OPINION
WWW.KANSAN.COM
FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2005
AS I SEE IT
Don't trust what Bush says; beware of conscription policy
BOB JOHNSON
bjohnson@kansan.com
Sometimes you have to fight. There are times when nothing else will do, times when any risk is vastly outweighed by what will be lost by striving for passivism or useless diplomacy. Sixty years ago I would have strapped on a helmet, said my prayers and stormed Omaha Beach
because I believed in the cause Americans were fighting for in World War II. I will not take this same path in recent years because I will not fight for something I do not believe in. Apparently, as evidenced by widespread officer retirements and recruiting difficulties plaguing our armed forces today, many young Americans agree with me. This isn't good news for the Pentagon, and it could spell bad news for you too.
Say you are a young surgeon starting a family and beginning a career. Everything seems to be in place when one day, while sitting through your mail, you come across a letter from the Selective Service. Congratulations! You have been chosen to drop your life, get fitted in fatigues, and ship out to Iraq in a few months. Seem far fetched to you? Sorry to rock your world, but it's not.
The Selective Service has begun to "re-engineer" the draft around drawing skill-based men and women into military duty. Our armed forces lack individuals trained in specific skill areas like health care and engineering., and this new draft format is designed to quickly and efficiently remedy that dilemma. No longer will the Selective Service collect merely the name, Social Security number and date of birth of each American male — women, along with men, will be required to consistently update information on their definable skills until they are ineligible for the draft at age 35. A plan for drafting doctors and nurses is already in place, and the goal of the Selective Service is to make that design easily adaptable to draft individuals from other skill-related fields. In other words if you are trained to speak Korean or build computer networks, you should start following the news.
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President Bush has said that "we're not going to have a draft — period." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asserts that "the idea of reinstating the draft has never been debated, endorsed, discussed, theorized, pondered or even whispered by anyone in the Bush administration." I would love to believe him, but it is hard to deny cold hard facts to the contrary. A memo that became public information by the Freedom of Information Act details a meeting in February 2003 between the Selective Service's acting director and two of Rumsfeld's undersecretaries in
which the focal topic was the possibility of returning to the draft. Despite the Bush administration's desire to avoid a draft, the memo states, "Defense manpower officials" have recognized the shortage of skilled military personnel and the lack of funding to attract those individuals voluntarily. Consequently, the plan to "re-engineer" the draft to acquire these individuals was developed.
This new skills-based draft doesn't mean that the old Vietnam-style free-for-all draft is out the window either. Retired General Merrill McPeak, who served as Air Force chief of staff under the first President Bush, believes that it isn't brainpower our armed forces are lacking, but manpower.
Some liberal politicians have also surprisingly spoken out in support of the draft. On the eve of our invasion of Iraq, Representative Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, introduced a bill to reinstate the draft — this time with zero deferments. Rangel thinks that current recruiting practices like targeting urban and rural areas with high unemployment and offering substantial enlistment bonuses serve to exploit the poor and underprivileged and foster a detachment between those on the front lines and the majority of Americans at home.
"What you've got now is a real shortage of grunts — guys who can actually carry bayonets," said McPeak in the Feb. 10 issue of Rolling Stone. He added that a comprehensive draft could be essential "to deal with the situation we've got ourselves into. We've got to have a bigger Army."
"If the kids and grandkids of the President and the Cabinet and the Pentagon were vulnerable to going to Iraq, we never would have gone — no question in my mind," said Rangel. "The closer this thing comes home to Americans, the quicker we'll be out of Iraq."
I have lost faith in the Bush administration's ability to tell the truth and put the well-being of American citizens first. The possibility of a draft is real, and that should be a frightening prospect to any young American, regardless of gender, socioeconomic status or any other factor. Our nation's admirable "all-volunteer Army" is in jeopardy; you could find yourself firing a machine gun in Iran right alongside a reservist whose contract was involuntarily extended by the Pentagon's "back-door draft." If draft talks gain any more substance, young America needs to find its voice and adopt the mantra of its preceding generation: "Hell no, we won't go!"
