for 2003 AUMF: Tom Carper, Max Cleland, Tom Daschle, Chris Dodd, Tom Harkin, Ernest Hollings, John Kerry, Herb Kohl, Zell Miller, Bill Nelson.
Democratic vets voting against 2003 AUMF: Daniel Akaka, Jeff Bingaman, Jon Corzine, Daniel Inouye, Ted Kennedy, Jack Reed
That’s 16, just Democrats, just in the Senate. There were way, way, way more than 30 veterans in Congress in 2003 (Ted Stevens, John McCain, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Larry Craig, Dick Lugar, Pat Roberts, Thad Cochran, Conrad Burns, Chuck Hagel, Don Nickles, Jim Inhofe, Lindsey Graham, Bob Bennett, John Warner, Craig Thomas on the GOP side bring the total to 31 in the Senate alone, even discounting Mitch McConnell and his 5 week service). That doesn’t even touch children serving, or anyone in the House in 2003.
IIRC schools in my WV county when I was 12 were closed until after the funeral. We hadn’t had a TV for very long, it was a big Admiral.
When Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the DPD garage, my Mom was watching the rare live feed, and literally screamed. I was in the next room noodling on the piano and thought she had hurt herself somehow.
She was shaking when I got there, in mere seconds, and Lee was going down and Jack was being grappled with by a handful of big plainclothes cops.
I was in science class to a classic bigot when they told us of the killing on the PA, teacher, long dead (thankfully) now was obviously delighted by the news, but smart enough to try to look concerned. We got out immediately as the buses were already all lined up for end of school by that time.
Given the current technology, the TV folks did a good job of keeping people informed, with as much video as was possible in 1963. It was a horrible week. Who was this guy, LBJ, who was the new president? No one really knew much about him, except he was from Texas, where Kennedy was killed…
Now that I know more about how crooked LBJ was even in class president elections, I would have been far more paranoid about his possible involvement in the shooting. As it was, just sad, puzzled, and a little fearful, as this was on the back side of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In order to be a “patriotic and good member of our society”
Sounds like I lifted that from Stalin or Chairman Mao
We live in a country where we enjoy great freedom and protection. Very few participate (except police fire, military) other than by paying taxes. The future looks like it may hold debt free college. Should we not ask those who are going to be getting a free ride now, unlike those who have paid before them to give something back?
113.
NoraLenderbee
If people are required do universal national service, they’ll start demanding things in return like free college, national health care, old-age pensions–and THEN WHERE WILL WE BE?????
Comments are closed.
Share this ArticleLike this article? Email it to a friend!
redshirt
Words are just symbols. Symbols that mean things collectively.
Invoking certain symbols unlocks certain people.
Omnes Omnibus
@redshirt: Meaningless babble.
Origuy
A friend of mine is a playwright and former professor of theater at BYU. He took one for the team and saw Convicted Felon Dinesh D’Souza’s movie Hillary’s America. Here’s his review. An excerpt:
Kropadope
I’m not saying that we should have armed insurrection against the government, I’m just saying that the Second Amendment provides an avenue for redress if an election
doesn’t go your wayis stolen by tyrants.redshirt
@Omnes Omnibus: Heh. You’re literally a Literal.
Adam L Silverman
@Origuy: D’Souza can’t make any money if he were to just say he disagrees with her, or the President, or anyone else on a matter of policy. If Senator Sanders was the nominee he’d have done a movie on him entitled Sander’s United Socialist America. He may be a true believer ideologically and religiously, but he’s definitely a true believer when it comes to grifting off of conservatives.
satby
@efgoldman: The results were pretty awful too.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: I think its that no one is taking whatever it is that you’re taking.
Kropadope
@Adam L Silverman:
A pity, that.
@Omnes Omnibus:
As opposed to meaningful babble which, I understand, is what one finds when meditating on a brook.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: Marijuana?
Mnemosyne
So after the whole “Lost Boys” thing last night, I have a question for the gents here:
There seemed to be something of a consensus in last night’s thread that young men often look for ways to physically challenge themselves and, with 4 older brothers, I’ve seen that dynamic in play.*
I know that a lot of people who want that kind of challenge go into the military, but further expanding the military right now seems like a bad idea. My question is, could something like an expansion of AmeriCorp or a new Conservation Corps absorb and/or redirect at least some of that energy? I’m thinking of stuff like giving young adults a chance to sign up to be woodland firefighters, or to do maintenance on remote parts of the Pacifc Crest or Appalachian trails, stuff like that, where they could physically challenge themselves while doing something constructive. Am I wandering off in the wrong direction?
* Yes, I realize that there are also young women who want to physically challenge themselves, and I am by no means advocating that they not be encouraged to sign up for these programs as well. I’m just wondering if this is a crazy notion or not.
redshirt
@Mnemosyne: I love it. Especially the Corp idea – diplomacy, construction, business, etc. Lots of Corps.
TheMightyTrowel
@Mnemosyne: Men! Come join us in the Conservacorps! Plant Trees! THEN FIGHT THEM!
Mnemosyne
@Origuy:
D’Souza knows that if rank-and-file conservatives got a good look at Hillary’s actual policies as opposed to what the Republicans propose, they would trample over him and his Randian pals to sign up with her. Therefore, he must demonize her lest the rubes catch on that what he’s proposing is actually really bad for THEM.
Origuy
@Mnemosyne: Governor Jerry Brown started the California Conservation Corps in 1976. It’s still going. They hire about 3000 young people every year, about 24% female.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: I’m not sure you’re wandering in the wrong direction, but I’ve long thought we need to have a national service requirement. Two or three years. When you’re done you get funding for university, healthcare, things like that as you’re subject to recall in case of national emergency. Most would serve in the military, with some then choosing to make it a career after they complete their minimum requirements. Others in a variety of other positions. Part of this is that I’ve watched up close and personal the All Volunteer Force become more and more separated from, while being put on a seeming pedestal, by the rest of the country that isn’t serving/hasn’t served/isn’t related to anyone serving/who has served. If we’re not careful we’re going to wind up with a dedicated warrior caste. And that will be toxic. A universal service requirement would resolve some of this. I think it would also make elected and appointed officials a little less quick on the draw to throw the military at everything.
Lizzy L
@efgoldman: You and I are almost the same age: I was a high school senior on November 22, 1963. I remember it painfully well. When I saw Trump’s “Second Amendment” comment as reported on TPM, that day was precisely where my thoughts went.
He has opened Pandora’s box; I wonder if he even recognizes it.
redshirt
Warrior Caste = Pretty Bad
Mnemosyne
@Origuy:
Right, but with the current population of California being 39 million, only having a 3,000-person strong CCC seems a little … underpowered.
@Adam L Silverman:
I worry that if we had a much larger military than we currently do, we would be more likely to throw it at problems because otherwise why spend all that money on it? I think that mindset is what got us into Korea and Vietnam to begin with.
But to have an expanded civilian way for young people to do national service would be very useful, I think. It would have to be carefully done, because you don’t want a Teach for America problem of a constant stream of barely-trained kids replacing seasoned professionals, but God knows we have more than enough infrastructure that needs work that there would be plenty to do for some time to come.
Turner Hedenkoff
Just another day in Weimar America. Isn’t it against the law to shout “Open fire” in a crowded theater?
seaboogie
Because I am a kind and caring individual, I am going to interject a musical interlude and (perhaps) an indelible image into the saddest late-nite thread in quite a while.
Scene: Twenty or so seventh grade girls in gymsuits in the 70’s in a middle school gym, doing synchcronized dance to this….. in Wisconsin. Still know a couple of the moves. Completely forgot the schottische….
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: Master Lao: “Shiny weapons are instruments of ill omen. Use them only as a last resort”
I understand your point, but thing of the political pressure against something like invading Iraq in 2003 if almost everyone in the country has blood, let alone treasure, on the line. If I’m recalling correctly, when they debated the AUMF there were fewer than 30 members of Congress total at the time that had either served, were currently in the Guard or Reserve, or had children serving. I strongly believe that if 400 members of Congress not only had served, but also had their children and grandchildren serving or subject to call up, they would have debated for longer than 40 minutes!
Bill E Pilgrim
The two years I worked closely with government agencies got me thinking that a required government service that involved people working in government itself might go a long way toward curing our ills. Some of them anyway. I came out vastly less cynical, or at least more informed and less likely to say “Oh no one’s even trying”. People not trying was not even remotely the problem. My attitude ever since has been okay, you think it can be done better, you try it. If you think you can fix it, give it a go. Sitting on a barstool or in front of your TV carping about it doesn’t count.
Villago Delenda Est
@Adam L Silverman: Agreed. There should be an alternative to the military, but everyone (no exceptions because your daddy is George H.W. Bush…or Fred Trump) must put in two years.
Davebo
@Adam L Silverman:
Wish I could agree but really I can’t. 2 to 3 years is too long for mandatory service, to short to be of any use either in the military or anything else (unless we’re talking the 2 year active 4 year active reserve plan).
Mnemosyne
@seaboogie:
See, people of my generation think of this when they hear that song.
Adam L Silverman
@Villago Delenda Est: Yep. Foreign Service. USAID. All sorts of options. I’m not even against allowing state and local law enforcement. Teaching. Park Service.
bemused senior
@Mnemosyne: look up California Conservation Corps. My daughter worked the summer wildfires one summer in college.
Mary G
I visited my grandparents in Austin for a month in the summer of 1963. I was seven years old and flew by myself from California and had to lie about my age. The thing that impressed me the most was how much they spoiled me. A new toy from the dime store, ice cream and a book from the library every day. But I did hear a lot of scary talk from my uncles and cousins and neighbors about the race traitors in DC. I repeated some things I heard when I got home and my mom went ballistic. That was the end of visiting Texas by myself. The 60s were scary.
@Origuy: Thanks for the link in the earlier thread.
Davebo
@Adam L Silverman:
While I agree with the sentiment I’d bet a years pay that your recollection is off on that one Adam.
patrick II
They were just joking.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
And yet the people who got us into both Korea and Vietnam were mostly veterans who hadn’t learned a damn thing who were working with a draft force that often did include their own sons, and they did it anyway.
Maybe the answer is to split the armed forces into the people who do the actual fighting and a civilian corps that does everything else. We’re already using contractors for a huge amount of the admin stuff — let’s make that a separate corps instead and make them civilian government employees.
Lizzy L
@Adam L Silverman: Yes. Teaching. Repairing roads and bridges. Forest Service. Services to seniors, to the disabled (with training). Emergency Services. The CCC is a good model; so is the WPA.