Bob Johnson is a Edmond, Olka., senior in journalism.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Kansan story misrepresents writer who was a satirist, cultural critic
I find it amazingly sad that the coverage of the death of Hunter S. Thompson has largely followed the "Wow, wasn't he weird?!" path. The article, "Reporter recalls writer's visit," March 1 was not only one more of these articles but problematic on other fronts too. Exemplary of this was the Thompson quote put at the end of the article saying that he was "too weird to live and too rare to die." That quote comes from his introduction to Oscar Acosta's "Biography of a Brown Buffalo," not "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." It was, however, borrowed for the fine film version of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
To remember a man who redefined the limits of journalism, the Kansan decided to interview a former Kansan reporter who accompanied him when he visited. Sure. That makes sense. Thompson famously tested people he met by being outrageous and obnoxious. Jennifer Forker failed his tests. Fine. Personality differences will happen. What is ridiculous is Forker's refusal to read anything he has written. No wonder he pushed her buttons. My question is, however, why is she worth interviewing? She is, was, and apparently always will be totally unaware of his actual contributions.
What has been forgotten in all these awful
"tributes" is that Thompson was a brilliant writer. He was a savage satirist and cultural critic extraordinaire. He got into the stories and tore them apart from the inside finding truths no one else had found. His book "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" is possibly the best book on American presidential politics written in the last 50 years. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" chronicled the end of the '60s optimism and predicted the darkness that became the '70s and '80s. I could go on and on.
He was a journalist pursuing a beat he defined as the end of the American dream. His definition of journalism, however, did not agree with the one used by the Kansan or the University. He fought the perfunctory nature of modern journalism and created his own path. That path is worth tracing, "Kingdom of Fear," his memoir, is wonderful, as is his most recent book "Hey Rube." Or you could read about the year he came to the University in his book "Generation of Swine."
To the good doctor I say goodbye. Now that the headlines surpass all satire, the fear is catching, and all our news comes from the New Dumb we will truly miss you.
Galen Turner
Lawrence graduate student
Religious studies
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PAIGE'S PERSPECTIVE
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THE B-SIDE
Language of music links cultures, promotes unity
SAM HOPKINS
shopkins@kansan.com
I remember the first time I intentionally listened to music in another language. I caught a glimpse of a French rapper called MC Solara Bravo on cable TV's Bravo network during middle school and chanced upon a cassette of his album Prose Combatat, at Kansas City's Reggae Fest in 1997.
I went home and read the lyrics as I played the tape, but my two years of studying French failed me. The English word cowboy stood out. Otherwise, I was lost. Luckily, I found some English text to guide me.
Fab 5 Freddy is one of the founding fathers of hiphop, having produced the seminal 1982 film "Wild Style" after introducing the New York art world to the nascent ghetto movement as a valid and beautiful means of cultural expression. On a similarly avant-garde tip, Freddy traveled to Europe in the early '90s and found MC Solaar in a Paris nightclub.
"I couldn't understand his words, but I understood the flow," Freddy said in Prose Combat's liner notes. The flow. That was how I would understand without understanding. Indeed, that is how anyone can learn anything. The key is to feel, not fear — to treasure your ignorance for allowing you to advance your knowledge. As Americans, we often leave out the second part, content with not knowing, but also content with maintaining that status noo.
I would not have heard French rap without English ska and reggae. I listened to the Skatalties, the Specials, and others — all in my language. International origin is not as apparent in such cases, but a funny accent and a few unfamiliar words betray foreignness. In our melting pot, small fissures are easily skipped over in favor of stark, intimidating cultural chasms by which we fuel our xenophobia.
loud and you'll notice that there is no actual pause between words. Language learning means learning word boundaries.
Linguistic science tells us that human speech is a largely uninterrupted stream. Say a sentence out
When music is written by speakers of another tongue, we should not feel like fools just because we miss the lyrical meaning. The music and
its energy allow us to process and appreciate input that might otherwise be pure gobbledgyook.
We have so much to learn that we should never stop listening. Not every foreign song is great, but not every foreign song is meaningful just because its words are obscure to us. I once bore the bitter-sweet task of tutoring a native Spanish speaker who had learned much of his English from Backstreet Boys lyrics. While I urged him in the strongest terms to disregard that "band" on an artistic level, I could not deny the utility of their bubbly pap in helping familiarize my student with the rhythm and sounds of American English. "Ain't nothin' but a heartbreak..." may not be perfect English, but such lyrics are far more faithful to common American speech than, say, Shakespeare. Communication is the goal when learning a foreign language, not eloquence.
There are many gaps in our cultural understanding. The Internet and speedy international commerce provide invaluable tools for narrowing the divide. Every day, our thinking brains and our dancing feet reap the benefits of this new awareness.
Our tongues should certainly not be left out of the affair. A few spoken words or sung lyrics here and there can make anyone an instant diplomat, regardless of proficiency. The flow extends arms, legs and tongues like olive branches and we reinforce those through participation in the intercourse.
So sing a song, shake your ass and help save the world.
- Hopkins is a Prairie Village senior in linguistics and international studies.
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