Prescott Cactus
@Villago Delenda Est: Agree. A little hard work and discipline away from Mommy and Daddy. Zero deferments.
Forest Service, National Parks, Military. Data entry to mowing the lawn at Vet’s cemeteries. Plus make it 1,000 + miles from home so that it isn’t suitcase weekends.
ETA: @Lizzy L:
Mnemosyne
@bemused senior:
See my comment at #23: a program that uses 0.01% of California’s population seems undermanned, to say the least.
(Note: math results not guaranteed.)
Luthe
@Adam L Silverman: Another option is to sweeten the pot on the existing national service options. You can get the military to pay for college, but AmeriCorps only knocks $5,000 off student loans while paying poverty level wages (without providing the food, shelter, and clothing the military does). They’d get a lot more volunteers if the incentives were actually worth the trouble.
frosty
@Mnemosyne:
Most of that work takes skilled labor, ditch digging is done by backhoe operators these days. And while it’s not particularly skilled, there are companies whose sole business is to provide flaggers for road construction. What infrastructure needs is funding for design and construction. We’ve come some distance from the WPA, but the CCC is still a good idea.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: It didn’t make a damn bit of difference with Vietnam. I think we’d need to start drafting 50-year-olds and dropping them on the front lines for it to make any political disincentive; people just don’t care enough about their children, or if they do, they find ways to get them exempted (and closing all those loopholes would be as politically impossible as making a tax code without loopholes).
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Adam L Silverman: You’re right that it’s dangerous for the military to be too separated from the population as a whole. And you and Mnemosyne are right there are substantial benefits to having a national service requirement. But the numbers are daunting in many ways.
There are something like 40+M people between 18 and 25 in the US.
The military is trying to cut the number of people required for lots of reasons (they’re expensive, they’re vulnerable to death and injury, they’re at risk of capture, they cause size and utility constraints in aircraft, tanks, ships, that increase costs and logistics requirements, etc.).
Sure, in principle, there’s lots of ways that 40+M people could be used for national service and civil society improvements, but we’re not going to have a 5M wo/man military again any time soon, we’re not going to have 10M people building roads, bridges, etc. So we’ll have to have a lottery to pick people to serve, or the time requirements will be short (too short to build a professional and career-oriented organization, etc.). Lotteries and service requirements can be gamed (see Vietnam).
Things were easier when the population was smaller, there was less sophistication in the equipment, and more people were needed to run the DoD, but it still wasn’t a universal service program.
Does that mean we shouldn’t try some sort of national service and think about ways to tie the DoD more strongly to civil society? Not at all. But it will be very expensive to get more people involved (if it’s beyond a “civil defense” type weekend or two a year system), and there will still be issues of the professional military being a tiny fraction of the population.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Luthe: Any civilian national service corps needs to pay good wages; otherwise, it’s nothing but another way to replace paid workers with glorified interns, pushing down wages for everyone.
Adam L Silverman
@Davebo: The majority of veterans in Congress at the time were Democrats. There were only a handful of Guard and Reservists. And the parents of those in the service were actually a small number. I once had it actually tallied for my Congress lesson blocks when I was an academic and teaching American Federal Government. It was a very small number.
Mnemosyne
To get back to the pictures at the top, I give you the opening number of Sondheim’s “Assassins”. Yes, that’s John Wilkes Booth kicking the number off.
We listened to the cast album on a road trip (because that’s our thing now) and it really struck me that Sondheim’s thesis about assassins in American life is now totally applicable to mass shooters. In fact, with all of the protections that have been thrown up around national politicians, I think mass shooters have taken over that cultural space that once belonged to assassins.
Mike J
@Adam L Silverman: 4-5 million people turn 18 each year. Active duty military currently totals ~1.3M, call it 2 when you add in the weekenders.
What do we do with a military twice its current size?
Mike J
@Mike J: Sorry, more like 4 times its current size with a 2 year hitch.
Bobby D
“If we’re not careful we’re going to wind up with a dedicated warrior caste.”
Yeah, no. I work on Air Force bases as a civil engineer, and have for a long time. I currrently work at a base with a heavy tech school focus. IOW, I see wave after wave of new airmen both enlisted and butter bars. The gung-ho, snap-to, classic military attitude of when I was IN, rather than working for, the AF (circa 90s), is gone for the most part. I can’t speak for other branches, but the bulk of those under 30 are way different temperamentally than my generation.
I think you are pretty far out of touch with that comment. Pearl clutching, as it were.
Mnemosyne
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I actually disagree with Adam that it should be mandatory, but I think it should be available and made desirable enough that people want to do it.
@Matt McIrvin:
This is also a concern — that’s why I brought up Teach for America in a negative way.
In a way, a military model of jobs that can be constantly rotated to new people without too much trouble is probably a good one. AFAIK, the military doesn’t lay off officers because they have a constant stream of new enlisted personnel who are put to the same tasks.
And, again, I’m picturing a lot of physical work that lets overenergetic young men channel that energy: seasonal firefighting, patrolling remote national park areas, assisting search and rescues, etc.
Adam L Silverman
@Mike J: I’m headed to bed, but KP duty works for me.
Adam L Silverman
@Bobby D: I spent 4 years assigned to the US Army War College. I’ve served on Army Service Component Command, Corps, and Brigade Staffs – the first two temporary assigned control and the latter as a special staff element. As far as the Army is concerned, with the career personnel, especially in the officer cohort, the trend/tendency is there. This is also my impression with the career personnel I’ve worked with and/or supervised (and I’ve supervised a lot of O5s and O6s) from the other services as well.
Mnemosyne
BTW, right now 30 percent of the seasonal firefighting corps in CA is made up of convicted felons who get paid $2 a day. It’s kind of a gray area because (a) they volunteer for it and (b) it’s actually one of the more desirable jobs that provides them with job training they wouldn’t otherwise get since those prison job training programs have been cut to the bone.
Still, I can’t help but notice that the number of prison convicts fighting fires outnumbers the entire California Conservation Corps by about 1,000.
piratedan
well, public service is public service… what needs does the public have? Granted, youngsters with limited skills need to do something… as people mentioned above…
our national forests and parks could use a hand… breaking trails, setting up fire breaks, clean up (from sovereign citizens or uncaring tourists)
train them in trades where there is a public need, say water reclamation, waste disposal, sewage treatment
public service in teaching in areas of need (say rural/poor/native american reservations
providing services for those that need it, say transportation of the elderly
working on elections as poll monitors, doing ballot recounts, census work
It doesn’t all have to be scut work, some of it can be quite useful, needed stuff.. data entry for the VA or Social Security, Medicare, IRS..
Software testing…
We do need the bodies to do some of the heavy lifting, pay them for it… give them a break towards college and give them some skills while they go along.
pseudonymous in nc
The NHSC is a decent model though it kicks in much later, usually after college, often after grad school.
As Mnemosyne suggests, the big criticism of Teach for America in its current incarnation is that it’s resume-padding for participants with aspirations for top-tier law and business school, and doesn’t provide the continuity and actual infrastructure that those high-poverty areas need.
A broader service obligation is better than a narrower one that has become a way for the already-privileged to stay already privileged. But the problem lies in finding projects and roles that can be done without undermining career lifers or introducing the burden of churn. Is it meant to provide training or a service experience? It’s hard to be both a floor wax and a dessert topping. And it’s also a tough sell to a generational cohort that already feels like it has to delay many of the core elements of adult life (long-term home, marriage, career, family) much later than previous generations. I like the idea of a travel or relocation component: there are few countries that offer the same chance to live a completely different life within its borders.
The military top brass would probably hate it. Tough.
KS in MA
@Mnemosyne: Totally agree that an opportunity for national service of some kind is an excellent idea. I’m not sure this could always involve the kind of strenuous physical activity that you’re asking about … but on the other hand, the idea that your country actually wants your help can be really powerful. Kids (or people of any age) don’t get told that anywhere near often enough. Offer a living wage, and I bet there would be lots of applicants, especially in this job market. Ideally it should be mandatory, but save that for later.
SectionH
@efgoldman: I was 12. Even my Republican teacher (oh yes she was*) was in shock and near tears that day. And yep, it was a thing that long ago.
*I was politically aware before that, but 63 was the year they started bringing Voice of America, or some such other propaganda shit in our classrooms, so we could be told about the glorious war in Vietnam. It was vile. This was actually before JFK was killed, not that made a difference.
Srsly – I’ve never even talked with someone who had the same thing happen, but I can’t possibly be the only one. We got this biggish black radio thing brought into our classroom on a cart, and then had to pretend to listen to BS about SE Asia.
Sorry, I almost always read all the comments (uh-hum…). But memory trigger thing.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: “I strongly believe that if 400 members of Congress not only had served, but also had their children and grandchildren serving or subject to call up, they would have debated for longer than 40 minutes!”
There is merit in this argument, I’m sure. And I’ve heard this argument advanced as a reason to bring back the draft. But do you really think a proposal like this would go anywhere in Congress? We got rid of the draft because of the reaction to Vietnam. “Skin in the game” didn’t keep us out of that war, and I remain somewhat skeptical that it would keep us out of indiscriminate military adventuring.
I don’t actually mind the idea of compulsory service of some form or other, whether civilian, military, or some combination. I just wonder how hard a sell it would be.
On the other hand…”I got your debt-free college/health care right here” might be a mighty persuader.
Prescott Cactus
@Miss Bianca:
A one or two year hitch making our country strong would be a great incentive for debt-free college/health care right here”. We might even be able to sell the Rethugs that, we are not giving it away, they earned it.
In my dream fantasy world every one of those jobs would include union membership. Time to climb on my unicorn and follow the rainbow to another pot of gold…
Major Major Major Major
@Prescott Cactus: You would absolutely have to have a non-military option though, like they do in many (most?) other compulsory service countries. Then it could become “the democrats want to give these damn hippies free college and healthcare for life after a stint in the peace corps!”, though.
Ehh, who knows.
OT: I scheduled a vet house call on Saturday. Samwise is due anyway.
NotMax
@Mnemosyne
Absent a constitutional amendment, universal mandatory service is legally sketchy.
“Welcome to legal adulthood; your ass is now ours for two years” rubs against the grain of a pluralistic culture. Regimentation does not suit all.
Mnemosyne
@NotMax:
Adam’s the one who wants to make it mandatory. I just want to make it an option.
SectionH
@KS in MA: I think that’s why JFK’s assassination hurt people so hard. Even if he did steal it from Pericles, “Ask Not…” was a real thing for 12 yr olds, and people a lot older. Peace Corps, Space stuff…
Miss Bianca, and Prescott, what’s not to like about some idea like that? In theory…
I’ve clearly never mentioned it here, but I was thrilled to meet a young woman who was actually in America-corps (?) was it called that? but it was a sort of domestic Peace Core (no, I know it’s Corpse, or, wait… damn! whatevs). Pretty sure it was an EVIL CLINTON Thing. Somehow she was very happy with what she was doing.
Major Major Major Major
@SectionH: Americorps?
Villago Delenda Est
@NotMax: I want to make it mandatory, too, but that’s just the service. The form of service, that we can be very flexible on. The military is just one example. As Adam points out, there are a great many other possibilities. The key thing is that everyone goes through it. You’ve got say a month of orientation where the high, middle, and low all stress together. It’s military only in the sense that you’re engaged in physical training in the morning, then the rest of the morning and afternoon it’s classes on what your options are. Some may opt for ditch digging. Others may opt for the Navy. Still others may find prep for teaching, or foreign service, or some other government task more to their liking. Say field studies in forests for future botanists. On the ground training with the Army Corps of Engineers. Internships at NSA for geeks. Yes, it needs to be reasonably paid, but it also needs to be a pathway to a future for the country and the individuals.
Mary G
We are crazy short of quality child care that doesn’t cost a fortune. It would give kids attention they desperately need and young people would learn skills for their future families.
Aleta
Ronald L. Feinman, a historian who’s written a book on assassinations and threats to the Presidency
hitchhiker
@SectionH:
My kid did the Jesuit Volunteer Corps for 2 years, and the 2nd one was in Alaska. She went up to Sitka and worked for peanuts in a domestic violence shelter, and became part of what turned out to be a whole phalanx of young people who cycle through there. Some are JVC, some are Americorps, some stay on for a few years because Alaska. The town kind of depends on this system to keep its agencies staffed.
We must be the same age, btw. I was 12 when JFK was killed, and I know that there was propaganda about Vietnam because of a very early diary of mine in which I recorded my thoughts about the war as explained to me by someone. I don’t have a memory of where I learned about it, but it was definitely not at home. No papers, no attention paid to news, etc. I sound on that page like a young zombie parroting impressive-sounding anti-commie talk. Within a few years all 3 of my older brothers would be in the military.
SectionH
.
Srsly, FYWP
SectionH
@Major Major Major Major:
If the llnk works, I’ll follow up.
Ok, seems to work. I wasn’t sure how to spell it. Not fond of the name. Good idea, but *Clinton* bad…
NotMax
@Mnemosyne
I was agreeing with you and expanding upon your premise.
Major Major Major Major
@SectionH: Yeah, I was telling you the name :P
Prescott Cactus
@NotMax: I go for mandatory but would settle for option. I believe that the incoming class of 2016 can be broken up into 2 to 6 categories:
1 Warrior Caste 1
2 Troubled Youth 1
3 Undisciplined child 1
4 First or second offender. 1
5 Macho Rambo Want to Be 2
6 Patriot Son 2
With one big wide bow you may, just may be able wrap that up into just one or 2 categories. I am NOT knowledgeable about what type of legislation would be required, but magic can happen !
@NotMax:
In order to be a “patriotic and good member of our society” you will set aside 2 years that you will be working for your country. Payback is enrollment in All age medicare and debt free tuition program. Failure to join would be life in Ma & Dad’s basement with a monthly Cheetos delivery.
Considerings the physical, security and environmental work our county could accomplish! I have no problem with youths in infrastructure projects, but we can as democrats,cannot pay less than Davis Bacon (prevailing wage) .
Anne Laurie
On the grounds that you might read the comments on this post (but not the last one), next time you’re running an opera group (/snark), might I recommend Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures?
SectionH
@hitchhiker: Hi, hitchhiker!
Good for your daughter, first, and yeah, Alaska’s … many of those “A” words: awesome, amazing start the list. We visited there before Sarah Palin, and last summer, for Mr S’s birthday. I can totally see how people fall in love with it.
The young woman I met was a guest of the Morris side my son was a member of in Lexington KY years ago. Most of the local Morris ppl were in the CS Dept at UK or closely related, so I was srsly touched to meet her, and listen to her. She loved what she was doing. It was lovely.
I’m a Very visual person, which is why after all this time I still see 1963 and that giant ugly machine being wheeled into my classroom.
SectionH
@Major Major Major Major: Sorry, I was pretty happy then: I don’t have to go to Kansas City next week (meaning, leave Saturday).
I need to write a story where the heroine’s name is Carrie Daway…
Keith G
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I think the value of your comments here are under appreciated.
In theory I think the idea of national service great, I just don’t know how we make it work in a meaningful way for the many millions of people who would become eligible either for the opportunity or the mandatory term. If it was mandatory, It seems to me there is a chance for an amazing bureaucracy growing up around it to deal with the all aspects of working with the 15 or 20 million people involved in the process of any one given time. The mind reels.
NotMax
@Prescott Cactus
Forced labor is forced labor no matter how it is gussied up.
Kathleen
@efgoldman: I was a freshman in high school. I will never forget that day. I recommend the book Dallas 1963, which provides not only context for November 22, 1963 but some eerie parallels to today’s political scene.
SectionH
@Keith G: That bureaucracy never existed? You have got to be joking.
Kathleen
@SectionH: I’ve met a few AmeriCorps volunteers in my community. They’re working for non profits that are focused on economic development, education, etc.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
Radio Rwanda has done a fine job of preparing the ground and planting the seeds on Hillary. With each knowing sneer, every one of those right wing fuckstains have been cementing impressions which are demonstrably false, yet so conditioned and imbedded in the brain that they’re impossible to remove. For those who’ve spent absurd amounts of time listening to winger material and participating in winger discussions, you cannot budge them with fact, because their conditioning denies the validity of your facts. The only way the impression falls apart for many is when they talk to the even truer believers and see the absurdities expected (that’s how it has worked for me).
SectionH
@Kathleen: Great stuff, innit?
amorphous
But what do Walmart moms think of not so subtle suggestions of assassination?
Now I have to hear about Walmart moms nonstop because of 20 randomly selected apparently brain dead Ohioan and Arizonan women were in a focus group.
Death Panel Truck
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
We will always be un-Real Americans.
Barb2
One of the benefits of some sort of mandatory National service should be a massive randomly assignments away from friends, classmates etc.
Then everyone has to work together as a team. There must be some way to strip learned racist mind set and replace it with how much we have in common with our fellow humans.
I was in high school when JFK was assassinated. I lived on a military base in the SF Bay area. We went to Fisherman’s wharf frequently the summer before he died. What is still vivid in my memory were the radical right hate group’s fliers nailed to wooden posts all over Fishermans wharf. Pictures of JFK and hateful words.
JFK was my father’s Commander-in-chief. JFK was a Veteran and a hero. He was always held in respect – top of the chain of command. But there in a public place there were dozens of derogatory posters, some encouraging violence against JFK. The fliers must have been removed daily, because every time we returned for SF Sour Dough bread the wooden posts were covered with new hate fliers.
Back then confusing stuff wasn’t expained. We were told to ignore the fliers and look elsewhere.
By November JFK was dead. The citizen’s militia didn’t assassinate JFK – but the hate was in those fliers.
That first wanted flier posted above with JFK photos, is similar enough to the ones I saw in San Francisco, that the old memories are clear again.
That was a rough and dangerous era. Cuba missile crisis and the right wing hate groups.
Patricia Kayden
@Origuy: The bigger question: Who cares what a convicted felon has to say about anything?
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
Adam, here’s a research project or 10 on the radicalizing effect of the wingnut Wurlitzer.
SectionH
@one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer: It’s ok. Really, it’s ok. We’re gonna win. Temporarily. But I mean for long enough.
You need to get out of Kentucky more. Trust me on that. And I don’t mean on diving trips (even though I envy you those). Go visit real cities. Spend s few days in Seattle or Portland or San Francisco or San Diego. Or drive 4 hours to St. Louis, ffs, it’s more vital than Louisville has ever been, including the racial shit. Or go to Chicago, which is so not my favorite city, but many ppl love it, and I totally acknowledge I’m in the minority and have a personal filter. Or go to a dozen East Coast places. Kentucky – well, you’ve tried.
No fucking joke: I still own a house in Leftington (as the redneck assholes call it, or Mexington, ha ha ha, they are so funny) but I spent too many years there being beaten down by the entire environment, even though Lexington is a wonderful place, but it’s always under siege, and the Ville is too. It just gets you down after a while.
I don’t have a solution*. But ffs, don’t let the rednecks get you down.
*well, sofa – I know you can spend money, etc.but you’ve got BJ friends
SectionH
@SectionH: Ok, shoot me now.
one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer
@SectionH:
You’ve got a point – while the People’s Republic of Louisville is an awesome place, it does feel like we’re constantly under siege. The feeling is that we’re about this close to having Frankfort strip any vestige of home rule, attach a tap straight to all revenue to send to religious hucksters, crony contractors and hilljack county governments, all while mandating strict blue laws on alcohol and requiring that the only full service restaurant to be allowed is Cracker Barrel.
I think it’s the constant feeling of “it can’t last because my country cousins don’t want it and don’t want better, and would prefer that I can’t have it either” that is getting me down.
Joel
@Origuy: Colbert nailed D’Souza way back when he was arguing that liberal, decadent New York had it comin’ on 9/11.
Matt McIrvin
I guess I’m generally skeptical about national-service schemes just because, in general, a labor shortage is not what we have, and especially not an unskilled-labor shortage. We have a shortage of desire to pay for things, and if we had that desire, we could generate all sorts of good paying jobs in public service that would not have to be mandatory. It’d just be seen as a career path–which might be great in itself, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing people are talking about.
More specifically, we just don’t need enough people in the modern military to make most of those jobs military, so the whole point of getting skin in the game to disincentivize war, or to establish in people a life-and-death stake in the common good of the republic Starship Troopers style, doesn’t fly. There’s a vague nostalgia for the situation that existed during World War II and the early Cold War, but that is not actually a situation any nation wants to be in.
Matt McIrvin
…Also, there’s just the general moral fact that I feel really uncomfortable advocating a return of the draft now that I’m safely past draftable age. I know I really didn’t like the idea when I was young enough.
Donalbain
No. No. No.
Teaching is a skilled profession that requires serious training and dedication. It is not something you can just throw unqualified kids at and hope for the best. Teach for America is bad enough, this idea is even worse.
philadelphialawyer
@Adam L Silverman: Flatly disagree. If a military draft is needed to protect the country, that is one thing. Forcing every young person into some dictatorial, mandatory “service” project just because it seems like a good idea is another. We don’t live forever. Two or three years is a big chunk of our lives, and an even bigger chunk of the best years of our lives (ie our young adulthood). Even a year of forced “service” sounds like crap to me.
satby
@Mnemosyne: tl;dr the thread, but AmeriCorps is still going on and does disaster services as well as regular stuff. As a former Vista volunteer, I’m an alumna. It’s perpetually underfunded by Republicans in Congress (duh).
I also believe we need a mandatory national service. Especially because Libertarians and Republicans like to equate the mandatory volunteer service requirements at many public high schools with slavery. So they need to do more service until they learn the difference.
satby
@philadelphialawyer: and your opinion sounds like crap to me. There are obligations that should go along with the privileges of citizenship, and too many people are refusing to recognize those obligations.
philadelphialawyer
@satby: Obligations? Like paying taxes and jury duty? Even a military draft, if the country is in danger? I agree. Not made up ones like “national service.” Our society does not need this “service,” rather, it is the worst kind of know it all, old folks telling young folks what to do “for their own good,” nanny state, bullshit. We have a lot of real problems in this country. A working government, fully funded by taxing the rich, would go a long way towards fixing them. Folks with a bug up their ass because “kids these days have it too easy” and so some sort of indentured servitude is needed doesn’t fit that bill.
philadelphialawyer
@satby:”I also believe we need a mandatory national service. Especially because Libertarians and Republicans like to equate the mandatory volunteer service requirements at many public high schools with slavery. So they need to do more service until they learn the difference.”
Maybe you should learn the difference between “mandatory” and “volunteer.” Hint: If something is required, then it is not voluntary. No, community service requirements for high school students are not slavery. But they aren’t voluntary either.
And I like how we should punish all young people just to teach folks who disagree with you about the requirements for graduation from public high schools a lesson. No authoritarianism here!
manyakitty
@Mnemosyne: They could have a super useful option with the National Park Service. Also, we have government laboratories – what about aiming STEM-oriented kids there? Honestly, it’s a brilliant idea, and its participants will feel like they have skin in the game.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Origuy: You Tub has this flick’s preview as advert and it looked hilariously bizarre. A bit like some paranoid wingnuts rant done on film. Good to hear the director did prison time.
satby
Well, as a young woman who was a Vista volunteer before it was all put under AmeriCorps, I found it enlightening and frustrating in about equal measure, but it also exposed me to people and viewpoints I wouldn’t have encountered had I stayed on the same path and in the same environment. It changed my life, as it does for a lot of alumni.
Your verbiage gives you away:”indentured servitude” “punish all young people” “nanny state, bullshit”.
A national service is not a punishment, it’s an opportunity to expand your life and build new skills and relationships on the government’s dime. But as long as we have IGMFY as a national motto, I doubt we could ever have a national service amounting to the puny AmeriCorps we have now.
FlipYrWhig
@philadelphialawyer: @Matt McIrvin: IMHO the goal wouldn’t be so much labor or discipline or toughening up or what have you but an experience of going someplace other than where you live and learning to deal with people other than the ones you’ve known your whole life. You’d pretty much have to learn about and put into practice things like cooperation and respect for diversity. I don’t know if it’d have to be two years…
satby
@FlipYrWhig: This. And Vista is (maybe was) one year. Peace Corps was two because of the investment in training, language school, and need for program continuity.
Volunteers wouldn’t have to replace teachers, they could do a great deal just as classroom assistants, PE aides, NPO assistant staff; there are lots of things that can be done with more hands that don’t require specialized skills or displacing workers.
manyakitty
@satby: Yes. Thanks for summing that up better than I seem able to.
Miss Bianca
@philadelphialawyer:
I’m in two minds about it.
Yes, I know Americans have a “you’re not the boss of me!” attitude that might make mandatory service unpalatable.
On the other hand, I’d say we have several serious fucking problems in this country that this type of service might help to address.
One of them being that “Lost Boys” phenomenon Adam alluded to in his article on hashtag terrorism – we have an awful lot of young guys wandering around, hopped up on inchoate rage and resentment, who seem to need some sort of guidance into becoming mature and productive men. In the absence of any meaningful societal/tribal rituals that help accomplish this task (you can vote when you’re 18! But you don’t even know what that means! You can walk into a bar and order a drink when you’re 21! Yay?), what do we as a society do to tackle this problem?
Racism is another huge fucking problem. I think a program like this would have to be committed to mixing folks together outside their home communities, outside their comfort zones, and making a racially and gender-mixed cohort. Say what you like about the military, but with all its problems, it’s a lot more de-segregated than most of the rest of our society. It’s harder to take the bs race/anti-LGBTQ propaganda spewed by our media seriously if you have personal experience of people of other races and gender orientations.
As for what work these young folk do together…I honestly don’t know if that’s the most important part.
ETA: And in the time it took me to stumble over my words and drink coffee while I drafted this, I see other folks have managed to make the same point, with slightly less verbiage. ; )
gvg
Childcare cannot be solved by national service. People want background checks on childcare workers. Random kids are not acceptable. Plus frankly most kids are bad kid sitters. Dealing well with lots of different children who aren’t your young relative is not even close to universal. Add in that good childcare that we actually want is a kind of preschool, not a park the kid somewhere where he won’t get hurt all day but it’s too much trouble to actually train all of them. Being a childcare worker worth anything actually takes training and the reason we don’t have it is we don’t pay for it. In fact a large portion of our population cannot afford to pay for it. I can’t think of any solution except a kind of public “school” for pre kindergarten and I don’t know how we could set up something that covers the fact that our workers have a lot of shifts that aren’t 9-5. Around here I don’t know of any day care that is past 6pm and that’s a problem for me even though my job is 8-5.
I don’t think highly of Teach America. Teaching is a professional skill. Teach America is slightly useful but more real teachers would be better IMO.
I have always liked the idea of nearly universal service but when I go to think about the nuts and bolts I tend to think we just don’t need it enough compared to other things. Clearly we aren’t teaching civics enough.
satby
@gvg: I’m a lifelong volunteer both here and abroad; background checks are routine for almost all service that might remotely deal with children or vulnerable populations even in other countries.I have to get another one in a few weeks if I do a project I’m considering this November, but they also have to be done close to the start of a project. And classroom assistants in lots of schools are parents who volunteer, they don’t have any special training either. But they are supervised, as any classroom assistant would be.
I have a friend who is working in a 90% poverty rate school as a teacher with Teach for America; she had a degree and a Masters, went through additional educational and classroom management training and was a “student teacher” with a mentor for (I think) her entire first year. She may be an outlier, but that school is lucky to have her.
Edited to add: she is very much a “real teacher”.
VOR
@satby: I suspect one of the issues with AmeriCorps, or reviving Great Depression era programs like the WPA or CCC, is those government run services compete with the private sector. We have to properly revere the “Job Creators”, after all.
Trump claims the real unemployment rate is close to 40%. If that were true, government putting people to work on useful things like a WPA or CCC would make a ton of sense.
Matt McIrvin
@VOR: A lot of the “FDR made the Depression worse” claims from people like Amity Shlaes are referencing the same old paper that, if I recall correctly, intentionally counted the people employed by those programs as unemployed, on the grounds that it was something like prison labor.
Mnemosyne
@VOR:
Yep. And if it’s a service so unprofitable that the private sector isn’t willing to do it, conservatives demand that the government pay a private company enough to make it worth their while, even though that means it will cost more than it would if the government just did it their own damn selves. Because it’s not actually about budgets or cost effectiveness, it’s about Government Bad, Private Sector Good.
wenchacha
@Mnemosyne: I have written about my daughter who did time in the WCC, in the PNW. What a great program. There are so many young adults, just out of high school or college, who want to do good things. They want to improve The Commons, for everyone. As a nation, we should help our young citizens become more invested in the future.
John D
@Davebo:
Democratic vets voting for 2003 AUMF: Tom Carper, Max Cleland, Tom Daschle, Chris Dodd, Tom Harkin, Ernest Hollings, John Kerry, Herb Kohl, Zell Miller, Bill Nelson.
Democratic vets voting against 2003 AUMF: Daniel Akaka, Jeff Bingaman, Jon Corzine, Daniel Inouye, Ted Kennedy, Jack Reed
That’s 16, just Democrats, just in the Senate. There were way, way, way more than 30 veterans in Congress in 2003 (Ted Stevens, John McCain, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Larry Craig, Dick Lugar, Pat Roberts, Thad Cochran, Conrad Burns, Chuck Hagel, Don Nickles, Jim Inhofe, Lindsey Graham, Bob Bennett, John Warner, Craig Thomas on the GOP side bring the total to 31 in the Senate alone, even discounting Mitch McConnell and his 5 week service). That doesn’t even touch children serving, or anyone in the House in 2003.
30 is simply too low to be credible.
J R in WV
@efgoldman:
IIRC schools in my WV county when I was 12 were closed until after the funeral. We hadn’t had a TV for very long, it was a big Admiral.
When Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the DPD garage, my Mom was watching the rare live feed, and literally screamed. I was in the next room noodling on the piano and thought she had hurt herself somehow.
She was shaking when I got there, in mere seconds, and Lee was going down and Jack was being grappled with by a handful of big plainclothes cops.
I was in science class to a classic bigot when they told us of the killing on the PA, teacher, long dead (thankfully) now was obviously delighted by the news, but smart enough to try to look concerned. We got out immediately as the buses were already all lined up for end of school by that time.
Given the current technology, the TV folks did a good job of keeping people informed, with as much video as was possible in 1963. It was a horrible week. Who was this guy, LBJ, who was the new president? No one really knew much about him, except he was from Texas, where Kennedy was killed…
Now that I know more about how crooked LBJ was even in class president elections, I would have been far more paranoid about his possible involvement in the shooting. As it was, just sad, puzzled, and a little fearful, as this was on the back side of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Prescott Cactus
@NotMax:
When you put it that way…
@Prescott Cactus:
Sounds like I lifted that from Stalin or Chairman Mao
We live in a country where we enjoy great freedom and protection. Very few participate (except police fire, military) other than by paying taxes. The future looks like it may hold debt free college. Should we not ask those who are going to be getting a free ride now, unlike those who have paid before them to give something back?
NoraLenderbee
If people are required do universal national service, they’ll start demanding things in return like free college, national health care, old-age pensions–and THEN WHERE WILL WE BE?????